Oldest Quran in the World: Ancient Quran Manuscripts Guide

Introduction

Of all the questions Muslims and non-Muslims alike ask about the Quran, this one draws the most curiosity: where is the oldest copy in the world? The answer is more complex — and more fascinating — than a single location. Several manuscripts from different institutions each have a claim, depending on how you define “oldest”: the parchment date, the date the text was copied, how complete the manuscript is, or the credibility of the attribution.

This guide introduces you to seven of the most significant early Quran manuscripts in existence, where they are kept, what makes each one remarkable, and — where possible — how you can see them in person or online. The story of these manuscripts is not just a question of age; it is a testament to how carefully one of the world’s great civilisations preserved its most sacred text.

What Does “Oldest” Mean for a Quran Manuscript?

Before comparing manuscripts, it helps to understand what scholars actually measure:

Parchment dating uses radiocarbon analysis to determine when the animal providing the skin died. This gives a range (often with a 95% probability window), but since parchment was sometimes stored before use, the parchment date can be older than the writing date.

Art-historical dating uses the style of calligraphy, decorative elements, and textual conventions to estimate when a manuscript was produced. This is highly expert-dependent and can produce different conclusions than radiocarbon.

Attribution refers to historical claims — for example, that a manuscript belonged to Caliph Uthman ibn Affan (d. 656 CE) who oversaw the standardisation of the Quran text. Most such attributions remain unverified by modern scholarship, though they are deeply respected in Muslim tradition.

Completeness varies dramatically. Some early manuscripts are single folios; others represent two-thirds of the complete text; the Topkapi manuscript is among the most complete early Qurans in existence.

The table below shows the manuscripts covered in this article and their key dating data.

The Samarqand Kufic Quran, Tashkent

Location: Hast Imam Library (Khast Imam), Tashkent, Uzbekistan

The Samarqand Kufic Quran — also called the Tashkent Quran or the Uthman Quran — is among the most revered early Quran manuscripts in the world. Housed in the Hast Imam Library in Tashkent, it occupies a place of enormous spiritual significance in the Muslim world. According to Islamic tradition, it is one of the copies commissioned by Caliph Uthman ibn Affan (r. 644–656 CE) when he standardised the Quran text and sent authoritative copies to major Islamic cities.

The manuscript begins in the middle of Surah 2 verse 7 and ends at Surah 43:10, constituting approximately 81% of the total Quran text. It is written in Kufic script — the angular, geometric script that dominated early Islamic calligraphy — and is one of the most substantial surviving early Qurans.

Modern scholarship, using art-historical methods and some radiocarbon analysis of the parchment, tends to date the manuscript to the 8th or 9th century rather than the 7th — which would place it after Caliph Uthman’s time. However, the manuscript’s traditional attribution remains deeply meaningful to millions of Muslims and to the government of Uzbekistan, which treats the manuscript as a national treasure. It is displayed at the Hast Imam Library, which is the spiritual centre of Islam in Uzbekistan, in a specially designed display case.

The manuscript was moved multiple times throughout history — it spent time in Samarqand, was taken to St. Petersburg by Russian imperial forces, and was returned to Tashkent in 1924.

The Topkapi Quran, Istanbul

Location: Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts (Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi), Istanbul, Turkey

The Topkapi Quran manuscript (H.S.32) is one of the most complete early Quran manuscripts in existence, containing more than 99% of the full text across 439 folios. Written in Kufic script on vellum — a high-quality parchment used in important early Islamic documents — its large size strongly suggests it was intended for public recitation or institutional use rather than personal study.

Art-historical dating places the manuscript in the late 7th or mid 8th century, making it one of the earliest near-complete Qurans we know of. Like the Tashkent manuscript, it has been attributed to Caliph Uthman ibn Affan in Muslim tradition, though modern scholarship is cautious about this attribution given the dating evidence.

The manuscript is held at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in the Ibrahim Pasha Palace on the Hippodrome in Istanbul — one of the finest Islamic art museums in the world. Admission is approximately €17 for international visitors, and the museum’s Quran collection, spanning the late 7th century to the early 17th century, is considered among the most outstanding anywhere.

The museum’s collections also include what are known as the Damascus Documents — thousands of Quran folios brought to Istanbul from the Great Mosque of Damascus following a fire in 1893.

The Ma’il Quran, British Library

Location: British Library, London, UK (shelfmark: Or.2165). Fully digitised and freely available online.

The Ma’il Quran is the oldest Quran in the British Library’s collection and one of the oldest in the world. Radiocarbon analysis dates the parchment to between 700 and 799 CE — the 8th century. The manuscript contains 121 folios representing over two-thirds of the complete text and is the largest of known fragments written in the ma’il script — a distinctive early Arabic writing style where the letters incline noticeably to the right, giving the script its name (ma’il = “sloping” or “inclined”).

The manuscript was purchased by the British Museum in 1879 from Reverend Greville John Chester, a clergyman and archaeologist who acquired it during travels in Egypt. It is now fully digitised and freely available on the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts website — allowing anyone in the world to examine each of its 121 folios in detail.

For Muslim visitors to London, the British Library is freely accessible. While the Ma’il Quran is not always on permanent display (the library rotates displayed items to protect them from light damage), the Islamic manuscript collection is one of the most significant in Europe and the library regularly mounts exhibitions that include early Quranic material.

