The "114 Qur'ans" project is being implemented at the Center of Islamic Civilization in Uzbekistan. The project brings together rare manuscripts of the Quran from different centuries, regions, and manuscript traditions.
This makes it possible to trace how the same sacred text assumed different book forms across diverse cultural environments over nearly fourteen centuries, and how calligraphic styles, systems of ornamentation, materials, book-production technologies, and translation traditions evolved over time. By comparing within a single corpus sources ranging from the earliest Qur’anic manuscript traditions to those produced during the periods of the Samanids, Qarakhanids, Seljuks, Khwarazmshahs, Golden Horde, Timurids, Baburids, Safavids, and the khanates of Turkestan, the project goes far beyond the scope of a conventional catalogue or exhibition.
Within the framework of the “114 Qur’ans” project, each manuscript is studied as an independent historical and scholarly source. Paleography makes it possible to examine its script characteristics and the development of writing styles; codicology allows for the study of the manuscript’s paper or parchment, dimensions, binding, and book structure; art-historical analysis explores schools of illumination, ornamentation, and composition; while historical linguistics examines layers of translation and lexical features.
Another important feature of the research is its engagement with an international geography of sources. Many rare Qur’an manuscripts connected with Uzbekistan and historical Transoxiana are today preserved in the collections of major museums and libraries in Istanbul, Paris, London, Dublin, Mashhad, New York, and other cities. For this reason, the project gives priority not to a manuscript’s present location, but to its provenance, the scholarly and cultural environment in which it was produced, its calligraphic tradition, and its historical connections.
The project has brought together scholars and specialists from Uzbekistan, France, Türkiye, and Austria working in Qur’anic studies, manuscript studies, paleography, and Islamic art within a single scholarly team. With their participation, scholarly data and digital images relating to more than a thousand rare mushafs held in museum and library collections around the world were reviewed, and examples of particularly high historical, textual, and artistic significance were selected. Such international cooperation makes it possible to conduct comparative research, within a unified methodological framework, on manuscript sources dispersed across different countries.
The scholarly outcomes of the project are also reflected in the Qur’an Hall of the Islamic Civilization Center.