The Quran remained in the Khoja Ahrar Mosque of Samarkand for four centuries until 1869, when the Russian general Abramov bought it from the Imams of the mosque and gave it to Konstantin von Kaufman, Governor-General of Turkestan, who in turn sent it to the Imperial Library in Saint Petersburg (now the Russian National Library). According to another, the Quran was brought from the ruler of Rum to Samarkand by Khoja Ahrar, a Turkestani sufi master, as a gift after he had cured the ruler. According to one of them, when Tamerlane destroyed the area, he took the Quran to his capital, Samarkand, as a treasure. The subsequent history of this Quran is known only from legends. Uthman was succeeded by Ali, who took the uthmanic Quran to Kufa, now in Iraq. The only other surviving copy was thought to be the one held in Topkapı Palace in Turkey, but studies have shown that the Topkapı manuscript is also not from the 7th century, but from much later. Five of these authoritative Qurans were sent to the major Muslim cities of the era, and Uthman kept one for his own use in Medina, although the Samarkand Quran is most likely not one of those copies.
![quran uthmani script quran uthmani script](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/f4/00/f2/f400f20348c723a6ad9277aa9a52318e--quran-soul.jpg)
According to Islamic tradition, in 651, 19 years after the death of the Islamic Prophet, Muhammad, Uthman commissioned a committee to produce a standard copy of the text of the Quran (see Origin and development of the Quran).
![quran uthmani script quran uthmani script](https://www.searchtruth.org/quran/images1/001.jpg)
The copy of the Quran is traditionally considered to be one of a group commissioned by the third caliph Uthman however, this attribution has been questioned. However, one of the folios from another manuscript (held in the Religious Administration of Muslims in Tashkent) was dated to between 595 and 855 A.D. Radio-carbon dating showed a 95.4% probability of a date between 775 and 995. Based on orthographic and palaeographic studies, the manuscript probably dates from the 8th or 9th century.