Saturday 4 January 2020

Kein Standard, Five


Today I will not give you snippet for snippet,
I will just tell you:
in 2:72 Gizeh1924, Bulaq1952, the Azhar Coran of the 1970s, all had a baseline hamza,
while Moroccans have alif+hamza, Tunisians (& Tripolitanians) dagger alif + hamza.
Both al-Ḥaddād (for Šamarlī) and ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (printed in Damascus, ar-Riyaḍ, Tehran, İstanbul) followed the Amiriyya.
Today all editions of al-Ḥaddad and ʿUṯmān Ṭaha have hamza on a dagger.
Did the King Fahd Complex bring about the change?
Yes, but they did not start it.
Dar al-Faiḥāʾ in Damascus brought it up.
Now it's standard in the Arab East.
The "revolution" took almost a hundred years: from 1890 to 1980.

BTW, when Hythem Sidky tweeted that the CE was "immensely popular" and "brought about a revolution", he did not know, what he said.
Had he spoken with the people of Egypt, he would know, that they
never took to the "Cairo Edition". Had he studied the developments of
printed maṣāḥif, he'd know that it was a slow process.
And: Egypt is not the Islamic World,
Syria followed in the 1970s, Iraq even later.
Africa partly due to Saudi gifts, Malaysia by government degree.
India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey and their diasporas never.
If you read German ‒ else Brockett's Ph.D. thesis.

Friday 3 January 2020

Kein Standard, Four

Whereas "the second print" of 1952 brought many changes,
in 73:20 "allan" changed all the time (before and after 1952):
In both the 1924 and the 1952 edition it is one word: أَلَّن
In Kein Standard I show lots of examples of Amiriyya and competitors type set prints,
in this blog I have already twice shown images.
Both Indian

and Maghrebian prints

have it in two words: ان لن ‒ Warš, Dar at-Tunisīya:


Qālūn, Gaddafi's copy:


Qālūn, Tunisian State Edition:

So I dare to say, the Egyptians made a mistake:

which they corrected in 1929 (or before):

The same in 1354/1935:
But the "second print" reverted to the mistake:

While some reprints follow the Amiriyya (especially the "Communists" in Taschkent and Peking, and in Bairut and Paris as well), another Bairuti print reprinted in ʿAmman (and available in archive.org):


and Cologne (Abu'r Rida Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rassoul, Islamische Bibliothek,
both Arabic only and with German translation)

and Gaddafi's Islamic Call Society (both the Arabic otherwise photo-reprint and the newly set alongside different translations) correct the mistake

The Amiriyya sticks to their choice, but both Sa'udia (KFC)

and Iran (Center) follow the majority of Muslims:

BTW, the Iranian Center for Printing and Spreading the Qurʾān produce mainly faulty maṣāḥif:
They are the only one who write "an lan" (not al-lan); in a copy that marks silent letters red,
the nūn MUST be red (and the lām must have šadda), what­ever the Center may say.
As I have said elsewhere, once you use signs for silent letters, it is stupid (arrogant, incon­sidered) not to use them everywhere,
when you show when yāʾs are shortend to /a/, you should show when yāʾ is shortend to /i/ as well (but Gizeh24 and Saudi UT do not do it),
when you have signs for /ā/ and /ī/, why not for /ū/ (but Turkish editors do not have it).
There are editors in Damascus, Jakarta, and Tunis that mark ALL silent letters as silent, but others (Dar al-Maʿrīfa and the Iranian Center) do not.

When you show only the words, not how they are pronounced in a particular context, I can under­stand,
but to do it sometimes, I do not understand.

Wednesday 1 January 2020

Kein Standard, Three

The Survey Authority Edition (King Fuʾād Edition, Amiriyya, Gizeh 1924) is
‒ not the Azhar Edition,
‒ not a Cairo Edition,
‒ not the first type printed muṣḥaf,
‒ not the first printed by Muslims,
‒ was never popular in Egypt or among Muslims in general,
‒ was not prepared by a committee,
    but made largely by one man: al-qārī al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād,
‒ was not a revolution,
but prepared thirty years before by al-Muḫallalātī
and only its grand-child, written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha, took off ‒ 65 years later,
‒ was not the first with the "ʿUṯmānic rasm",
‒ not the first with an afterword,
‒ not special because it named its sources,
because it is a lie. Nothing of what is written in the afterword
is 100% correct. Although it claims to be a reconstruction based on
Abū Dāʾūd Sulaimān Ibn Najāḥ, it turns out that it just follows the
common Maghribi maṣāḥif, mostly Ibn Najāḥ, but sometimes ad-Dānī, when they disagree
‒ except for the transmission of Ḥafṣ and the Kūfī verse numbering,
plus the pause signs developed by the main editor himself
plus the differentiation between a sign for vowellessness and two signs for unpronouncedness.

When you study the first "normal" page from
an Ottoman muṣḥaf (written by Hafis Osman Nuri)
a 1895 Būlāq print of "ar-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī"
an Algerian print from the period
the Muḫallalātī Cairo print of 1890
and the Survey Authority Edition,
you see, that the 1924 print is no revolution,
it is "just" a switch from the Ottoman to the African writing tradition.
For 398 years Egypt had been part of the Ottoman Empire.
Now it demonstrated that it was part of Africa:
Gizeh 1924 was Bandung avant la lettre.

But it was not free of mistakes, nor did it fix a text.
There were about 900 "mistakes" fixed in 1952
(over 800 different pauses + the changes that result from the [forgotten] inclusion of the basmala in continuous reading) + no more chronology of revelation ‒ in the sura title boxes ‒ because there is no consensus on the matter)
a tāʾ marbuṭa instead of a tāʾ maftuḥa, two alifs, a hamza moved from above the line to below,
two misplaced hamzat (Gizeh 1924 and Saudi UT have a free-floating hamza, India and the Maghreb have a "regular" yāʾ-hamza):


and more ... (in the next post)

minute things in Maghribian maṣāḥif

I wanted to post about signs used in Maghrebian maṣāḥif resp. in Medina maṣāḥif of readings used in the Maġrib (Warš and Qālūn). I decided...