seven written shapes or just two?

Some say: there are only two spellings of the qurʾān:
one on the tablet in heaven, in the ʿUṯmānic maṣāḥif and in the Medina al-Munaw­wara Edition (or similar to it)
and the other ‒ false ‒ ones.
They say: Both the oral and the graphic form are revealed.
      Muhammad instructed his scribes how to write each word.
Polemically phrased: God vouches for the Saʿūdī muṣḥaf calli­graphed by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha.

Other think: the qurʾān was revealed orally,
that God vouches only for its spoken shape,
that the written form was fixed by agreement, that it is a convention,
that there are seven ways of writing the qurʾān.
To avoid misunderstandings: Here I do not talk about the dif­ferent readings,
the different sound shapes, but about ways of writing the same reading,
the rasm and the small signs around it.

First, there is اللوح المحفوظ in heaven.
We do not know how it looks like.
(2) Then, there are the copies written at ʿUṯmān's time and sent to Baṣra, Kāfā, aš-Šām ...
Again, we do not know how they were spelt, but very old manu­scripts give us an impression what they must have looked like.   see
(3) Later Arabic orthography underwent change.
We have reports from the third century about the proper writing of the qurʾān.
Although the spelling reported definite­ly is not the same as (2), it is called "ar-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī";
the Maġrib, India (for some time) and the Arab Countries (since the 1980s) write their maṣāḥif based on it (with small variants of the rasm, dif­ferent ways of writing long vowels, different additional sign for assimila­tion and other fine points).
(4) In countries between the Maġrib and India (Iran, Irāq, Egypt, at some time the Otto­man and Safa­vid empires) the spelling came closer to the standard spel­ling of Arabic ‒ never approa­ching it, always being different from the "normal", everyday spelling.
This writing is called plene or imlāʾi إملاء .
Turkey has fixed a standard based on the Ottoman practice, Iran is experimenting.
(5) The spelling in different colours, be it to dif­feren­tiate between the "Uthmanic rasm" and the additions,

be it to show unpronounced letter, lengthened, nasalised, assimi­lated ones (and so on).

(6) Braille for the blind.
(7) The full (imlāʾī) spelling. In the 1980s, when many of the signs of the 1924 muṣḥaf or the Indian ones were not encoded yet

some signs necessary for Maġribī maṣāḥif are still awaiting inclusion in the fonts ‒
I downloaded such a text called muṣḥaf al-ḥuffāẓ to be used for pro­nouncing the text,
not to be trans­ferred into a bound volume.
I marked words spelled not according to "ar-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī" in grey.

In Egypt and in Saʿudia rulings have been published forbidden the writing of the qurʿān like any Arabic text.
They based their view on Mālik ibn ʿAnas, Aḥmad ibn Ham­bal, and the Šafiʿī al-Baihaqī.
Prominent among their critics is Grand Ayatollah Nāṣr Makārem Širāzī ناصر مکارم شیرازی‎, born 25 February 1927:
‒ the qurʾān was revealed orally,
‒ the prophet did not fix its written form,
‒ manuscript evidence shows clearly that the "ʿuṭmānic rasm" is not the ʿuṭmānic rasm.
‒ As long as we do not know the ʿuṭmānic rasm, we are free to write, as seems appropriate to us.
‒ Even if we know it one day, we are not bound by it: it is sanctioned "only" by iǧmāʾ ṣaḥāba.
‒ The ʿUṯmān Taha way of writing is not forbidden, BUT is it the best?
‒ There are otiose letters in it, missing letters, con­nected words, that are normally not connected, words written differently at different places within the muṣḥaf,
      it is dif­ficult to read = there are better ways to write it.
On the one hand, Ayatollah Makārem Širāzī points to many differences
between maṣāḥif that claim to follow the ʿuthmanic rasm,
which invalidates their claim,
on the other hand, he does not ask for a radical modern (normal) spelling,
   seems to be content with a mix of modern (simpler to read) and archaic spelling,
   aiming at proper pronunciation and at correct under­standing,
   at ease of reading and respect of tradition
   (bismillāh, raḥmān ... should be written tra­ditionally,
   although their spelling is wrong).

Makārem Širāzī is not alone in attacking "ʿUṯmān Ṭaha's way of writing the qur'ān", by which they mean to say "the Saʿūdī muṣḥaf and its copies", what Marijn van Putten calls "the Cairo edition" (if I understand him correctely, which is not certain). Ayatollahs Ǧaʿfar Sobḥānī, Javādī Amol and Ṣāfī have published similar opinions.

An edition is "one of a series of printings," "the entire number of copies of a pub­li­cation issued at one time or from a single set of type." Novels normally have a hard­cover and a soft­cover edition. Scholarly books mostly a first, a second and third revised edition, because at the same time and from the same set of type both hard­cover and (same or reduced size) softcover are printed.
van Putten writes again and again of "the Cairo edition" and claims that that is a common term for something. But he never defines what he thinks it is.
Is it the 1924 Gizeh edition, the King Fuʾād Edition, the official Egyptian edition of 1924, the 12 liner مصحف 12 سطر, the Survey Authority edition?
Or that he means all editions that roughly have the same text?
He seems not to know, that Gizeh1924 had not a single reimpression (German: Nach­druck, which is dif­ferent from "reprint");
in Egypt itself, there were only improved editions, already in 1925 there were changes (in the afterword), a completely new set of plates were used, the margins were just about a third of the 1924 edition.
The only edition that had almost the same text   is the 1955 Peking edition, but it has one leaf less and all ornamental elements (frame, signs on the margin, title boxes) are different, the headers are different, and it has a title page, which is lacking in Gizeh and Cairo.
The 30st edition or so, named "second print" differs from the 1924 edition at about 900 places.
I fear that van Putten means by "the Cairo edition" all Ḥafṣ editions written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha, although the King Fahd Complex has further changed the 1952 Amiriyya Edition (2:72, 73:20 and لا pause signs).
What he means by "edition" is not properly called "edition."
but the rasm, the dots and the set of masora of the 1952 edition ‒ ignoring small variants, and ignoring many characteristics of maṣāḥif: lines per page, pages per ǧuz, header, sura title box, margin signs, notes, catchwords and so on.
Although reading, style of writing (can be different for sura name, the basmala, the marginal notes and the text proper), rasm (& dotting), the masora often go together, they are independent of each other: the reading transmission Qālūn can have al-Ḫarrāz, Ibn Naǧāh or ad-Dānī rasm or a mix of them, can be written in Eastern Nasḫi, in Maġribī or a mix thereof, can be on 604 or 60 pages or something in between, can have the Eastern lām-alif or the Western alif-lām!
‒

the Cairo Committee ‒ ha ha ha

Some time ago I started a blog against the German Orienta­list myth of the King Fuʾād Edition as The Standard: Kein Standard. I had no idea that there are scholars out­side Germany too, who ascribe this and that to this edition.
Let me admit that the edition printed 1924 in Giza, bound and blind-stamped in Būlāq "ṭabʿat al-ḥukūma al-miṣrīya sanat 1343 hijrīya" (1924/5), with­out a title on the cover, the spine, with­out a title page, is im­por­tant, but not as im­por­tant as many think and not for the reasons given.
طبعة الحكومية المصرّية
        -- . --
    ١٣٤٣ هجرّية
                سـنة

The edition is not and never was The Standard, it has not spread Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim (BTW it is not an "Azhar Edition," and no "King Farūq edition" was published in 1936 or any­time). It was not the first that pro­claims to follow the ʿUṯmānic rasm, and it is not type printed ‒ it is type­set, off­set printed (plano­graphic prin­ting just as litho­graphy). It is not the first with a post­script (Luck­now copies from the 1870s onward and the Mu­ḫalla­lātī Cairo 1890 print have post­scripts ‒ although the latter is some­times bound as pre­face ‒ the numbers on the gatherings {malā­zim, sg.: mul­zama} show that it was to be the last section).
Whatever is written by "experts," the 1924 edition was not "im­mense­ly popular": the people of Egypt always pre­ferred other editions: in the 1920s and '30s 522 pages written by Muṣṭfā Naẓīf Qadir­ghali (still reprinted in its Otto­man gestalt in the 1950s), since 1975 (till today) the Šamar­lī (as well on 522 pages), after 1976 for a decade Muṣḥaf al-Azhar aš-Šarīf (525 pages, several sizes), since 1980 editions written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (on 604 pages). The people of Egypt never took to the 844 pages of the "revolu­tio­nary" King Fuʾād Edition (18,5 x 26 x 5 cm). The 1924 edition was never re­printed (the 1955 Peking edition has the same text for the qur'ān and the information, but adds a title page, sup­presses the de­di­cation to the king, has different headers, different frames etc).
To understand what went on, it helps to know that Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire from January 1517 to November 1914. Soon after, the govern­ment found "faults" in Ottoman maṣā­ḥif and asked the chief qārī of Egypt to pre­pare a modern Egyptian edition; a former direc­tor of the Arabic depart­ment of the Ministry of Education and two pro­fessors from the Teachers Training Center Nāṣa­rīya (located next door) were to assist him.
It is important to note that India and the Maghreb had largely kept the qurʾān ortho­graphy of the tenth century, or they had reverted to the old spelling already sometime before.
When Hythem Sidky writes in his review article:

