yet another mistake in KFE1924

The maker of the 1924 Cairo edition evidently did not understand the function of the mutating small alif: it is not a vowel sign but turns yāʾ or wāw into alif — in other words, a letter that looks like a yāʾ is an alif (alif bi‑šakl al‑yāʾ). In early Warš prints the mutating alif is correctly placed above the yāʾ; the Cairo edition, by contrast, places the sign some­times, correct­ly some­times not.
top: Warš prints; second: KFE; third UT0; fourth: Muṣḥaf al-Muʿallim, Tunis; 5^thTaj
It should sit above yāʾ, not after it. In Morocco this is always the case, in KFE it is some­times like it should be, some­times not.
Mikāl is dif­ferent from the others, be­cause Warš and Qālun (Tunis) have /mi­kāʾil/. While here there is a hover­ing sign and a tooth/نبرة/letter, in the other cases there is just one letter. What KFE and UT are doing is just wrong: they often have use­less tooth/نبرة !
This is the same scribal incon­sis­ten­cy, likely due to care­less­ness, that Otto Pretzl had already notised.
I have added a last row in IPak. Here the dagger is neither a small alif, nor a mutating sign, but a ā-vowel sign; it belongs to the con­sonant; the tooth/nabra is mute.
So, it is not only Abū ʿUmar ʿUbaidah Muḥammad Saliḥ al-Banki who does not care, KFE and UT are not perfect either.

Here the last words from KHO, MNQ and Aryamehr. Yes, Ottomans write the yāʾ with its dots even when it stands for /ā/, yes, Persians put the marks somewhere (in the right order, but whereever).

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2:72

I have shown that the King Fahd Complex has changed the text of the KFE.
As I can't find a single word of explanation comming from Madina, I will show the different ways of writing /fādāraʾtum/:
both Ḥafez Osmān the Elder (right, top) and the Moroccans (on the left I show the oldest Fès-print 1296/1879; context first, below just the word) write an alif: for Asians it is hamza (the sukūn above says: I am not mute, do pronounce my consonantal value /ʾ/!); for the Africans it carries hamza represented by a red point.
On the right the second (Muṣṭafà Naẓīf Qadarġalī) and the third (al-Muḫallalātī) have hovering hamza sign (without seat, but not on the base line)
The KFE (middle next to its exact copy by UT) puts the hamza sign on the baseline. Hence ʿUṯmān Ṭaha does the same (fourth on the right).
Unlike the Indians (left of KFE) who have a seatless hamza sign like the KFE, both Tunis (first Hanibal, then BenʿAlī) and Tripoli (left, last) have in their Qālūn maṣāḥif a hamza sign on an dagger-alif,
exactly what the KFC did when changing UT0 into UT1.

At the bottom I show other quotes from Qālūn maṣāḥif: while Qaḏḏāfī (third line) often has an alif (following ad-Dānī), the Tunisians (following Ibn Naǧāḥ) have hamza on a dagger.

Do any of the authorities recommand to put the hamza on a dagger?

No, its is an innovation made by KFC.

a counterfactual history ...

... of Qurʾānic printing.
The revisted KFEII (1952: 827 typeset pages, 12 lines) pro­vided the text (Q52) for three fully ber­Kenar maṣā­ḥif that is, each page begins with a new verse and ends with a verse, with no verse carried across a page break.

One realization was the 1383/1963 Cairo muṣ­ḥaf, a 486‑page edition set in 16 lines, com­plete­ly re‑flowed and strict­ly base­line‑oriented (Cairo: Ǧaʿfar Muḥam­mad Muṣ­ṭafà 1383/1963).

A second written by Šukrī Ḥaršu aš-Ṣīšānī for Ibn Katheer in Damascus: 17 lines on 486 pages (as well). The "winner" was the 1399/1979 Damascus muṣḥaf, the 604‑page handwritten edition by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha in an extremely linear calligraphic style.

Had the 1963 Cairo edition received broader attention — and had the Madi­na/KFC project adopted its dis­ciplined, fully berKenar page archi­tec­ture — it could realisti­cally have become the "stan­dard" UT is today.
In this counterfactual history, the development of Qurʾānic print­ing would have followed the 1963 model: a modern, base­line‑ori­ented ber­Kenar lay­out derived from the 1952 KFAII type, rather than the hand­written 604‑page form that ultima­tely prevailed.





