Bombay

1358/1959

1299/1880

Iran (chronologically)

after the page with links to posts about Indian maṣāḥif, here about Iran:
1829
1830
1832
1846
1850(the last in that post)
1850
1886

1940 (second in the post)
1957 +'67
1973
2004 (second part of the post)
Persian calligraphy

UT but not UT

I do not believe what is said or written.
I prefer to look for myself.
Here a page by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha OR they say:
wa-nāla šarafa kitāba­tihi al-ḫaṭāṭ ʿuṯmānu ṭāha suggest­ing that he wrote it,
but it is made with a open type font:

To remind you: UT0 is a true render­ing of KFE II on 604 ber­kenar pages with five minor mis­takes.

the two roundels in the sura title box are UT's invention, the in­forma­tion is in the KFE but not in separate roundels,
Madina elimina­tes them, the Syrian Auqāf Ministry Muṣ­ḥaf of about 2016 has them different­ly.
In 2:72, Madina and the Syrian ministry put the hamza on a dagger: a inven­tion in a Ḥafṣ muṣā­ḥaf ‒ neither in KFE nor in UT0 (or added by hand).
In the last (three) line(s): two of the mis­takes:
the Auqaf ministry has the fatha, in one of my UT0 copies the owner has added it;
the Auqaf ministry muṣ­ḥaf has the dagger, one of my copies has UT's alif;
the other early print has a dagger, but one sees the space where the alif was in UT's hand­written original (اصله)
So the modern Syrian print it neither UT0, nor UT1 (the first Madina ver­sion), but a muṣ­ḥaf set in UT's hand­writing on a com­puter.

Both the Ǧaʿfar Bey type of the Amīriyya and ʿUṯmān Ṭaha's writing are poor in stacked liga­tures, and never place harakāt before or after its letter. I call that "base­line oriented"; it is Nasḫ.
Hence some of the Egyptians who saw the muṣḥaf thought they had pictures of handwritten pages in their hands.
Therefore the phrase "he (al-Ḥusainī) wrote the book" was changed into "... wrote the model (اصله) of the book in his writing".

Almost seventy years later the expert translator and commentator Adel Theodor Khoury wrote in each of his eight volume commentary (1990-2001) that it included

den arabischen Original­text der offiziellen Ausgabe des Korans in der schönen osmani­schen Hand­schrift (emphasis added)
the original text in the official edition of the qurʾān in its beauti­ful Ottoman hand­writing

This is as grotesque as taking the set pages of the Syrian Auqāf Ministry muṣḥaf for hand­written.
Here a demonstration of its technical character:

­‒

India (chronologically)

As I have not posted about Indian maṣāḥif chronologically, here are some links (and low quality images):
1829 with Persian
1831 Calcutta, type, pleasing
1837 type
1840 lithograpgy

Agra 1264/1847

1850 Lucknow
1286/1852 Delhi, Sahāran­pūrī's Aḥmadi Press see below

Delhi 1281/1864

1866 two lithographies
1867 Lucknow
1868 cheap bestseller
1869 three (twice Bombay)
1870 three

Kanipur 1287/1870

Kanipur 1289/1872 ↑

Ludhiana 1296/1878 →

1875 Bombay

1876 Bareilly

1878 Lucknow


1879 translation by Shah ‘Abd al-Wahhāb Rafi ad-Din ad-Dihlawī

1883 (and 2000) Cochin

Allahbad 1887

1888 Dilhi Persian, Urdu

Agra 1895

Kanpur 1897

today (in German)
Taj company Ltd.
Indian spelling (in German)
Bombay spelling
izhar nūn in Bombay prints
Bombאy prints for the Dutch Indies
for Central Asia
Indian pause signs (German)
tajwid ‒ many from Lahore

The title of the 1852 print was: al-kitāb allaḏī qāla allāh taʿAlA fī waṣihī laʾin iǧtamaǧat ...

While the base text is Ḥafṣ it has information in other vowels in the inner margin and different rasm on the outer margins.

reprint

leaving the meaning partial reprint / offprint aside
"reprint" has two distinct meanings:
1. a reissue of a printed work using the same type, plates, etc, as the original
a new printing that is identical to an original; a reimpression.
a facsimile, a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, art print
that is as true to the original source as possible.
a new impression, without alteration, of a book or other printed work.

2. a reproduction in print of matter already printed, a new impression, with minor alterations.

We have seen that there are no reprints in the strict sense of the King Fuʾād Edition of 1924 at all.
The editions 1925 to 1929 are different in size and (slightly) in content.
The large KFE II of 1952 has the same size but has almost a thousand changes in content (but not those of 1925 to '29).
The small kfe II after 1952 are made with the 1925 plates but with about a hundred changes introduced in 1952. ‒ I'd say: their text is with­out value, because it is a mix of two different editions, the one made by al-Husainī al-Ḥaddād and the one made under the auspicies of aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ.