"the [modern] ortho­gra­phic standard of clas­sical Arabic ... charac­te­rized nearly all muṣḥafs" before 1924 (Book Review of Daniel Alan Bru­baker, Cor­rec­tions in Early Qurʾānic Manus­cripts in Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27, 2019. p. 276),

he is com­pletely wrong: There was not a single muṣ­ḥaf written like clas­si­cal Arabic and the majo­rity (in Africa, in India, in Nusan­tara, in Central Asia) wrote accord­ing to ad-Dānī or close to his Muqniʿ. Egyptian ʿulamāʾ had been aware of the old spel­ling; books of ad-Dānī (on the rasm, on the readings, on verse num­bers) were taught and studied.
On the other hand, in Persia and (to a lesser extent) in the Otto­man Empire, the spell­ing had become closer to the "normal" spelling of Arabic ‒ this process has been labelled "clas­si­fi­cation" = writ­ing as if the qurʾān had been put on vellum by Sībawaih & Co.
1924 brought no revo­lution. Already in 1890, a muṣḥaf had been printed that was pretty close to the spel­ling of 1924 ‒ actually closer to ad-Dānī (not to his pupil Ibn Naǧaḥ, preferred in the Maghrib).
Five years later a qurʾān "bir-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī" was type printed on the margin of a com­mentary.

The scholar behind the reform Abū ʿId Riḍ­wān al-Muḫalla­lātī had died the year before, but the makers of the King Fuʾād Edition pay tribute to him.
In 1930 Gotthelf Bergsträßer met Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. Ḫalaf al-Ḥusainī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī al-Ḥaddād (and his suc­ces­sor ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm al-Maṣrī aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ d.1380/ 1961). In "Die Koran­lesung in Kairo" (Der Islam XX, 1932. p. 5) he writes:

Quelle für diesen Konsonanten­text sind natürlich nicht Koran­hand­schriften, sondern die Literatur über ihn; er ist also eine Rekon­struk­tion, das Ergeb­nis einer Um­schrei­bung des üb­lichen Kon­sonan­ten­textes in die alte Ortho­graphie nach den An­gaben der Litera­tur. Benützt ist dafür ...
of course the source for the con­sonan­tal text are not manu­scripts, but the lite­ra­ture about it; hence it is a re­con­struc­tion, the result of trans­forming the [then a.s.] common con­sonan­tal text into the old ortho­graphy ac­cording to the lite­ra­ture, fore­most Maurid aẓ-Ẓamʾān by [abu ʿAbdallāh] Muḥam­mad ibn Muḥam­mad [ibn Ibrāhīm] al-Ummawī aš-Šarīšī known as al-Ḫarrāz and its com­men­tary by ... and a further com­men­tary for the marks (ḍabṭ)

I think Bergsträßer is wrong, and Sidky is wrong, when he writes that the 1924 Gizeh print relied on rasm works. Yes, its makers write in the post­face, that they did, but I am convinced, that in practice al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddad al-Mālikī just copies a Warš muṣ­ḥaf changing it to Ḥafṣ ‒ which is easy for the chief qārī, he knows the dif­feren­ces bet­ween the two readings by heart; the pause signs are his creation, the verse numbers are Kufic based on works by aš-Šāṭibī and al-Mu­ḫalla­lātī.
Marijn van Putten recently tweeted:

The Cairo Edition clearly attempted to get to the original rasm, and was suc­cess­ful to a remark­able extent, but oc­casional­ly failed to get it right, as is clear from manu­script eviden­ce. [Some­times] Rasm works (or, at least those con­sulted by the commit­tee of the Cairo edition) con­sistent­ly get it wrong in com­parison with the actual manu­script evi­dence.

As I see it, MvP makes several mis­takes: there was no committee work; of the four editors men­tioned there was only ONE ʿālim, the others had not the slightest idea about writ­ing and read­ing a muṣ­ḥaf, they just stood for the Giza print as "govern­ment/min­istry of edu­cation muṣ­ḥaf". The editor al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād did not scruti­nize qurʾān manu­scripts, either ancient nor recent. He just adapted a Warš muṣḥaf with verse numbers according to Medina II to the trans­mis­sion of Ḥafṣ with Kūfī num­bers and his own pause signs (based on the system used in the East). Al­though he writes in the after­word that the rasm is based on Ibn Najāḥ, it does not follow him all the time; I have the im­pres­sion that it is not pri­marily based on rasm works (by ad-Dānī, Ibn Najāḥ, al-Ḫar­rāz, aš-Šā­ṭibī, al-Saḫāwī or al-Murādī al-Balansī, nor the Indian al-Arkātī) but on a con­tem­porary muṣ­ḥaf.
I go further: al-Ḥaddād was not even aware of the "Ḥijāzī" manu­scripts. He didn't "get it wrong", because he did not try to do what MvP thinks he tried. He assumed that the Maġribī scholars had pre­served the ʿUṯmānic rasm.

Don't get me wrong. I am contra­dicting PvM not because he is parti­cularly stupid, but because he is especially important. Whereas most scholars are just Nöldeke IV or Spitalerin 1.6 (or try to become those), MvP prepares new paths.

But MvP's "The Cairo Edition" (and Sidky's "CE") is stupidity pure:
There are more than a thousand Cairo editions, but the King Fuʾād / Survey Authority Edition is a Giza edition, not Cairo.
Marijn van Putten and Hythem Sidky are not stupid, they are just like the people of Tiznit, who call Duc Anh Vu, the only Vietnamese in town, "Chinese", they do not know from which city he is, they do not need to know, "Asia some­thing" is good enough for them. Experts in early qur­anic frag­ments do not have to visit the hun­dreds of book­shops in Cairo, Karachi or Jakarta ‒ but still    it would be nice if they stopped calling Duc Anh Vu "Chinese" (or the King Fuʾād Edition "CE") ‒ he/it is not.

Came across a quote by Martha C. Nussbaum, an excellent philosopher and essayist, referring to Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini as "the Ayatollah," because she does not know that there are more than 5000 Ayatollahs in Iran. It seems that some do not know that there are more than a thousand Cairo editions ‒ or they just don't care.

Neuwirth's Nonsense: Qur'ān vs. Muṣḥaf

Once you are a diva, commoners don't prevent
you any more from writing nonsense.
Be it that they don't dare to,
be it that they think: When the goddess says so, it must be so.

The Qur’ān in its emergent phase is not a pre-meditated, fixed com­pilation, a reified literary arte­fact, but a still-mobile text re­flecting an oral theo­logi­cal-philo­sophi­cal debate bet­ween diverse inter­locutors of various late antique de­nomina­tions.
Angelika Neuwirth, "Two Faces of the Qurʾan" in Kelber, Sanders (eds.): Oral-Scribal Dimensions ... Eugene, OR: Cascade 2016. p.172

So far: no problem.
But a truism for "its emergent phase".

Islamic tradition, however, does distinguish between the (divinely) “authored Book,” labelled al-muṣḥaf ... and the Qur’ānic com­munication process, labelled al-qur’ān.
first in Oral Tradition, 25/1 (2010): 141-156, here: 143
later in Werner H. Kelber, Paula A. Sanders( eds.) Oral-Scribal Dimensions of Scripture, Piety, and Practice. Eugene, OR: Cascade 2016. pp. 170-187, here: 173?

No footnote. No sources given.
For the "Islamic tradition" it should be easy to give lots of sources,
but does the Islamic tradition really see al-qurʾān as a com­muni­cation?
Do Muslims really call the Divine Book al-muṣḥaf?

