Monday 25 November 2019

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.

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