Thursday 26 December 2019

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!


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