No and No.
Utter Nonsense! True Neuwirth.

Yes, Muslims make distinctions:
al-kitāb ‒ al-qurʾān ‒ al-muṣḥaf
But al-qurʾān is not a process.
It can be recitation (the core meaning of the word).
It can be the same as al-Kitāb, the divinely authored Book in heaven.
al-muṣḥaf is the rather mundane materia­lisation, not on a tablet in heaven,
but between two covers on earth ‒ be it written by hand, be it printed.
Before reading Neuwirth ‒ and after reading her ‒ I thought that they call the divine book al-kitāb.

If my credentials are too weak, you might rather believe Yasin Dutton:

we need to distinguish between kitāb, qurʾān and muṣḥaf, which we can see as three aspects of the same thing. Kitāb, we would say, is the divine­ly-pre­served ‘original’, which, as God’s speech (kalām) and there­fore one of the divine attri­butes, is, strictly speaking, inde­finable in human terms. In a sense it belongs to a different realm: it is ‘that book’ (dhālika l-kitāb; Q. 2. 2) rather than ‘this Qurʾān’ (hādhā al-qurʾān; e.g. Q. 6. 19, 10. 37, etc). It is, as the Qurʾān says, a book that has been sent down in the form of a qurʾān in the Arabic language (kitābun fuṣṣilat āyātuhu qurʾānan ʿara­biy­yan [‘a book whose āyas (‘signs’, ‘verses’) have been demar­cated (or ‘clarified’) in the form of an Arabic Qurʾān’] Q. 41. 3) so that it can be under­stood by people. One could say that it is from the out-of-time and comes into the in-time on the heart, and then the tongue, of the Messenger: ‘The Trust­worthy Spirit brought it down onto your heart for you to be one of the warners, in a clear Arabic tongue’ (Q. 26. 193–5). But in doing so it takes on some of the characteristics of ordinary human speech: it is in their language ...
we could say that the kitāb of Allah gets expressed as qurʾān on the tongue of the Messenger, and then as ṣuḥuf and maṣāḥif by the pens of the Muslims—and all are aspects of one and the same thing. Wa-l-lāhua aʿlamu bi-l-ṣawāb.

"ORALITY, LITERACY AND THE 'SEVEN AḤRUF' ḤADĪTH" in Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1 (January 2012). pp38ff.

al-muzzammil 20, page 775

In Kein Standard I show 26 images of prints by the Amiriyya and reprints, clones of surat al-muzzammil verse 20.
I started with the two copies held by the National (Prussian) Library: the first print from 1924 and a print with reduced margin from 1929.
American university libraries hold other copies. So here are page 775 from 1925:

and 1930:

van Putten's QCT again

"QCT" is a bad name for a bad concept.

bad name ...
because many of its letters are not consonants.
Aḥmad al-Jallad was kind enough to inform me that
these letters ARE con­sonants USED as some­thing else:
con­sonants "re­purposed", cons­onants func­tioning as vowels.

In my philosophy (and that of Wittgenstein II) this makes no sense:
words ARE what they are USED for = they have no essence apart from the way we use them.

But this is not very important.
Important is whether the text
we are dealing with
is purely con­sonantal.
And unlike all Safaitic, Hismaic, and Thamudic texts
the Early Quranic Text is clearly not purely con­sonantal.
van Putten's term QCT for the Common Early QT is wrong
because many of its letters stand for long vowels,
because many of its letters stand for diphtongs,
because one letter stand for end of word (alif after waw),
because many of its letters stand for short vowels,
‒ not only those that are marked in Giza24 by a circle (in IndoPak with no sign),
    but those seen now as seat/carrier of hamza.

bad concept
Marijn van Putten:

The QCT is defined as the text reflected in the consonantal skeleton of the Quran, the form in which it was first written down, without the countless … vocalisation marks.
The … QCT is roughly equivalent to … the rasm, the … undotted consonantal skeleton of the Quranic text,
but there is an important distinction. The concept of QCT ultimately assumes that not only the letter shapes, but also the consonantal values are identical to the Quranic text as we find it today.
As such, when ambiguities arise, for example in medial ـثـ ،ـتـ ،ـبـ ،ـنـ ،ـيـ , the original value is taken to be identical to the form as it is found in the Quranic reading traditions today.

When I look at van Putten's slide, I get what he means by "the Quranic text as we find it today":
Ḥafṣ without the "countless" marks.
The QCT can not be "identical ... to the reading traditions" ‒ because ‒ as I have shown before ‒ many skeletal words do have different dots;
skeletal words stand for different words ‒ they are identical to themselves, NOT to their brothers in another reading.
Here just some words from the first suras differently dotted for Ḥafṣ and Warš:
ءَاتَيۡتُكُم ءَاتَيۡتنَٰكُم (3:81) تَعۡمَلُونَ يَعۡمَلُونَ (2:85) تَعۡمَلُونَ يَعۡمَلُونَ (2:140) (3:188) تَحۡسَبَنَّ تَحۡسِبَنَّ (4:73) تَكُن يَكُن (2:259) نُنشِزُهَا نُنشِرُهَا (2:58) يُغۡفَرۡ نَّغۡفِرۡ (2:165) يَرَى تَرَى ترونهم يرونهم (3:13) (3:83) يَبۡغُونَ تَبۡغُونَ يُرۡجَعُونَ تُرۡجَعُونَ(3:83) (3:115)يَفۡعَلُوا تَفۡعَلُوا يُكۡفَرُوهُ تُكۡفَرُوهُ (3:115) يَجۡمَعُونَ تَجۡمَعُونَ (3:157) (2:271) يُكَفِّرُ نُكَفِّر (3:57) فَنُوَفِّيهمُ فَنُوَفِّيهمُۥۤ (4:13) يُدۡخِلۡهُ نُدۡخِلۡهُ (4:152) يُؤۡتِيهِمۡ نُوتِيهِمُۥٓ‍
Some other examples:
4:94
fa-tabayyanū
fa-taṯabbatū

2:74, 85, 144
yaʾmalūn
taʾmalūn

2:219
kabīr
kaṯīr

2:259
nanšuruhā
nunšizuhā

3:48 wa-nuʿallimuhu
wa-yuʿallimuhu

Yes, the rasm was not meant to be a naked drawing,
people did read it.
But to assume they read Ḥafṣ is just stupid.
Better a naked skeleton than a text fleshed out in ONE way.
It would be nice to have a COMMON Skeletal Text with all the dots,
on which ALL canonical readers agree
‒ which requires ihmal signs for rāʾ, dāl, ḫāʾ, final he, ṭāʾ, ṣād and sīn.
Just for those not familiar with ihmal signs:
for all letters V = two bird wings = لا can be used
for ḫāʾ, final he, ṭāʾ, ṣād and sīn a small letter (not unlike the little kāf in end kāf),
and for rāʾ and dāl a dot below tell us: not ǧīm, not ḫāʾ, not ẓāʾ, nod ḍād, not šīn, not zāʾ, not ḏāʾ!

al-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī vs. "al-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī"

Orientals have a well-established narration about the collection of the qurʾān
and its subsequent dissemination to the central cities of the empire.
Orientalists ‒ keener in scru­ti­ni­zing real old manu­scripts ‒ had the best time ever:
first came the quranic manu­scripts from the Great Mosque of San'a'
then came the realisa­tion that a couple of fragments belong together: that they had been one codex in the ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ mosque in Fustat before being dis­persed.
And after studying the famous palimpsest and the frag­ments in London, Paris, Peters­burg Orientalists came away "assuming/knowing" what Muslims had "believed/known" for a long time:
during the caliphate of ʿUṯmān the text has been stan­dar­dised.
So far, so good.
But the Orientalists made another discovery:
The early manuscripts were not written in the spelling known as "al-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī",
but in what Michael Marx calls "Hijāzī spelling" ‒ im­pli­citly calling the common "rasm al-ʿUṯmānī" "Kūfī spelling"
‒ although one finds some "Hijāzī spelling" ( علا for على
; حتا for حتى ) in Kūfī mss.
In order not to burry the ʿUṭmānic rasm Behnam Sadeghi comes up with a new concept: the mor­phe­mo-skele­tal text: never­mind the concrete rasm, as long as it is the same mor­pheme (David, thing, about, until) it is the same text.
I have no problem with that,
but I protest, when someone calls "al-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī" (fixed/dis­co­vered/in­vented about four centuries after ʿUṯmān) al-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī without quotation marks.
You can cling to ad-Dānī's rasm, but please do not call it ʿUṯmānic rasm, because it is not!
"belonging to the ʿUṯmānic text type" is fine:
Persian and Ottoman mss. have the ʿUṯmānic text, but not the "ʿUṯmānic rasm", and the ʿUṯmānic rasm is not known.

