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)."





­‒