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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1358/1959 1299/1880
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