Kūfī verse numbering

It is not wise to repeat hearsay.
But sometimes we do it never­the­less.
Somewhere I had read that in India the Kufī numbering system
has five more verses than the Egyptian Kufī system ‒
with­out moving any end of verse (there­fore both being Kufī),
just by splitting five long verses.
Adrian Alan Brockett wrote that in the 20th cen­tury the dif­feren­ces have been reduced
‒ with­out giving chapter and verse.

But here are four places where India used to differ from Arabia:
4:173,       6:73,               36:34+5 were
4:173+4 , 6:73+4 resp. 36:34.

In Encyclopedia of Islam II A.T.Welch writes that in India 18:18 was split in two. I can not confirm this. He further writes that Pickthall has this split verse ‒ correct ‒, and that it was only changed in 1976 ‒ it was changed in 1938.

BTW, the Ottomans did not have here an addi­tional end of verse:

added later:
2:246 and 41:45 can be different in India from Gizeh24 (Brockett p.29)
BHO had both Kufī and Baṣrī, known 100% like "modern" Kufī.
HOQz, MNQ, (HaRi and ar-Rušdi) had exactly the same Kufī numbers as we have today ‒ like Muṣḥaf al-Muḫal­la­lātī and KFE.
al-Muḫal­la­lātī is even one of the four authorities giving in Hyderabad38:

Persian / Iran

In one of my first German posts I show that ʿUṯmān Ṭaha writes less calligraphicly than the 1924 Egyptian government print: UT has a strict base line, no mīm without white space in the middle = no mīm below lām: the next letter is always to the left. In the UT style vowel signs are always near "their" letter <--> in traditional Ottoman and Persian style they must only be in the right order.
All in all, ʿUṯmān Ṭaha is very close to the style of the Amiriyya = a simple Ottoman style.
In a German text I focus on orthography, giving most attention to the Maghrebian-Arab and to the Pakistani-Indian ones
and consequently on the new Arab calligraphic style and the new Pakistani-Indian one. Of course, I display examples from Morocco, from the Sudān, from Russia-Tartaristan as well -- and the earlier Indian style from Lucknow plus example from Punjab, from Bengal and Kerala.
I show many examples from Turkey and the Mašriq, but from Iran, I show mainly Nastaʿliq ones.
Here you see the normal Persian "qur'anic" style, taken from old maṣāḥif, all recently reproduced.

although written by three different (famous) writers, they are similar.
Note in the bottom right, that (like sometimes in India) wa is separated from the word to which it "belongs", something forbidden in Arabic.

Here two more examples of wrong wa- at the end of a line. I find the first example shocking because the silent alif-waṣl is separated from its vowel /a/.

Fist images from four Iranian ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā editions:
Now an Arab-Persian version which the original ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā writing, but in 11 lines instead of 15 -- and again twice the grave sin against Arab orthography: wa- at the end of line:

Here a more traditional print: 604 pages, a Persan style close to ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā, mostly with the Persian help signs:

never trust a reprint

never trust a reprint ... you did not "improve" yourself!
Köҫök Hafiz Osman = Haǧǧ Ḥāfiẓ ʿUṯmān Ḫalīfa Qayiš­Zāde an-Nūrī al-Bur­durī (Hac Hattat Kayışzade Hafis Osman Nûri Efendi Burdur­lu, d. 4.Ramaḍān 1311/ 11.March 1894) wrote 106 1/2 maṣāḥif.
BülÜk Hafiz Osman (1052/1642‒1110/1698) wrote only 25 (but many En’am-ı Şerif, and hilye­ler) One on 815 pages (plus prayer, index, colophon) was often reprinted in Syria ‒ in Egypt mostly as re­feren­ce in lengthy commen­taries.
In Turkey one finds hun­dreds of different "reprints".
They never give a true picture of the original.


On the left you see a Syrian print (HO the Elder, twelve lines per pages, 815 pages) from before 1950 with many signs that are later missing:
small hā' and yā' for five and ten (fif­teen, twenty and so on)
small two letter signs always including bā' giving information about Baṣrī verse numbe­ring
small dotless letters under or above a dotless letter stressing its dotlessnes.

In the middle (HO the Younger) I have highlighted two places:
the first was changed by the modern Turkish editors (see the page on the right), because the letters and signs do not follow right-to-left clearly enough.
the second one (modern edition) show a different rasm ‒
a rasm by the way used by the same calli­grapher in the other (the "Syrian") muṣ­ḥaf:

the script

Whereas English is written with
A a B b C c D d E e
F f G g H h I i J j
K k L l M m N n O o
P p Q q R r S s T t
U u V v W x , ; . :
! ? " - 1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 0 (  ) [  ] /  \
% & # ' + * ~ ^ { }
(80 chars)
the first qurʾān manuscripts just have
  ا   ٮ‍   ح‍ د ر و  ه‍ ط ك‍ ل‍
م‍ س‍ ص‍ ع‍ ڡ‍ ڡ ٯ ع ص س
* م ل ك ‌ـه‌ ح ٮ ں ى لا
(30 chars)

Most people know that the earliest manuscripts
do not have diacritical dots, no ḥamza sign, no numerals,
no shadda, no hyphen, colon, just an end of aya sign,
but hardly anybody is aware of two facts:

There is no space between words.
{Th. Bauer is wrong ("Words are set apart by greater spaces" in Peter T. Daniel, ed. p. 559).}
There is no hyphenation: end of line is insignificant.

Start letters and End letters are distinct letters
(although standing for the same sound, they carry a different meaning), whereas Start and Middle forms, End and Iso forms are "just" a consequence of the preceding letter.
As "conservative, liberals, god" are different from "Conservative, Liberals, God"
= A and a are not the same letter
ح‍ and ح are not the same letter
Just as capital letters carry a meaning (person, majesty, name, start of a sentence--in German: noun),
End (resp. Iso) carries the meaning: "end of the word".
Therefore there was no "space between words" -- or was it the other way round?
And because there is no End-waw (and because two alifs can not stand WITHIN a word),
after waw at the end of a word an alif was added: the word border runs between the two alifs.
Lakhdar-Ghazal saw a core letter and end markers:
ح ع م
ٮ ل ى
س ص ں
That does not work for all letters and not for all calligraphic styles.
Unicode sees colon, space, Non-Joiner as triggering the end form of ONE letter.
That is clearly wrong for the early manuscripts.

Bauer's "each letter may occur in four different positions: initial, medial, final, and isolated" is a truism, but it shows, that he noticed that the common statement "each letter has four forms/graphic shapes" is untenable, both because many have only one form (in typewriter script), and many have more than twenty (in "high" naskhi). Not trivial is "the common designation of the Arabic script as "consonantal" is incorrect, since the long vowels are represented but consonant gemination is not." (Bauer in Daniel p.561) -- although not ALL long vowels are represented (as Bauer knows of course), and some short vowels are represented and diphthongs as well.

don't confuse!

Perception is multilayered.
Some "see" blue, black and white.
others see strokes and dots,
others Arab words, or words from the beginning of the qurʾān or (among other things) 18 "dagger alifs".     I see only nine.
A "dagger alif" is a small alif, an Ersatzalif (supple­mentary alif)
or a Wandelalif (transforming alif).
The similar looking signs in the "Indian" muṣḥaf from Medina
are no alifs, but fatḥas, standing fatḥas or turned fatḥas,
not letters but vowel signs.
I fail to understand, how anybody can confuse a sign that sits on its letter (or near its ascender)
with a letter that follows a letter+vowel­sign-com­bina­tion.
Once one knows that in the African notation there must be a ḥarf al-madd to lengthen the vowel,
where­as in the Asian notation fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma each have a turned vari­ant for the long vowel,
one SEEs the difference.
Whoever does confuse long vowel sign and Ersatz letter is blind.
In the last line: two Wandel­alifs:
there is a ḥarf al-madd, but the wrong one: instead of alif (expected after fatḥa): waw resp. yāʾ here the small alif transforms waw resp. yāʾ into alif. (In the blue line above: (long) standing fatḥa again.)
So not 18 dagger alifs, just seven Ersatzalif plus two Wandelalif.
Not convinced?

