The King Fuʾād Edition of 1924 is in the "ʿUṯmānic rasm" but not as the result of a tedious, year long discussions by a committee (as many experts claim), but as a simple switch. All Fāzī print are ʿuṭmāni, all Indian prints have /al-ʿalāmīn, mālik, razaqnāhum/ with dagger alifs; so has the Būlāq type of 1895 and the most important Muḫallalātī muṣḥaf of 1890.
When you compare a Fāzī print from the 19th century, a muṣḥaf by Hafiẓ Osman Kayşzāde, the 1895 Būlāq print without vocal signs, the 1931 Algiers print, and ‒ most important ‒ the 1890 Muḫallalātī and the 1924 KFE, you see, that 1924 did not introduce the rasm ʿuṯmānī to Egypt. ((in this image I have no Indian print, although they follow the rasm ʿuṯmānī, because I believe that al-Ḥaddād was not influenced by them, but by Morocco and by al-Muḫallalātī))
So what was new?
‒ offset print without which the uplifting of kasras would have been impossible (today standard)
‒ streamlined Saǧāwandī pauses signs
‒ no more refereces to readings other than Ḥafṣ
‒ no more refereces to verse ends other than Kufan → number after each verse
‒ more space between lines, between words
‒ baseline ductus (no stapled ligatures; all harakat sign excately above/below letter)
(this is standard now)
‒ three "mute"/not to be prounced-signs: waṣla at the start, zero and circle at the end of words
So there were many switches:
‒ from scholarly to for state school students and foreigners (baseline, numbers, no alternatives)
‒ from "words as units" (Ottoman and Persian) to "words in context" (Ipak and And), i.e. notating assimilation between words
‒ from having short and long vowel signs to needing always ḥuruf al-madd, therefore introducing small, substitution vowel letters ( ٰ ࣳ ۧ ); already Muḫallalātī had this Western system, which follows the Arab grammar
‒ from "imlāʾī" to "ʿuṯmānī" (rasm)
‒ from Asian to African (spelling):
‒ اللَه instead of اللٰه
‒ ءادم instead of اٰدم
‒إِ أَ instead of اَ اَ اِ اِ (in Asia alif is hamza, in Africa its "just" the seat of hamza)
‒ sequential tanwīn (for iḫfāʾ or idġām) instead of iẓhār nūn
‒ from notating the difference between spoken /ī/ and shortened /ĭ/ to writing them the same
What we have, is
‒ (1) the original spelling that we find in the scriptio inferior of the Sana'a palimpest and the Codex Mashhad
‒ (2) the spelling that we find in the (true) ʿUṯmānic maṣāḥif, like the CPP, or CA1 or or
‒ (3) the "ʿuṯmānic rasm" as described by ad-Dānī and colleaguges
- (4) the "imlāʾī" text as found in the Ottoman and Persian imperies
‒ (5) the modern spelling (MSA)
Although we find (3) in all Western (Andalus, Maorocco, West Africa, Libya) and all Eastern (India, Pakistan, Indonesia, South Africa, Ceylon, their diasporas) maṣāḥif, experts and geniuses call (3) "Cairo": not excact, and the result of flagrant ignorance (what was understandable for a German scholar in 1930 is inexcusable for www-verse youngster today. BTW, Bergsträßer calls the KFE exlicitly "the offical egyptina qurʾān" and implictely "the al-Ḥusainī-al-Ḥaddād-muṣḥaf", never anything with Cairo, he and Jeffrey know that there were hundreds of different CEs, no "CE".).
Bobzin, Bergsträßer, Brockett, Puin, van Putten know a thousand times more about, Arabic, the Qurʾān or Islām than I do. Yet, I dare to say: this sentence by XY is nonsense. ‒ Because they do not know enough about printing, or because they do not keep the oral form, the text, the graphic form and the book gestalt apart.
The Azhar Koran prompted a veritable flood of printed editions of the Koran throughout the Islamic world, as there was now a recognized authority on which the Koran text could be based.Bobzin's statement that Muslims did not have a text before 1924 is absurd, mistaking the switch from Ottoman spelling and ductus to Maġribī spelling, baseline type and post‑verse numbering with the final standartization of the text. His base mistake: He does not see (does not hear), that the oral form was fixed centuries ago, and that the graphic elements are not of equal importance: the sura title box is not as important as the rasm, and while some rasm differences are discussed for a single word, others for a grammatical category. ‒ and: The King Fuʾād Edition of 1924 is no Azhar Koran!
Hartmut Bobzin: “Von Venice to Cairo: On the History of Arabic Editions of the Koran” in Sprachen des Nahen Ostens und die Druckrevolution, eds.: Eva Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glaß, Geoffrey Roper Westhofen 2002. p. 171
the various editions of the Qur’an printed today (with only extra-ordinary exceptions) are identical, word for word, letter for letter.Yes, there is less varity than hundred years ago, but maṣāḥif from Kazan, Bakū, ankara and Istanbul are very different from those from Djakarta; those from Casablanca, Dakar, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Kano are not only different from each other, but very different from those from Khartum or Karachi. In Bairut, Medina, Tehran maṣāḥif with different spellings are produced.
Gabriel Said Reynolds "Introduction" to The Qur'ān in its Historical Context, Abingdon: Routledge 2008, p. 1
BTW, compared to the Ottoman rasm, G24 differs only in about 5 150 places where it writes a dagger instead of an alif, whereas its spelling system yields roughly 32 000 different word‑forms when set against IPak.
Except for the sequence IsoHamza+Alif, which was adopted from the Maghreb in 1308/1890 and 1342/1924 (alif+madda was not possible, since madda was already taken for elongation ‒ btw, the Būlāq type print of 1299/1881 (Muṣḥaf Taufīq) uses madda for /ʾā/), in the Muḫallalātī print of 1308/1890 everything is already as in 1924.
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