Cultural Events
U.S. Company Helps with Preservation of Ancient Koran (06/30/2009)
An American company that specializes in historical documents worked with officials in Uzbekistan on a project to preserve ancient religious texts, including preservation of what is believed to be part of the oldest Koran in the world.
Archivists in Tashkent have been working to preserve a number of ancient manuscripts, including the Usman Mushafi Koran, which is believed to have been compiled a few years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
Dr. Richard Smith, the president and founder of a company called Wei T’o near Chicago, Illinois, was in Tashkent in June to work with the archivists as they learned to use preservation equipment designed by his company.
The equipment uses a process to wet pages, then freeze and dry them to prevent damage from insects and other organisms, Smith explained.
He worked with officials and archivists from the Muslim Board of Uzbekistan, the Uzbekistan Committee for Religious Affairs and the Ministry of Culture and Sport Affairs. He said the sessions were a wonderful chance to work with colleagues in Uzbekistan on extremely rare and important documents.
“This experience quietly demonstrates the depth of outreach and cooperation that occur between people and businesses in different countries, societies, government agencies and international corporations,” Smith said, adding that such cooperation and the sharing of knowledge is essential in performing such delicate work. “Preserving the Usman Mushafi Koran is the kind of task where mistakes in judgment simply are not acceptable.”
The Usman Mushafi Koran is said to have been compiled in Medina, present-day Saudi Arabia, by the third Caliph Usman in the year 651, about 19 years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death. Usman and his scribes compiled this Koran and several copies, one of which is housed in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, using the original texts that had been written down as the holy words were revealed to Muhammad.
Usman was assassinated by a mob while reading this Koran; a stain on the holy book is said to be his blood. After his death, his successor, the Caliph Ali, is believed to have taken the Koran to Kufa in present-day Iraq, where it remained for centuries. When Amir Timur (known as Tamerlane in the West) conquered the area around the turn of the 15th Century, he brought the Usman Mushafi Koran back to his capital of Samarkand. The Koran was taken to St. Petersburg after the Russian conquest in the 19th Century, but later returned to Tashkent, where it is now housed in the Mui Mubarak (“Sacred Hair”) Mosque with thousands of other manuscripts.
The preservation project is meant to maintain the Usman Mushafi Koran and many other historically important texts for use by scholars and others today and in future generations.