Look at these examples.
If you don't see "argu­ments", study some­thing else (you are not made to study the writing of maṣā­ḥif).

Here the text from the King Fuad Edition about the small letters (among them "dagger alif"):

And about fatḥa, standing fatḥa, kasra, standing kasra, ḍamma and turned ḍamma.

rasm ‒ consonantal skeleton?

The most common translation for rasm
"consonantal skeleton" is wrong.
Look at the 22nd word of 3:195 واودوا
six letters,
definitely not six consonants.

On the sound level
Arabic, like any language,
has sonants and con-sonants.
But on the sign level,
there are just letters.
It doesn't make sense to talk of Phoenician, Arabic, Semitic consonant letters.
Only once there are sonants/vowels, there can be con-sonants/not sounding on their own.
Since Greeks speak no ḥ, they used the letter ḥēt for ē
Jota for ī, changed ʿain into Omikron, waw into Ypsilon (ū).


When you look into early qurʾān manuscripts,
you will see the letters function as end of word maker &
as long vowels & as diphthongs (ḥurūf al-madd wa'l-līn)
& as short vowels,
not only in the common اولٮك and the less frequent أولوا۠ but in ساورىكم
(7:145, 21:37), لاوصلٮٮكم
(7:124, 20:71, 26:49) and
in rare words like وملاٮه (7:103 + 11:97 + 43:46 ) IPak: وَمَلَائِهٖ / وَمَلَا۠ئِهٖ Q52 : وَمَلَإِيْهِۦ
and اڡاىں (3:144 + 21:34)
IPak: افَائِنۡ / افَا۠ئِنْ Q52: اَفإي۠ن .
Modern readers may perceive two silent letters:
one carrying a hamza,
one otiose.
Originally they stood for ayi or a'i or aʾi --
definitely for short vowels.
Both words are written in IPak with silent alif + yāʾ-hamza
in Q52 with alif-hamza + silent yāʾ.
Add to this alif as akkusativ marker (at the end), as question marker at the beginning, hāʾ (tāʾ marbūṭa) as femining marker
(plus wau as name marker at the end outside the qurʾān عمرو)
and common words like انا.
So, to call all letters "consonants", makes no sense.
To call the rasm "consonantal" is wrong.
Call it: skeleton,
letter skeleton,
basic letters,
skeletal text,
stroke,
drawing.
Unfortunately most academics repeat what their predecessors wrote,
they can't look for them*selves, don't mention thinking for them*selves --
whether female, male, trans*gender or non*binary.

Kein Standard Two (How did they make Gizeh 1924?)

Angelika Neuwirth, an expert on the genesis of the Qur’an before 623,
knows nothing about the history of printed maṣāḥif,
but she writes about it:

the mushaf, i.e. the text put onto sheets, bound between two covers, was trans­mitted through the centuries, genera­tion by generation ... to end up in the last century, in 1925, in the form of a printed text
A. Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010. p. 190

I fail to understand, what Neuwirth wants to say.
Does she ignore that the Qur’an was printed in 1537, in 1694, in 1698, in 1787 for the first time by Muslims in St. Peters­burg, in 1834 in Leipzig, in the 1830s ten diffe­rent prints in Persia and India?
Does she ignore that from 1875 each year thousands were printed in Istan­bul and India?
What does she mean by "end up in the form of a printed text"?
What does she want to say by "trans­mitted genera­tion by genera­tion"?
Okay, before sound could be recorded, the oral text had to be taught from teacher to pupil:
it was indeed transmitted through the ages.
But was that necessary for the muṣḥaf?
Was it not possible to read (and copy) a muṣḥaf written by a person dead at the time of reading the manu­script?
It was not common to give an isnād of scribes who each have learned the art of writing a muṣḥaf from an older scribe/ ḫaṭṭāṭ.
When we believe the main editor of the King Fuʾād Edition it was a re­con­struction,
based on the oral text and Andalusian books from the 11th and 14th century on the ortho­graphy of the qurʾān.
I believe it was an adaptation of a printed copy of the trans­mission Warš to the normal Egyp­tian reading of Ḥafṣ.
For sure, it was not the last in a chain of trans­mitted maṣāḥif, from Egyp­tian scribe to pupil (through the gene­rations).

Neuwirth has never seen the King Fuad Edition.
Consistently she cites it wrongly.
The book has no title on the cover, no title page; the first page is empty,
the first page with something on it, has the Fatiḥa.
In the afterword, it refers to itself as "al-muṣḥaf aš-šarīf,"
in the dedication to King Fuʾād it calls itself "al-muṣḥaf al-karīm".
Because it has no title, according to the German library rules,
the given/ assumed/ generic title is in brackets: "[qurʾān]",
but Neuwirth gives two different one in the notes:
„Al-Qur‘ân al-Karîm, Kairo 1925“ (Der Koran als Text der Spät­antike, p. 30)
and „Qur‘ân karîm 1344/1925“ (Der Koran als Text der Spät­antike,. p. 273).
Neuwirth has never read the information/ تعريف at the back of the King Fuʾād Edition,
nor read and understood the article Gott­helf Berg­sträßer wrote about it.
Otherwise, she would know that the editors claim to have re­con­struc­ted the muṣḥaf from scratch.
The chief editor is not a scribe, but the chief reader/ qāri of Egypt: he knows the qurʾān by heart ‒ in seven to twenty trans­missions.
In the تعريف he states that he has tran­scribed the oral text according to a didactic poem based on two medieval books on the basic letters for writing the qurʾān,
on a Maghrebian book on vowelling but with Eastern vowel signs and other books ...
I interrupt, because I do not believe, what is written in the تعريف
I am convinced that the editor took a Warš muṣḥaf and adopted it to Ḥafṣ.
For the vowelling, he did not have to replace Maghre­bian signs by Eastern signs because the system developed by Al-Ḫālil ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī was current in the West because printing colour dots was too complicated/ expensive at the time.
The "information" further informs us that verse numbering and litur­gical divisions are according to a recent Egyptian scholar, Abū ʿĪd Riḍwān ibn Muḥammad ibn Sulaimān al-Muḫalla­lātī, again not informing us that they adopted the Moroccan system in which a ḥizb is half a ǧuz ‒ not a quarter as before, as in Turkey, Persia, India, Nusantara.
There are many more things, in which Egyptian maṣāḥif used to be like Ottoman, Persian, Indian and Indone­sian maṣāḥif,
in which from now on they are like Moroccan ones ‒ with­out giving an authority to whom the King Fuʾād Edition is said to adhere.
—> The KFE just follows Maghrebian maṣā­ḥif, a switch of tra­dition, the opposite of what Neu­wirth wrote, the opposite of what Berg­strä­ßer believed.
The KFE has three different forms of tanwīn, and three dif­ferent forms of sukūn ‒ to be precise: the Moroccan sukūn for "un­pro­nounced" (circle or oval) and the Indian sign for "un­vowelled" (clearly the first letter of ǧazm without the dot not "ḫa with­out the dot" as they write).
Egyptian prints used to have signs for long vowels, now they have the Maghre­bian system, in which a vowel sign AND a vowel letter (ḥarf al-madd) is needed (hence a small letter is added when­ever neces­sary).
When a word starts with /ʾā/ they used to write the letter hamza (i.e. an alif) + a turned fatḥa,
now they copy the Maghrebian practice:
seatless hamza-sign+fatḥa followed by a lengthe­ning alif.
This does not change the rasm, it is not mentioned in the scholarly litera­ture cited.
Vowelless nūn not followed by h,ḥ,ḫ,ʾ,ʿ,ġ used to have a sukūn (as in Osm, Soltani, IPak), now they have nothing because they are not pro­nounced (clearly as them­selves - not iẓhār) because they are (partly) assimilated or reduced.
compare the beginning of al-Baqara from Bombay vs. Medina (aka IPak vs. Q52):

There used to be two (or three) different madd signs, now there is just one.