The library also holds the Sultan Baybars Quran — a magnificent 7-volume Mamluk masterpiece from 1304–1306, written in gold Thuluth script throughout, which represents the absolute pinnacle of Mamluk manuscript art.

The Birmingham Quran

Location: Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern Manuscripts, University of Birmingham Special Collections, Birmingham, UK. Not permanently on public display; available to academic researchers.

The Birmingham Quran is one of the most remarkable discoveries in Islamic manuscript history. In 2015, radiocarbon dating carried out at the University of Oxford placed the parchment of the Birmingham leaves at a 95.4% probability of having been produced between 568 and 645 CE. If this dating is accurate, the parchment was produced during or immediately before the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (born c.570 CE; received revelation from 610 CE; died 632 CE).

As David Thomas, Professor of Christianity and Islam at the University of Birmingham, stated: “The tests carried out on the parchment of the Birmingham folios yield the strong probability that the animal from which it was taken was alive during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad or shortly afterwards. This means that the parts of the Qur’an that are written on this parchment can, with a degree of confidence, be dated to less than two decades after Muhammad’s death.”

The two leaves contain parts of Surahs 18–20 in Hijazi script — the earliest Arabic script used before Kufic became standard — with diacritical marks and verse separators. They were found bound within a larger manuscript in the Mingana Collection, having been misidentified for decades.

Scholarly debate about the dating continues: some scholars note that the parchment date does not necessarily equal the writing date, and the presence of certain textual features (verse separators, dotted diacritics) may be inconsistent with the earliest possible date. The manuscript is kept in the University of Birmingham’s special collections and is available to academic researchers by appointment; it is not on permanent public display.

The Codex Parisino-Petropolitanus

Location: Primarily Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (70 folios); National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg (26 folios); Vatican Library (1 folio); Khalili Collection, London (1 folio)

This 98-folio manuscript contains approximately 88% of the complete Quran text, written in Hijazi script on parchment. Scholars date it to the late 7th or early 8th century. The manuscript is unusual in being distributed across four different institutions on two continents — a situation that arose through the manuscript’s complex modern history.

The Paris portion of the manuscript was studied extensively by François Déroche, whose art-historical analysis concluded the text was written around the end of the 7th century and the beginning of the 8th century. Some scholars have proposed that this manuscript may be related to the copies described in Islamic tradition as having been sent to major Islamic cities by Caliph Uthman.

The Blue Quran (Scattered Across the World)

Location: Fragments held at Museum of Islamic Art (Doha), Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur), Chester Beatty (Dublin), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Aga Khan Museum (Toronto), Brooklyn Museum, National Institute of Arts and Archaeology (Tunis), and others.

The Blue Quran is not the oldest manuscript, but it is the most visually extraordinary. Produced in North Africa — probably Tunisia, possibly for the Great Mosque of Kairouan — in the late 9th or early 10th century, it is written in gold Kufic script on parchment dyed a deep indigo blue. The silver verse separators have largely faded or oxidised, but the gold lettering remains luminous after more than a thousand years.

Called “one of the most extraordinary luxury manuscripts ever created,” the Blue Quran represents the apex of early Islamic calligraphic art. It is described as almost impossible to read — the Kufic letters were manipulated to produce equal-length lines, and distinction marks were omitted for aesthetic purity. The manuscript was almost certainly produced under royal patronage for use in a great mosque rather than for personal study.

Approximately 600 folios survive scattered across institutions from Dublin to Doha. Seeing a folio of the Blue Quran in person — at the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha during your visit, or at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia — is one of the most genuinely moving experiences an Islamic art enthusiast or Quranic scholar can have.

What the Manuscripts Confirm

For Muslims reading this article, the most important conclusion is not which manuscript is technically oldest. It is what all these manuscripts collectively demonstrate: that the text of the Quran — the words Muslims memorise, recite, and study today — corresponds with extraordinary fidelity to what was written down within a generation of the Prophet Muhammad’s ﷺ death.

Across manuscripts in Tashkent, Istanbul, London, Birmingham, and Paris, scholars have found a remarkable consistency in the consonantal text. The variations that do exist are in areas like orthographic conventions, diacritical marks, and verse numbering — not in the fundamental text itself. As scholar Michael Cook of Princeton University wrote of the Codex Mashhad: the manuscript “leads to questions about the early transmission of the text” but also “contains the text more or less as standardized in the mid-seventh century.”

The physical manuscripts housed in the world’s museums are, in the truest sense, witnesses to one of history’s most extraordinary acts of preservation.

Where to See Early Quran Manuscripts

Conclusion

The world’s oldest Quran manuscripts are scattered from Uzbekistan to the United States — preserved in purpose-built Islamic museums, in national libraries, and in university collections. Each one is a physical connection to the earliest decades of Islam and to the extraordinary civilisation that preserved this text through wars, migrations, and centuries of change. Visiting institutions like Beit Al Quran in Bahrain, the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul, or the Chester Beatty in Dublin is one of the most meaningful journeys an Islamic educator, student, or pilgrim can make.

For students in Hifz programmes today, the existence of these manuscripts is a profound reminder: they are the living continuation of a tradition that these ancient pages document. The Quran they carry in their hearts is the same text that scribes pressed into vellum with reed pens more than thirteen centuries ago.

👉 Explore How Ilmify Helps Schools Preserve the Hifz Tradition →

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