A Soviet history of the Quran of Uthman, or decolonization Bolshevik-style

Abstract

After the conquest of Samarkand by Russian forces in 1868, a sacred relic, the reputed Quran of Uthman, was removed from the Khoja Ahrar madrassa and taken to the Imperial Library in St Petersburg. Following the October 1917 revolution, successive Muslim organizations successfully petitioned for the Quran’s ‘return’, representing a remarkably early case of formerly colonized peoples reclaiming cultural property taken under imperial duress on the principle of decolonization. The highly politicized and publicized debates contesting this Quran’s rightful ownership and the history of its multiple ‘repatriations’—from Petrograd to Ufa to Turkestan and from mosque to museum to anti-religious exhibition—illustrate the competing claims to spiritual, ethno-national, scholarly, and ideological authority leveraged by various actors in the first decade of Soviet power, amidst visions of transnational anti-imperial revolution in the ‘East’. As Soviet rule solidified in 1926–27, the Quran was concealed from view domestically while increasingly being deployed in diplomacy abroad.