In all these things the King Fuʾād Edition clearly copies Maġribi Warṣ muṣāḥif ‒ unlike pauses, numbering, rasm, dotting they are not described in books ON the matter, al-Ḥaddad could only copy them from maṣā­ḥif. Strangely neither Berg­sträßer, nor anyone else noticed that.
And there is more: no more sign for Baṣrī numbers, no more small nūns, when tan­wīn before alif is spoken as a/u/i-ni (called "ṣila nūn" or on the sub­continent "quṭnī nūn"/tiny nūn).
To summarize:
Except for the transmission of Ḥafṣ, the Kufī numbering, and a new pause system (based on Saǧāwandī), and the letter font of the Amiriyya (by Muḥammad Ǧʿafar Bey)
this is Maghribian.
That the rasm was not ad-Dānī, not al-Ḫarrāz was clear. When people found out that it was only 95% Ibn Naǧāḥ, the editors in Medina and in Tunis added "mostly" (ġāliban / fĭ l-ġālib) to the informa­tion at the end of the book. Since it is 99% Maghribian, I guess al-Ḥaddād just adopted an existing muṣḥaf ‒ the "reconstruction" is a myth.

The other great German qurʾān expert, Hartmut Bob­zin, gives the right year, he writes:

the publication of the so-called "Azhar Koran" on 10 July 1924 (7.Dhū l-hiǧǧa 1342 in the Islamic calendar)
FROM VENICE TO CAIRO: ON THE HISTORY OF ARABIC EDI­TIONS OF THE KORAN (16th ‒ early 20th century), in Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution A cross-cultural encounter. West­hofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima 2002. p.171

which is not correct either: on that day the printing was finished,
before the book could be published it had to be bound.
One can be a good translator of the qurʾān, without knowing a thing about publishing,
but maybe it is not a good idea to write about publish­ing without knowing a thing about it.
And the King Fuʾād Edition is not the Azhar-Koran, nor known as such.
It was produced by the Govern­ment Press under the direction of the Chief Qārī of Egypt, assisted by men from the Education Ministry and the Pedago­gical College on Qaṣr al-ʿAinī.
In the end, the chief of al-Azhar and the chief copy editor of the Govern­ment Press vouched for correct­ness.
Only 1977 to 1987, an "Azhar Koran" was printed ‒ in five different sizes, different bindings and get-ups (with two reprints in Qaṭar, the last one in 1988)



Everything Bobzin writes is completly wrong

Der "Azhar-Koran" löste eine wahre Flut gedruck­ter Koran­ausgaben in allen isla­mi­schen Ländern aus, da man sich nun für den Koran­text auf eine aner­kannte Auto­rität stützen konnte.
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. ibidem

 

If there was a wave of prints after 1924 ‒ unsubstantiated by Bobzin ‒ it was to due to offset printing, has nothing to do with the KFE. The only print caused by it, the Kabul print of 1934, is "unknown" by the experts.

Die Entscheidung der Kairiner Gelehrten für den Text nach der Les­art "Hafs 'an 'Asim" ver­schaffte ihr nunmehr gegen­über allen anderen Les­arten einen ent­schei­denden Vor­teil.
there was a pronounced tendency to understand the "Azhar Koran" as virt­ually a "textus recep­tus", in other words as the only binding Koran text. The decision by the scholars in Cairo in favour of the text in the "Hafs 'an 'Asim" version secured it a decisive advan­tage over all other versions. ibidem

That Ḥafṣ experienced an upsurge due to the KFE is nonsense. Only in the Sudan it gained a bit ‒ but only because it is closer to the Arabic taught in state schools (which had more pupils now).

Allen "modernen" Koranaus­gaben bleibt eine Gemein­sam­keit ..., daß für die Her­stellung des Satzes keine be­weg­lichen Lettern ver­wendet werden, son­dern stets ein kalli­graphisch ge­stalteter Text zu­grunde liegt, der ent­weder litho­gra­phisch oder photo­mecha­nisch ver­viel­fältigt wird.
all the "modern" editions of the Koran still have one thing in common ... above all in the fact that no movable type is used to set the pages, which are, instead, always based on a
calli­graphi­cally designed text which is reproduced either by litho­graphy or by photo­mecha­nical pro­cesses.

Untrue: KFE'24, Kabul'34, Hyderabad'38 and the Muṣḥaf Azhar aš-Šarīf are type set.

Im Hinblick auf den Text folgte [Flügel] nicht einer einzigen Les­art, son­dern bot einen Misch­text (wie das übri­gens in den meisten Hand­schriften der Fall ist).
As regards the text itself he did not adhere to a single reading, but instead provided a mixed text (as was the case in most manu­scripts). p.169

Again, Bobzin states a fact ("most manu­script editions are a mix of readings") without proving it. It would be inter­esting to get informa­tion about one or two, not to mention "most" manuscripts mixing readings!

In the meantime, young brilliant scholars have surpassed Neuwirth and Bobzin in writing nonsense. Although there are more than a thousand editions printed in Cairo, they call the first (and for over fifty years: the only) Gizeh print "the Cairo Edition (CE)". It is as calling Notre-Dame de Paris "the Paris Novel (PN)."





­‒

Kein Standard

In 1914 a few English- and Scotsmen controlled more than half of the globe (most of the seas and chunks of land too, includ­ing millions of Indians).
Kaiser Wilhelm found that unfair. He started a war.
Five years later Germany had shrunk.
Adolf Hitler found that unfair. He started a war.
As one of the results, German is not understood (less written) by most scholars and scien­tists anymore.
So today, there are people reading books and blogs that do not under­stand German.
Therefore, I will repeat in the Lingua Franca of the age, what I have written in German.
In 1834, years after an adequate copy of the Qur'ān was set and printed in St. Peters­burg (later in Kazan)
and when lithograph copies began to be produced in India and Persia,
the German orientalist Gustav Flügel came up with a new typeset copy,
with a text of his own ‒ not very different from rasm, ḍabṭ and ḥarakat recognized by Muslims, but different from the can­on­ized variants never­theless,
and with a numbering system of his Hamburg col­league Abraham Hinckel­mann (which diverges from all Muslim systems and places the numbers BEFORE the verse).


Already the cover shows Flügel incompetence: the little hā' above hā' signals "not a tā' marbuṭa", but in this position (above hā' in hudā), hāʾ can not be tāʾ, so it can not carry an ihmal sign:

The alif (before lām mīm) has no madda. raḥmān and ḏālika should have a dagger alif, Flügel's font doesn't have one. How could any scholar use such a print?

Although it came 50 years too late, it became the standard edition of European orientalists ‒ for about a century.
Later the Egyptian King Fuʾād Edition became the standard ‒ not as I see it ‒ because it was really better than most others, but because it was much better than the orienta­list sorry effort, and because most (Central European) orien­talists ignored the Magh­rebian and Indian prints (Ottoman and Persian prints had a few hundred more alifs as matres lectionis which does not make them inferior, but serves as an argument against them, besides them not indi­cating as­simila­tion of nūn sākin. ‒ Although most Muslims in Germany use Turkish prints, these are avoided by the scholars.)


This was typeset in 1299/1881/2 in the Egyptian Government Press and printed both in one volume (Prince­ton library 2273) and in ten and/or thirty leather bound volumes (on the market and "Exhibi­tion Islam," London).
13 years later printed in Bulaq as well:

In 1914 ‒ when the United Kingdom was at war with the Ottoman Empire ‒ Egypt declared its indepen­dence, the ruler changed from Wālī/Governor to Sulṭān ‒ Khedive had been the personal title, not a function or an office.
Now it was urgent that Egypt printed its own maṣāḥif. The statement that the "foreign ones" (Istan­bul was the capital, not foreign before 1915) had mistakes ‒ without given further informa­tion what and where ‒ is propaganda, no real informa­tion. Repetition does not turn it into fact.

The Shape of the Qur'ān ‒ Guide for Publishers

When I started to write "Kein Standard", I wanted to show that the King Fuʾād Edition of 1924 is not the standard,
that the maṣāḥif printed by the Tāj Company Ltd. are 100 times more often printed, reprinted in other countries and copied in Pakistan and elsewhere.
The 1924 copy was only reprinted once: 1955 by the Communist govern­ment of China ‒
to be precise its text was reproduced, but put into a new frame, with new page headers, with new sura title boxes, new signs on the margin for divi­sions, saǧadāt and sakatāt.
A title page was added ‒ the original didn't have one.
And two pages were thrown out, because King Fuʾād was men­tioned ‒ not republican enough.
In Cairo, it was never reproduced, but some­what improved ‒ some­times its margin reduced.
1952 the Egyptian Govern­ment Press (Amiriyya) pro­duced a "second print,"
different from the 1924 edition at about 900 places.
"That Tāj was more success­ful commer­cially is ir­rele­vant.
The King Fuʾād Edition is superior," one might say.
The opposite is true.
Even if we take the ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā edition printed in Medina, which com­bines 99,8% of the orthography of the 1952 (!) Cairo print with the dis­tri­bution of the text on 604 pages popular in Istanbul around 1900, with a clear and easy to read calligraphy, it is NOT superior to the Tāj Company Ltd edi­tions, it is just as good ‒ see here.

