Thursday, 17 October 2019

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.

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