Source : Tatar-Inform / 17 Apr 2014

A ceremony to hand the Silver Quran over for exhibition at Kazan Kremlin museum’s Kul Sharif mosque on Wednesday took place at the Tatarstan Plenipotentiary Representation in Moscow. The author of museum project is WT company.

Tatarstan Plenipotentiary Representative Ravil Akhmetshin and Kazan Kremlin Deputy Director Anton Reichschtat received the unique Quran from WT Director Vladimir Prusakov. The unique Quran will be available for viewing as shortly as the end of this month. The copy will be shown to the general public for the first time. The Quran will stay in Kazan until the end of summer, Tatarstan Plenipotentiary Representation’s press centre reports.

Ravil Akhmetshin thanked the company and its CEO for the opportunity to display the unique exhibit at Kul Sharif. “Both Tatarstan residents and visitors will in the near future be able to see the Uthman Quran. We are especially pleased with that the silver copy of the Quran will be presented in Kazan. The unique silver sheets with early Quranic script will definitely arouse a great interest in the visitors,” he said.

The silver Quran is an exact copy of the 8th century oldest Islamic manuscript Uthman Quran. It was coined by Russian Finance Ministry’s Moscow Mint and comprises 162 sheets made from 999-standard silver. The manuscript’s original is property of Russia and is kept at Russian Academy of Sciences' Oriental Manuscript Institute in Saint-Petersburg.

The manuscript is considered to be the earliest Quran copy written during the reign of the righteous calif Uthman (may Allah be pleased with him) and used to make all the subsequent copies. The calif (may Allah be pleased with him) was murdered by plotters while working on the Quran whose pages have his blood. In the copies that followed the blood stains were reproduced.

There is the gold copy of Uthman Quran, coined in 2006 at the request of WT company and exhibited in Russia and abroad. The silver copy was made in 2010.

In November 2010, President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev gifted one page from the Silver Quran to Emir of Quatar who was in Russia on a state visit. In January 2013, President of Russia Vladimir Putin gave one page from the Silver Quran to President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov on occasion of his 75th birthday. In July 2012, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev gave the full set of Silver Quran as a personal present to the Khazret Sultan mosque in Astana.