By the time I had finished the book, something else had caught my eye.
First I discovered, that in Cairo more than ten printers (as well as others in Bairut and Tehran) repro­duced the 522-page-muṣḥaf written by Muṣṭafā Naẓīf Qādir­ġalī
‒ as it was written (in the Ottoman ortho­graphy) still in the 1950s,
‒ in the new orthography (with I have called Q24).
So I learned that publishers just change the masora (little signs around the rasm), verse num­bers, sura title, divisions (juz, ḥizb ...) ‒ and even the rasm (elimi­nating a ḥarf al-madd from time to time) without much ado, with­out informing the public.
Then I noticed that a printer (Aḥmad Šamarlī) had a calligrapher (Muḥ Saʿd al-Haddād) copy the 522-muṣḥaf line by line calli­graphi­cally very similar but in the new (African) orthography.

At first, I had believed what the chief editor of the 1924 edition had told G.Berg­sträßer, that he had recon­structed the spelling by tran­scrib­ing the text that he knew by heart according to the Andalu­sian manuals on the writing of the qurʾān by Abū ʿAmr ʿUṯmān ibn Saʿīd ad-Dānī and his pupil Abū Daʾūd Sulaiman Ibn Naǧāḥ, following Ibn Naǧāḥ, when he disagreed with his teacher.
Later I discovered that the editors of the Medina muṣḥaf written by ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā, wrote that they followed "mostly" Ibn Naǧāḥ, which means ‒ if the 10% of the text that I com­pared are re­presen­ta­tive ‒ in 95% of cases.
And that they (i.e. al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddad al-Mālikī) some­times follow neither Abū ʿAmr nor Abū Daʾūd (maybe Abu'l Hasan ʿAlī bin Muḥammad al-Murādi al-Andalusī al-Balansī [d. 546 h] in al-Munṣif or Abū'l Qāsim ibn Firruh ibn Ḫalaf ibn Aḥmad al-Ruʿaynī aš-Šāṭibī (أبو القاسم بن فره بن خلف بن أحمد الرعيني الشاطبي ) [d. 590 h] in al-ʿAqīlat Atrāf al-Qaṣāʾid or in ar-Rāʾiyya الرائية
or as-Suyūtī's [d.849 h] Itqān fī ʿulūm al-Qurʾān 1999
2019

Then I learnt that some editions follow Mawrid al-Ẓamʾān by al-Kharrāz, which is based on both ad-Dānī and Ibn Naǧāḥ;
and that Gizeh 1924 just follows the most common Moroccan rasm,
the Libyan muṣḥaf al-jamāhīriya follows always ad-Dānī,
and Tāj Company mostly ad-Dānī, because the Indian rasm authority, al-Ārkātī follows ad-Dānī,
that Indonesia had copied several Ottoman and Indian (notably pre-Tāj from Bombay) maṣāḥif, that 1983/4 the government committee (Lajnah Pentashihan Mushaf al-Qurʾan established in 1957) published a standard to bring them together (e.g. introducing an "Indian" sign for /ū/ missing in Turkish and Persian manuscripts), reducing the pause signs to seven, imposing one system of verse numbering (Kūfī with 6236 verses)
that the Committee changed the standard after 19 years ‒ not secretly but in the open AND stating which authority they follow in each case.
September 2018 a list with 186 words to be written differently again was published.
In 171 cases a straight fatḥa will stand, where none was before, but there are 11 cases were it is the other way around.
Three cases concern raʾā = he saw. 1983 it was written as in Bombay and in Bahrije (the two prints reprinted in Indonesia): راٰ In 2002 the scholars changed it to رأى like in Modern Standard Arabic, in 2018 they switched to the African way of writing: رءا
In Tunis there are lots of editions following the transmission of Qālūn, some following the normal Maghrebian rasm, other al-Kharrāz, some in the writing style of ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā, others a "mild" form of Maghribī (not as difficult to read as Fāsī), none copying the Libyan (ad-Dānī) rasm, since that book is readily available.
So I discovered that one must keep the different dimensions apart:
not assuming that there are fixed/necessary links between rasm, reading/trans­mission, verse counting, names of Sura, liturgical divisions, calligraphic style, page layout (like: each Juz must start on top of a right page, or: verses may not straddle pages {or very rarely} ...)

Yes, the 1924 KFE brought several innovations:
letters are on a baseline, few ligatures, space between words, numbers after each verse (not just an end-of-verse-marker, and signs every fifth verse),
a streamlined system of pause signs;
the reading helps were largely Maghrebian, but a common sign for vowelless and for unpronounced became differen­tiated.
Strangely most orientalists still assume that the "Cairo/Azhar committee" came up with lots of innovations.
There were some improvements (streamlined Sajawandi pause signs, differentiated sukun signs for vowellessness vs. unpronouncedness), but the main revolution happened with the 1308/1890 al-Muḫallalātī muṣḥaf:
a difficient rasm,
the Maġribi way for writing long vowels:
having always two signs: a vowel sign + ḥarf al-madd
writing if necessary a small (or red) ḥarf al-madd.
Yes, the Iranian Center for Printing and Publication of Qurʾān, came up with a new (simplified) rasm
and at the same time a new (simple) system of vowel signs, pause signs and so on.
One must keep these aspects apart. There are Iranian prints with the new rasm, with the tradi­tional signs, there are prints with the calligraphy of ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā, but with a different rasm from the Medina print.
Most prints published by the Center do not differen­tiate between iẓhār vs. idġām, of nūn sākin (esp. tanwīn), but some do!
Most Iranian prints do not show assi­mila­tion that go further than in MSA, but some do.
The Damascus publisher Dar al-Maʿrifa prints Medinese transmissions (Qālūn, Azraq, Isbahani) with Kufian verse numbers ‒ to make it easier to compare.
Instead of talking of "la version du Maghreb" one should say "the trans­mission of Warsh", "the verse numbering of Medina II," "the rasm of Ibn Naǧāḥ" or "Q52 rasm aka KFC rasm" (different at two places from Q52) or "the rasm of Muṣḥaf Qaṭar" (different at one place from ʿUṬ/KFC); in other cases of "an elaborated Saǧā­wandī pause system with 15 signs" or a "simplified Saǧā­wandī pause system with five signs."
True, that is longer, but assuming that these aspects go toghether, is wrong.
Publishers are free to come up with new devices.
Almost 50 years ago the Iranian Center for Printing and Publica­tion of Quran intro­duced three new signs: small fatḥa, small ḍamma, small kasra where in old Ottoman and Safavid maṣāḥif we find red fatḥa/ḍamma/kasra (just waṣl-sign in Q24).
Ten years later the Center introduced grey for silent letters (later yet, blue or red instead of grey). When it had become cheap and simple to print a second colour they did not go back on their earlier invention: red letters were un­pronounc­ed/silent and the fatḥa at the beginning of a word normally starting with hamzatu l-waṣl after a pause, hence spoken as hamzatu l-qaṭʿ stayed small and black.
Yes, there are traditions of qurʾān writing, some aspects normally come together, but not necessarily.
Note:
The publishers do not change the (oral) text of the qurʾān, they just try to make it easier to read or to pronounce it correctly.

