Tuesday 28 July 2020

Cairo 1890

Most orientalist expert on the qurʾān assume that the King Fuʾād Edition of 1924 was a revolution, was (almost) completly new.
First: It was more of a switch ‒ from Asian con­ven­tions to African.
Second: It came not out of the blue. The break happen­ed 34 years earlier:

 
Below is the first word that shows the African way. In India /-lahū/ is written with a "turned ḍamma" الٹة پيش ulṭa peš.
In Africa there are only short vowel signs; when a vowel is long,
a leng­thening letter (ḥarf madd) is needed ‒ always.
If there is none in the rasm, a small wau/yāʾ/alif is added
‒ as can be seen in this 1890 Cairo print.  The same is true for /ī/. In stead of a turned kasra under hāʾ as in Indian and modern Turkish maṣāḥif a small yāʾ stands after/below hāʾ
Here 2:31 with ʾādam "african" with a hamza-sign preceding alif
instead of the "asian" long-fatḥa following alif.
Below I compare page 3 (al-baqara after the ornamental page).
In the top line an Ottoman muṣḥaf,
below from  Būlāq 1313/1895,
than Warš (Alger 1931)
in the last but one line: Cairo 1308/1890 (muṣḥaf al-Muḫallalātī),
and in the last KFE  Gizeh1924.
The Cairo prints 1890 and 1895 have the same rasm as Gizeh1924 (with a normal/modern madd-sign vor /ʾā/ in the 1895 print, with does not change the rasm).
Scrutinizing the whole muṣḥaf, one finds that muṣḥaf al-Muḫallalātī is closer to IPak/ad-Dānī than to Maġrib/Abu Daʾūd; the important point here: it is a breack awqy from the Ottoman rasm.
1924 was not the Revolution, the change started in 1890 and ended -- thanks to ʿUṯmān Ṭaha -- a hundred years later.

Monday 27 July 2020

Gizeh 1924 <> Cairo 1928 and after

See the end of Sura 73 in the Gizeh 1924 print (on the left)
and Cairo 1928 (on the right, slightly enlarged -- the Cairo print is a bit smaller and has much less margin).
First line  الن and ان لن
In 1952 it's back to الن

The Bairut (Paris, Amman) reprints oscillate between the two.
The original Damascus ʿUṯmān Ṭaha has   one word:
So has the first Saudi reprint:
But the next, the first done in the new printing complex, has two:



Kazan

Since 1802/3 (parts of) the Kur'an were printed in the Tartar centre of Tsarist Russia, Kazan.
  Here the first and last page of a book from the Bavarian National Library;
  the left side is page 58 of ǧuz 5 -- each ǧuz is paginated afresh

Like the 1787 Mollah Ismaʿīl ʿOsman St.Petersburg Muṣḥaf they were type printed.
I know of no studies on the orthography, the pauses, liturgical divisions and so one.
It clearly belongs to the Asian school, closest to Ottoman.
In the first 200 years there are small changes in calligraphy

and orthography: Where the original (black on white) is close to Ottoman, the modern one (black on yellow) has hamzat on alif, madda for lengthening, and alif alif for /ʾā/
Added later:
Walter Burnikel and Gerd-R. Puin published
„Gustav Flügels Vorworte, kommentiert. Ein Rückblick
auf die Geschichte des Korandrucks in Europa“ in
Markus Groß /Robert M. Kerr (Hg.):
Die Entstehung einer Weltreligion VI.
Vom umayyadischen Christentum zum abbasidischen Islam.
Berlin: Schiler & Mücke 2021, ISBN 978-3-89930-389-6
(INÂRAH Schriften zur frühen Islamgeschichte und zum Koran, Band 10), S. 64-129
with observations not only on Flügel and Redslob, but on Kazan (and Hamburg and Padua) too.

Since 2011 the rasm is very close to Gizeh 1924
‒- with the exception of dual alif (first: Kazan 1856, last line Kazan 2016)
The Tartar (both in Kazan and on the Crimea) most of the time have as title "Kalam Šarīf" (or al-Muṣḥaf aš-Ṣarīf) ‒ not "al-Qurʾān al-Karīm" (like the Arabs), nor "Q. maǧid" (like in Iran) nor "Q ḥakīm" (like in Hind).
Japanese Tartars being the exception:
here a page from a Japanese YaSīn edition:

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...