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Lucknow 1890

The first images of a muṣḥaf by Naval Kishore came from Oxford: black and white, wrong order and low resolution. It made be happy.
Now I found a muṣḥaf by him from 1890 in Heidelberg with the opposite problem: too high resolution, as you can see here:




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Indonesia

Unlike Malaysia, which aligns itself muṣḥaf­wise closely with Saudi Arabia, and South Africa, which is under Pakis­tani influence, Indone­sia had to chart its own course — not only because it is the most populous Muslim‑majority country, but also because it has been pursuing its own path since 1848. Before 1976 when a commi­tee to define standards for the pro­duction of maṣā­ḥif was established, there were a) local traditions, b) reprints of a 542page Bom­bay muṣ­ḥaf c) re­prints of a 604page muṣ­ḥaf by Muṣṭafà Naẓīf Qadir­ġalī; all follow Asian ortho­graphy, but not exactly the same. So, Indo­ne­sians knew that prints to not have to be iden­tical to be true copies of the qurʾān: they were not con­fused by small dif­ference.
From the 1930s to 1974 the Bombay muṣ­ḥaf was the norm, espe­cial­ly since the five million copies printed by Toppan printing company in 1960 as part of the Japa­nese repa­ra­tion for damage during the WWII occu­pation.
Besides defining a Braille muṣḥaf (see below), the experts had two guide lines: Ǧalāl ad-Dīn as-Suyūṭī's Al-Itqān fī ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān esp. chapter 76 Marsūm al-ḫatt adāb al-kitāba): and bringing the Ottoman (Bah­riye) and Indian (Bom­bay) spelling closer to each other: the easies are the pause signs:
all MSI have the six ʿalāmāt al-waqf of KFE
the Baḥriye/Otto­man/MNQ does not get signs for iqlāb (small mīm before bāʾ after nūn sākin), nor for assi­milation (šadda on the second ḥarf) = it stays as simple as before (trusting the teachers to teach this)
Turks, Iranians and Indonesian write the words in its proper form, whereas Maghri­bians, Indians and now central Arabs write the verse as it has to be pro­nounced connected.
While after 1985 the 604‑page ber­kenār muṣ­ḥaf of ʿUṯmān Ṭaha became a global standard, Indonesia did not join this develop­ment, because it had already intro­duced a 604‑page muṣḥaf by reprinting Muṣṭafa Naẓīf Qadir­ġalī’s Ottoman‑ortho­graphy muṣ­ḥaf aimed at pesan­tren and/or maʿāhid tahfīz. This made a shift to UT less attrac­tive.
btw, the calligrapher was not named, the (re-)print is known by the press, the Marine press. Maṭbaʿa Baḥrīya.

Bombay reprints

Bombay Nov 1960 low resolution

Bombay 1967

all images are from Ali Akbar

MSI 1985

Verse	1985	2002	2016	2016	Dānī	ADSIN
2:2
2:5	وَاُولٰۤىِٕكَ هُمُ	وَاُولٰۤىِٕكَ هُمُ	وَاُولٰۤىِٕكَ هُمُ
2:22
2:43	الرّاكِعين			الركعين
2:65
2:69	النّاظِرِيْنَ		النّٰظِرِيْنَ
2:116
2:257	اوليـٔهُمُ	لولياؤُهُمُ		اَوْلِيَاۤؤُهُمُ
2:167
2:187
2:191
2:198
2:233
3:7
3:33
3:35
3:43
3:54
3:114	الْخَيْراتِۗ		الْخَيْرٰتِۗ
3:134
3:146
4:18
4:24
4:43
4:95
4:95
4:100
4:117
4:162
6:143	نَبِّـُٔوْنِيْ			نَبِّـُٔوْنِيْ
12:59	اُوْفِ الْكَيْلَ	اُوْفِى الْكَيْلَ		اُوْفِى الْكَيْلَ
25:49	لِّنُحْيِ َۧ بِهٖ			لِّنُحْيِ َۧ بِهٖ
26:176	لْـَٔيْكَةِ		لْـَٔيْكَةِ
32:10	بِلِقَاۤئِ		بِلِقَاۤءِ
33:51	وَتُؤْوِيْٓ		وَتُـْٔوِيْٓ
51:47	بِاَيْىدٍ		بِاَيْىدٍ
88:22	بِمُصَۜيْطِرٍۙ		بِمُصَيْطِرٍۙ

Braille

Pakistan and Jordan were amomg the first. Indonesia, Tunesia, Lybia, Saʿūdīa each produced a Braille muṣḥaf of their own.
Arabic Braille ist written from the left. And today all countries write/punch one line: letter, sign, letter, sign...
In the 1950s Egypt adopted an other system: signs in an extra line above the letters. But that is history (What Natalia Suit wrote in Quranic Matters Material Mediations and Religious Practice in Egypt, Bloomsbury,2020 was the opposite of the reality at the time of publishing.
1985 the Indonesian commitee (Muker ʿUlemaʾ) decided that Braille would render imlāʾī rather than ʿUṯmānī. Many blind Indonesian Muslims did not like this.
So in 2010 a revison was made. /ṣalāh/ and /zakāh/ stayed as they were (no waw), different madd-sign were not deviced (because madd wāǧib is within a word, madd ǧaʾiz at the end of a word, so the following word-space "makes" it ǧaʾiz. The greates simplification styed as before: mute letters are not rendered in braille (except after fatḥatan), so no mute-sign is needed.
saktah is "(س)" in Braille
išmām "( إش )"
imala "( إم )"
tashīl is not marked in Braille
extra signs for /ʾā/ اٰ , /lā/ لا
; ي ,ى ,ئ are three different signs
šadda stands BEFORE the letter it doubles!

But for some other things: braille follows ʿuṯmāni after 2010; now, the muṣ­ḥaf for the visually impaired is not much different from those for normal Muslims.





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