Giza 1342/3 1924/5

The Giza print
‒ is not an Azhar Quran
‒ did not trigger a wave of Quran printings
    because there was finally a fixed, authorised text.
‒ did not immediately become the Qur'an accepted by both Sunnis and Shiites

‒ did not contribute significantly to the spread of Ḥafṣ reading;
    it was not published in 1923 or on 10/7/1924.
But it drove the grotty Flügel edition out of German study rooms,
‒ had an epilogue by named editors,
‒ gave his sources in it,
‒ adopted ‒ except for the Kufic counting,
    and the pause signs, which were based on Eastern sources.
    ‒ the Maghrebi rasm (largely after Abū Dāʾūd Ibn Naġāḥ)
    ‒ the Maghrebi small substitute vowels for elongation
    ‒ the Maghrebi subdivisions of the thirtieths (but without the eighth-ḥizb)
    ‒ the Maghrebian baseline hamzae before Alif at the beginning of the word (ءادم instead of اٰدم).
    ‒ the Maghrebic spelling at the end of the sura, which assumes that the next sura is spoken immediately afterwards (and without basmala): tanwin is modified accordingly.
    ‒ the Maghrebic distinction into three kinds of tanwin (one above the other, one after the other, with mīm)
    ‒ the Maghrebic absence of nūn quṭni.
    ‒ the Maghrebic non-spelling of the vowel shortening.
    ‒ the Maghrebic (wrong) spelling of ʾallāh.
    ‒ the Maghrebī (and Indian) attraction of the hamza sign by kasra

in G24 the hamza is below the baseline ‒ in the Ottoman Empire (include Egypt) and Iran the hamza stays above the line


















A new feature was the differentiation of the Maghrebic sukūn into three signs:
    ‒ the ǧazm in the form of an ǧīms without a tail and without a dot for vowel-lessness,
    ‒ the circle for never to be pronounced,
    ‒ the (oval) zero for "only pronounced if paused".
    ‒ the absence of any sign to signify "not to be pronounced".
Further, word spacing,
baseline orientation and
exact placement of dots and dashes.


Nor was it the first "inner-Muslim Koran print".
Neuwirth may know a lot about the Koran, but she has no idea about Koran prints,
because since 1830 there have been many, many Koran prints by Muslims.
and Muslims were already heavily involved in the six St. Petersburg prints of 1787-98.
It was not a type print either, but ‒ like all except Venice, Hamburg, Padua, Leipzig, St.Petersburg, Kazan and the earliest Calcutta ‒ planographic printing, albeit no longer with a stone plate but a metal plate.

Nor was it the first to claim to reproduce "the rasm al-ʿUṯmānī".
Two title pages of Lucknow prints from 1870 and 1877.

In 1895, a Qur'an appeared in Būlāq in ʿuṯmānī rasm, which perhaps meant "unvocalised". Kitāb Tāj at-tafāsīr li-kalām al-malik al-kabīr taʼlīf Muḥammad ʿUṯmān ibn as-Saiyid Muḥammad Abī Bakr ibn as-Saiyid ʻAbdAllāh al-Mīrġanī al-Maḥǧūb al-Makkī. Wa-bi-hāmišihi al-Qurʼān al-Maǧīd marsūman bi'r-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī.
Except for the sequence IsoHamza+Alif, which was adopted from the Maghreb in 1890 and 1924 (alif+madda was not possible, since madda was already taken for elongation), everything here is already as it was in 1924.

Incidentally, the text of the KFA is not a reconstruction, which Bergsträßer al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād simply believed: He does not follow Abū Dāʾūd Sulaiman Ibn Naǧāḥ al-Andalusī (d. 496/1103) exactly, nor Abu ʿAbdallah Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ḫarrāz (d. 718/1318), but (except in about 100 places) the common Warš editions.
Also, the adoption of many Moroccan peculiarities (see above), some of which were revised in 1952, plus the dropping of Asian characters ‒ plus the fact that the epilogue is silent on both ‒ is a clear sign that al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād al-Mālikī adapted a Warš edition.
All Egyptian readers knew the Warš and Qālun readings. As a Malikī, al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād ‒ not to be confused with the scribe Muḥammad Saʿd Ibrāhīm al-Ḥaddād ‒ probably knew Warš editions even better than most.
There was the text, sup­posedly establi­shed in 1924, not only in the Maghreb and in Cairene Warš prints, but also already set in Būlāq in the century before.

Now to the date of publication.
One finds 1919, 1923, 1924 and 1926 in libraries and among scholars.
According to today's library rules, 1924 is valid, because that is what is written in the first printing.

But it is not true. It says in the work itself that its printing was completed on 10.7.1924. But that can only mean that the printing of the Qurʾānic text was completed on that day. The dedication to the king, the message about the completion of the printing, can only have been set afterwards; it and the entire epilogue were only printed afterwards, and the work ‒ without a title page, without a prayer at the end ‒ was only bound afterwards ‒ probably again in Būlāq, where it had already been set and mounted ‒ and that was only in 1925, unless ten copies were first bound and then "published", which is not likely.