Sunday, 24 October 2021

The October-Conference on The Cairo Edition

Last weekend the conference on "the Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān, 1924" took place in a room of the AUinC.
While the Arab titel مصخف الملك فؤاد ١٩٢٤م is fine, the English title (the French one pro­minent at the beginning of the year had dis­apperead) is a testimony to utter ignorance ‒
ignorance either of logic, ignoring the func­tion of the definite article
or ignorance of the world of Cairo prints and book­shops ‒ there are thou­sands of Cairo Edi­tions of the Qurʾān a few miles east of the AUC, even fewer miles south-west of the IDEO.
(Anyhow, I find it strange that the English title is not "the 1924 King Fuʾād Edition of the Qurʾān in the Ḥafṣ trans­mission" ‒ multi­lingual con­feren­ces should have the same title in all its lanugages.)
    Sadly, I find both reasons ‒ carelessly calling an edition "the edition"
    and calling an edition "the edition" because s/he never bothered to study different editions,
    plausible.
    It is common among these young scholars to speak of "the palimp­sest"
    for the scriptio inferior of the pamlimpset or the lower text
    ‒ why should they make a difference between "a" and "the"?
    And because they are not interested in having a look into the maṣā­ḥif
    local Muslims use, they just assume that all Muslims have some­thing very
    similar to what most Orienta­lists have. Many scholars explicite­ly wrote that
    the KFE is most common in the Muslim word and for religious purposes.
    Shows that they have no idea of the real Muslim world.
    Sorry: Do not confuse the KFE with Islam on the ground(s).
    Unfortunalely Islamology is 90% theology and philology,
    only 10% social anthropology and sociology of religions.

In the "Call for Papers" (anony­mous, hence offi­cially by the IDEO, in fact by Asma Hilali) one can read about 50 times "l'édition du Cairo, le coran du Caire, ظبعة القاهرة etc.), during the conference all except the Blind African herself spoke of the Govern­ment Copy, the print of the Amī­riyya, the KFE ... ‒ unfor­tunatly the official English title is still the old one, the il­lo­gical one; the IDEO hasn't even made up its mind whether there should be a comma bet­ween "the Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān" and "1924" (cf. the image above) ‒ in both cases the year is an ac­ciden­tal property not an essen­tial one, while in "the 1924 Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān" the year would be es­sential, defining.
Here I repeat what I wrote to the guys in charge in Cairo ten times:
There are about a thousand "Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān" ‒ to put the definite article in front defies logic ‒:
at least ten editions of the Warš trans­mission, one being THE Warš Edition for decades;
here are two of the four title pages (normally bound in one volume):
Here two images from a 1929 Cairo Warš Edition ‒ without a title page, as was common at the time:
And here from two of the oldest al-Qahira pub­lishers, i.e. not from Bab al-Khalq, al-Faggala, from Bulaq or even Giza but from "behind" al-Azhar, first one from Subīḥ:
than from Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, first from 1930 for Maġribian Arabs:
others:
Apart from these 100% Cairo Editions, there are editions con­ceaved in Morocco resp. Algeria, but pro­duced in Cairo ‒ the Moroccan ones without pro­duction place, the Algerian ones with an Algerian publisher's name. (Only the third edition of the third sherifian muṣ­ḥaf was produced in Morocco.)
In the literature another one is mentioned, which I have not seen ‒ so I rest sceptical:
al-Qurʼān al-karīm : innahu li-Qurʼān karīm fī kitāb maknūn
Majmaʻ al-Buḥūth al-Islāmīyah. Lajnah Murājaʻat al-Maṣaḥif
[Cairo]: [Jāmiʻ al-Azhar], [1964]
OCLC-No: 22354261
"Aqarrat hādha al-muṣḥaf al-sharīf wa-diqqah rasmihi wa-ḍabṭihi wa-ʻaddaʼa ayātaha Lajnah Murājaʻat al-Maṣāḥif bi-Majmaʻa al-Buḥūth al-Islāmīyah bi-al-Jāmiʻ al-Azhar bi-al-Qarār ... 1964."
qāf is written with a dot above the letter, fāʼ with one below the letter, and no dot over final nūn 518 pages ; 25 cm
Of two "Cairo Edition"s before 1924 I do have image:
the one written by the same calligrapher as the 1308/1890 edition, ʿAbd al-Ḫāliq Ḥaqqi (?) Ibn al-Ḫawaǧa, produced by a famous printer around the turn of the century (-1919) behind al-Azhar: aš-Ṣaiḫ Aḥmad ʿAlī al-Melīǧī al-Kutubī:

Plus one printed in al-Maṭbaʻa al-ʻĀmiriyya:
InnahuLi-Qurʾān Karīm, 1318/1900:

One of the talks in the IDEO conference led from Venice and Ham­burg, Kazan and Leipzig to the first com­plete Qurʾān printed in Cairo, the Bulaq 1881/2 print ‒ both in one volume in in several (possibly both in 10 and in 30) leather­bound parts. It is well known both from the Enyclo­pedia of the Quran and from Kein Standard:
It has 13 lines per page, 603 pages in the one-volume-edition.
In 1308/1890 the most important of all Cairo editions was published ‒ it was mentioned but no copy was shown ((even the Geburtstagskind, the 1924 Gizeh print was not there)). It was not analysed or discribed in detail. Good heavens!
In 1885 an other important Cairo edition saw the light of day ‒ this one as well with "ar-rasm al-ʿuṯmānī":
Let's mention two more early "Cairo Editions":
One written by they same calli­grapher who wrote the tremend­ously import 1308/1890 edition, ʿAbd al-Ḫālliq Ḥaqqi (?) Ibn al-Ḫawaǧa, by the editor Šaiḫ Aḥmad bin ʿAlī al-Melīǧī al-Kutbī, who had a press near al-Azhar until 1919.

Innahu li-Qurʾān karīm fī kitāb maknūn lā yamassahu illā al-muṭahhirūn tanzīl min ...
Miṣr : al-Maṭbaʻah al-ʻĀmirīyah, 1318 [1900]
364 p. ; 20 cm.

Only one of the participants has made research for the con­ference. Aziz Hilal dis­covered, that he did not find any reports on the pre­para­tions for the edition, nor reports on its pub­li­cations or its re­per­cussions. It was a non-event at the time.
Ali Akbar had to report, that in Indo­nesia (+ Singa­pore, Malaysia, southern Thai­land) no copies of the KFE were sold. Nor could he locate a survving copy Azhar students or pil­grims to Mecca might have brought into the area.
Necmettin Gökkır informed the par­ticipants, that in the Turkish Republic very few experts took note of the edition. Neither the state religious autho­ri­ties nor normal Muslims were inter­ested in the KFE.
Michael Marx's “Inno­vation, Mile­stone, Stan­dard? Remarks and Reflec­tions about the Cairo 1924 Print from a Histo­ri­cal Per­spective” is wrong because there is NO Cairo 1924 Print, the copy was printed in Gizeh, and he did not explain what the ino­vation(s) was resp. were. As for the "standard" he refered to Arno Schmitt.
I could not detect for all the papers which of the topics named in the Call for Papers they dealt with. Only A.Hilali's concluding remarks belonged clearly to a tailor-made topic.
Interesting that the three languages English+French+Arabic
had turned to Egyptian+English+Arabic and that Hilal's talk consisted to 38% in imala (eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh).

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