Saturday 13 November 2021

Muṣṭafā / ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī

1858 Aḥmad from al-Bāb, north-east of Aleppo, came to Cairo and together with others opened a publishing house. Having no children he invited his cousins to join him and they took over the enterprise becoming Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī

al-Muḫallalātī

Many think that the 1924 print was the first with the ʿUṯmānic rasm.
That's not correct.
Already for a long time India had producecd maṣāḥif with the defective rasm.
So had Morocco.
And in 1308/1890 in Egypt a muṣḥaf with the ʿUṯmānic rasm according to ad-Dānī was printed.


Monday 8 November 2021

Tom Milo ‒ mushafmuscat.om ‒ mushaf oman

God news about Tom Milos mushafmuscat.om
Bad news for Tom Milo
Thomas Milo analysed the best examples of high Ottoman calli­graphy = court calli­graphy, syn­thesized its Grammar (term coined by him) ‒ ignoring all other (lesser) Ottoman calli­graphers.
He and his team succeded in aping human writing: first the stroke, then the dots, at last the addi­tional signs. Like the writers of old, the signs of each category have to be in the right order, but they don't have to be exactely above resp. below the charac­ter that they modify.
In Kein Standard I critisized a word in 4:4, where Milo placed a madda above a con­sonant, al­though according to G24 (followed strictly by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha) madda can only sit above a vowel ‒ šadda "lengthening" con­sonants.
Today I looked at 4:4 again and low and behold, the wrongly placed (blue) madda was moved to its proper place:
Thomas Milo had to be flexible all the time. In his view dots belong to letters in­cluding its con­nection to the next resp. its tail signaling: End Letter. But the Omanis thought that the dots belong to the "heart" of the letter, the tooth resp. the defining part.
Milo wanted staked letter­groups, Omanis prefered base­line letters with a clear right-to-left order. Milo agreed to half way solutions.
His elektronic Muṣḥaf is marvellous!
But Oman never had it printed. A printed, a bound codex does not exist.
Instead a Muṣḥaf ʿOmān was calli­graphed and printed ‒ by the way not as strictly simpli­fied as ʿUṯmān Ṭaha, hardly less Ottoman than Milo's electronic muṣḥaf. How dis­appoin­ting that his did not became THE muṣḥaf of the sultanat.

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...