Quranic Calligraphic Styles

When you leaf through my German Amazon book "Kein Standard", you learn a lot about calligraphic styles, but I hardly write about them. In my German blog I show that ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā is less calligraphic than the 1924 Egyptian muṣḥaf: his letters stay close to the baseline, there is no point-meem, the next letter is always to the left, so ḥarakāt are always near to the letters ‒ and in his first (Syrian) muṣḥaf there is some space between word, in the version he wrote in Medina often there is no extra space between words.
All in all, ʿUṯmān Ṭahā is very close to the style of the Amiriyya = a simple Ottoman style.
In "Kein Standard" I focus on orthography, giving most attention to the Maghrebian-Arab and to the Pakistani-Indian ones
and consequently on the new Arab calligraphic style and the new Pakistani-Indian one. Of course, I display examples from Morocco, from the Sudān, from Russia-Tartaristan as well ‒ and the earlier Indian style from Lucknow plus example from Punjab, from Bengal and Kerala.
I show many examples from Turkey and the Mašriq, but from Iran, I show mainly Nastaʿliq ones.
Here you see the normal Persian style, taken from old maṣāḥif, but recently reproduced.

although written by three different (famous) writers, they are similar.
Note in the bottom right, that (like sometimes in India) wa is separated from the word to which it "belongs", something forbidden in Arabic.

Here two more examples of wrong wa- at the end of a line. I find the first example shocking because the silent alif-waṣl is separated from its vowel /a/.

In the book I show images from four Iranian ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā editions.
Here an Arab-Persian version which the original ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā writing, but in 11 lines instead of 15 -- and again twice the grave sin against Arab orthography: wa- at the end of line:

Here a more traditional print: 604 pages, a Persan style close to ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā, mostly with the Persian help signs:

Qurʾānic Orthography

Most people think that there is ONE way to write the qurʾān, that if we leave the different qiraʾāt aside and ignore the style of writing, all copies of the qurʾān are the same.
And that they are written alright.

The opposite is true:
there are many different qurʾanic "ortho"graphies and none is ortho/right.

b, k, l, m, n, t ... are fine. Paleo-Linguists argue about ض ص ط ظ

But for modern readers only the vowels are proble­matic: short and long vowels.

Basically there are two systems:
an Indian system with seven vowel signs (a ā i ī u ū x)
an African System which needs for each long vowel a vowel sign plus the correspond­ing lengthening letter.

The African system is today common in the Arab world. When there is no leng­then­ing letter (waw, yāʾ, alif) after ḍamma, kasra, fatḥa in the rasm, a small letter is added. When the rules of pro­sody require an "ī" al­though no yāʾ is in the rasm, a small yāʾ barī (i.e with the tail to the front) is added.

But when the rules of prosody require a (written/long) yāʾ to be shortened,
that is not reflected in the text.
I am shocked because the lengthening of vowels required by prosody IS shown.
I had no problem with sticking to the base letters, but adding read­ing helps sometimes defies God's logic.
(Turks and Persians do never show the niceties of quranic as­simi­lation. ‒ That I can under­stand.)
(Turks note leng­thened ī, but not leng­thened ū ‒ some­thing corrected in all Indo­nesian and some Iranian reprints.)

Indians, Turks, Persians, Indo­nesi­ans are not happy with this. The Arab attitude "every­body knows that these letters do not leng­then the vowel at these places" sounds arrogant in non-Arab hears.

In XXX:10 /ʾasāʾŭ s-sūʾā/ in India (second line) and Indonesia (last, right) there is no vowell sign about the wau in /ʾasāʾŭ/, hence it is not pronounced (just as the following alif).
In Kerala (first, right) and Turkey (fourth line) that wau is silent because it is only the "seat" of hamza (there would be written "madd" under­neath if it were to be pronounced).
In the new Iranian orthography (fifth line, right) all silent letter are pink.
But in the third line (right: Madina: ʿUṯmān Ṭaha; left: Damascus: Dār al-Maʿrifa) there is no Silent-Sign above the wau.
The same in the last line, left (Tunis: Nous-mêmes) ‒ wrong as I see it.
But two of the taǧwīd-Editions based on UT do show the silence of that wau: On the top, left from Bairut (blueish for silence), on the fifth line, left from Damascus (grey triange above for silence).

When shortening doesn't follow a general rule, but applies just to parti­cular places within the text = when a vowel is short because it must rhyme with lines before and after, this IS reflected in the Arab-African text. So why not: all the time?

Here you see words from an Indian manuscript (from Surat Hūd) in which ONLY the vowel SIGNS count, the "lengthening" vowel letters are IGNORED (hence: NO sign above or below) ‒ al-farīqaini in the last line has jazm above the yāʾ because in the diph­thong yāʾ is NOT silent.
((Added later: I first had seen just one manu­script from around 1800 with the sign-only ortho­graphy, by now I have seen some more ‒ up to the time when litho­graphs became common, litho­graphs with the modern/ mixed way of writing long vowel letters)

on the margin I added doctored versions: signs were moved to a place easier to read for the modern reader

The modern Indian system (black on white background) is a mix of the old con­sistent system and the African one: when the CORRES­PONDING letter follows a vowel sign, the SHORT vowel sign is used (as in Africa), only when there is a diffe­rent letter or no "leng­thening" letter at all, the long vowel sign is used.


In 7:103, 10:75, 11:97 and 43:46 (and 10:83 with an added mīm for plural) pro­nounciation and rasm are the same; there is only disagreement on whether the alif or the yāʾ is mute:
wa-malaʾihī
IPak: وَمَلَا۠ئِهٖ
Q52: وَمَلَإِي۠هِۦ
In the rasm there are matres (ḥurūf al-madd) for both /a/ and /i/,
‒ indeed here letters (not consonants!) stand for short vowels,
  because there was no other way to notice them.
in India alif is silent (the short fatḥa is valid, not the alif), yāʾ carries hamza,
in Arabia alif "carries" hamza below, yāʾ is silent.

In 21:34 ʾa-faʾin
IPak: افَا۠ئِنْ
Q52: اَفإي۠ن
India and osm/Tur make the alif silent
(Indians used to leave the alif without any sign, now they put the silent making circle,
Turks write qaṣr underneath)
for Arabs alif carries hamza, yāʾ is silent.
Muṣṭafā Naẓīf in one of his manu­scripts (the 604 pages berkenar one) just drops the otiose letter. اَفَإنْ
It does not help to observe that in his other maṣāḥif he has the super­fluous letter. The 604 page muṣḥaf is often re­printed (not as often as the 522 page one, but in different countries) without "correc­tion".
Similar 6:24 min-nabaʾi

In Q52 alif "carries" hamza and /i/, yāʾ is silent and in IPak alif is silent, yāʾ carries hamza and /i/.

forward to the Middle Ages (the Dark Age)

In the European Middle Ages (let's say after Augustin of Hippo) scholars believed what was written by authoritative authors.
So the earth was created some five thousand years ago in six days -- including plants, birds, fish, animals, and snakes -- and Adam & Eve.
And in Jerusalem, there was first The First Temple and then The Second Temple.
After the advent of Modernity, scholars made observations, experiments, and excavations.
And no traces of a central temple for the people of Israel was found in Jerusalem, and what is more: There was no United Kingdom.
IF there were David and Salomon, they were petty chieftains.
Of course, if you are looking for a map of the Garden of Eden in the Hebrew Bible, you can believe the existence of the First Temple.
Or you can read the books of Israel Finkel‎stein (and Neil Asher Silber‎man) and know what can be known.
Even if there are no traces, one can assume that there was a local temple in Jerusalem and that it was destroyed by Pharaoh Šošeq's army.
The Judean King Jehoaš had a second temple built after 835.
Destroyed around 700 BCE by the Assyrian King Sîn-aḫḫe-eriba.
The third temple was destroyed 597 by the Babylonians, and 586 annihilated.
The fourth ‒ the first of regional importance, but still not THE only temple for יהוה ‒ was built by Zerubbabel and Joshua 520 BCE
or 445 by Nehemiah and Ezra (or was that the fifth? )
500 years later Herod the Great built the Sixth Temple.
Around it, he had erected an artificial mount supported by huge stones blocks.
To call this temple the Second is like saying that Pei erected the Louvre and Forster the Reichstag.
And to speak of "Solomon's Temple" is like saying King Arthur defended the UK.
If you say: But the Jews ... I call to your attention that the national socia‎list Ben Gurion proclaimed the Third Reich (בית השלישי) after "his" army had conquered the Sinai Pen‎insula.

CC (in the "the World of the Quran" module) talks of Salomon's Temple, showing that they just reproduce what others say, re‎producing phrases used by Believers in the Hebrew Bible, showing that they live in the Middle Ages, are not "Wissenschaftler".
To say "around the turn of the eras", "in the third century before ..." is better than "in the so-called Second Temple Period", but it is okay. To calls Herod's temple "The Second Temple" is wrong -- and whoever does it is stupid.