Now, let's have a look as the Hyderabad edition of 1938.
It is a double reprint in the second meaning:
double, because of the English trans­lation from 1930 by M.M. Pickthall, and the 1924 Amiriyya print, the KFE I.
But there are imp­rovements in both part:
The English text has four minor changes in verse numbering:

with a kind of justification in English and Urdu

The Arab text is page and line identical with KFE I,
but has a technical dis­ad­vant­age (kasra being below the letters instead being inte­grated into the des­cen­ders like م)





kasra, kasratan, sequential kasratan, kasratan+mīm, and other signs below the base line (like sīn)











and minor improvement to make it acceptable to Indian Muslims.

/ʾallah/ with (short) kasra is changed into /ʾallāh/ with a (long) dagger;
ruquʿāt are added.

While there was no second impression in Hyderabad, in 1976, the year of a huge The World of Islam Festival in London, George Allen & Unwin made a reprint: with the unchanged original and an added foreword

this was reprinted in 1979, and in 1980 for Sharjah.

In the 1970s there were "reprints" in the second meaning (with slight changes) in Bairut:
Dar al-Kitab al-Lubnāni/al-Maṣrī printed (in one volume on Bible paper, just as in London) bilingual editions (with Pickthall's English trans­lation, and with the French one by Denise Masson) for the Lybian World Islamic Call Society.
In these "reprints" some mis­takes in the 1924 text mentioned in KFE II 1952 are changed: like (/ka­limat, qāʾim/ ...)

whether kasra draws the ham­za sign below the base­line has no­thing to do with the rasm, it is a con­ven­tion, but it must be the same in all places. While both the Maġ­rib and India have hamza near kasra, Otto­mans, Turks and Per­sians have it above the base­line.

and most of the time (some were forgotten) when a sura ends with tan­wīn it is changed to tanwīm
because in 1924 it was assumed that after a sura the next one is recited without a fresh basmala. Since 1952 a basmala is assumed, hence in­stead of /an, un, in/ now: /am, um, im/.

I will end with a horrific discovery for a German.
In the English language there is a proper term for our "Flachdruck":
pla·nog·ra·phy (plə-nŏg′rə-fē, plā-) n.
A process for printing from a smooth surface, as litho­graphy or offset.
And there is a wrong one:
li·thog·ra·phy (lĭ-thŏg′rə-fē) n.
A printing process in which the image to be printed is rendered on a flat surface, as on sheet zinc or aluminum, and treated to retain ink while the non­image areas are treated to repel ink.

This is just wrong: "lithos" meaning "stone", not "zinc", nor "aluminum"
The same mistake differently put:
lithography
1. the art or process of producing an image on a flat, specially prepared stone, treating the items to be printed with a greasy substance to which ink adheres, and of taking impressions from this on paper.
2. a similar process in which the stone is replaced by a zinc or aluminum plate, often provided with a photo­sensitive surface for reproduc­ing an image photo­graphical­ly.

While the first definition is fine, the second is stupidly wrong. Why use a word with "stone" in it   for a process with a metall plate, although there are proper terms for the process?
Since the language has the specific "offset" and the general "planography", there is no need to use "lithography" for printing with metall plates.

As much as I am happy with this 1980 reprint for Sharjah informing us of the printer, and the fact that it is an un­changed reproduc­tion, I am horrified by the use of "lithography" for "offset" (knowing that it is not a personal idiocracy).
thanks to Muhammad I. Hozien for providing this (and other images) from his huge collec­tions of maṣā­ḥif.
    ‒
­‒

Beauty / Readabiliy

Muṣḥaf Muscat (top) and ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (bottom) look better than the KFE (middle),
but are not always easier to read.

The main problem I see in the Amīriyya set KFE after rāʾ/zai and waw, and before kaf within words. Often (not always) there is too big a space within words.

Why are kasras flater in Hyderabad than in Būlāq?

In 1938 the 1342 Giza muṣḥaf was reset in Hyderabad:
the same text in lines as long as in Būlāq but slightly higher
although kasras and kasratain are not as steep as in the original.

While in Giza kasras are integrated into the descender of the main (letter) line,
in Hyderabad they are ‒ like the pause-sign-top-line, the Ḍamma-Fatḥa-Šadda-Ǧazm-line ‒
in a line of their own below the letters.
This is normal in type set/type printed maṣāḥif

It would be possible to inte­grate kasras into the letter line, see these words in the 1299 Būlāq print, but it is not worth it for signs as common as kasras and kas­ra­tain
So, what was done in Giza is getting rough proofs of the set text from Būlāq, and cutting the kasra line (either all of the line or the piece bet­ween two des­cen­ders) and paste it higher;
sometime a single kasra gets pasted into the tail of ح ع or kasra­tain descends below the descen­der line.

