Event details

Join us for research seminars hosted by the Department of History with a selection of visiting academics, alongside University of York researchers. All students and staff are very welcome.

Date: Wednesday 30 April 2025 (17:30-19:00)
Speaker: Mollie Arbuthnot, Harvard University
Title:  A Soviet History of the ʿUthmān Quran, or Decolonization Bolshevik-style

Location: V/N/123

'A zoom link will be made available for distance learning PhD students on request'

Please contact Dilnoza Duturaeva (dilnoza.duturaeva@york.ac.uk) and Ana Otero-Cleves (anamaria.otero-cleves@york.ac.uk) if you have any questions. You can view the full schedule for the semester here.

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 their 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. I 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 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, I 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.

Mollie Arbuthnot is a postdoctoral fellow in History at the Davis Center, Harvard University. She previously held a junior research fellowship at the University of Cambridge and in 2025 will be joining the History faculty of Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. Her current book project (in progress) is titled Red East: Posters and Propaganda in Soviet Uzbekistan.