Send message to Authors

Abstract

After the conquest of Samarkand by Russian forces in 1868, an invaluable and ancient manuscript known as the ʿUthmān Quran was removed from the Khoja Aḥrār madrassa, its home for over 400 years, and taken to the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg. Following the October 1917 revolution, it was “returned,” first to Ufa and then to Turkestan. This is a remarkable and remarkably early case of a (formerly) colonized people successfully reclaiming cultural property from an imperial center on the principle of decolonization. This paper investigates the debates about this Quran’s rightful ownership and the history of its multiple journeys—highly politicized and publicized events—in the context of the political upheavals of revolution, Civil War, and the first decade of Soviet power. We argue that the competing and contested claims of ownership made on the Quran by various groups between 1917 and 1923 illustrate how Muslims in the former Russian Empire made new claims to political authority after the revolution, and some of them were able to “speak Bolshevik” effectively enough to have “their” Quran given to them. On the part of the Soviet state, we argue that the transfer of the ʿUthmān Quran to Turkestan represents a symbolic gesture of decolonization motivated both by ideological principles and by strategic political aims.