All of this was too com­pli­cated for the makers of the Hyder­abad muṣḥaf, so in order to get 12 lines into al­most the same size frame as in Giza, they had to make kasras and kas­ratain smaller, not short­er but flater ‒ and al­though there was enough place for a "steep" fatḥa in the ḍamma-line, they adapted the fatḥa to the same angle.

For those still unconvinced
let me repeat the facts:
Offset had only been used for maps, posters, postcards.
All over Cairo, no book publisher had offset equipment.
The 1343 muṣḥaf was the first offset printed book in Egypt.
So, the Amiriyya had to transport the material over the Nile forth and back again;
and they had to pay the Survey of Egypt for their services.
Why would they do that when they did not do something they could hardly do the traditional way?











­‒

KFE <--> kfe

While IDEO held a conference on "100 years of the Cairo Edition" without having a single copy ‒ either of the 1924 edition by al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād nor the 1952 one by aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ & colleagues, neither a big one, nor a small one, not even a version by a commer­cial or foreign publisher, just a 1971 print of the 1952 text on 548 pages with 15 lines.
Both the Berlin Staatsbiblothek

and Muhammad Hozien

have severval copies.
top image: editions of 1924/5 and 1927, below: both from 1952.

While the Staatsbibliothek was just lucky (getting an intact copy of 1952 with the de­dication to King Fuʾād [from East-Berlin] and one in which the republican book­seller had torn out the page [from West-Berlin]), Muhammad Hozien searched, because he knew that they are not just prints of the same.
1924 to 1952 it is fairly easy:
First comes KFE_1,
then kfe_a, kfe_b, kfe_c
‒ a succession, a development: each edition builds on the earlier one.
When exactely these four editions were published I do not know:
the problem for KFE_1 is objective, for the small ones only subjective (I did not pay sufficient addention).
In all editions up to 1952 one can read:

Printing was finished 7. Ḏul Ḥigga 1342 (= 10.7. 1924).
I have a problem:
How can the book with that text inside know when its printing was finished?
Was it observing its own printing and taking the time?
I guess (!) that the date given was just the date planned,
and because they could not meet it, they de­cided to stamp the finished book with the real date:

The differences between the editions before 1952 are minor.
My main conclusion from studying the text of 1242/43:
it is not the result of year long committee discussions,
nor the appli­cation of what ad-Dānī and Ibn Naǧǧāḥ have written about the rasm,
but a switch form Indian-Persian-Ottoman practise of writing the well established text of Ḥafṣ
to applying the African (Maġribian, Andalusian) rules (with­out clolour dots, too ex­pensice/com­plicated for printing at the time).
The text was written by the chief reader of Egypt, Muḥam­mad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḫalaf al-Ḥusai­nī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī al-Ḥad­dād (born 1282/1865) who knew the dif­ferences between Warš (of which he had a copy at hand) and Ḥafṣ by heart.
After he had died on 22.1.1939, ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm al-Maṣrī aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ be­came chief reciter of the qurʾān. He chaired a commi­ttee to revise the written text. Apart of one clear mistake (the spelling of /kalimat/ in 7:137), some minor corrections, the elimina­tion of infor­mation on the chrono­logy in the sura title boxes, the inclusion of the basmalla in continu­ous reading (which leads to some changes at the end of suras)

and about 800 changes in pause signs were decreed ‒ decreed, not made, because the changes were only made in the large editions, for which new plates were manu­factured. For the small editions old plates were used, and here some changes were just not made, others by hand. Only the changes in tanwin were all made. (on the image in the middle from the 1954 small edition the sura title box is the old one and the mīm added by hand
below from the Tash­kent 1960 reprint.)
so we have: KFE_1   less than 1000 changges   in KFE_2 /2a
but: kfe_a /b /c less than 100 changes   in kfe_d
And the changes introduced in kfe_a, _b, _c are all gone in KFE_2
BECAUSE they never occured on the large plates ‒ existing plates were reused.

So, there are technical reasons for the content of the different editions.

While for the Muṣḥaf al-Azhar aš-Šarīf, "the Šamarlī" and the Madina Editions
we have different sizes of the same content,
while we have huge runs of Madina Editions, hence fresh plates (almost) evey year,
the runs of King Fuʾād Editions were low, so low that some of the 1924 plates were used until the end, and some of the first small plates from the next year to the end.

­‒