India 1829-1880

For hundreds of years German Orientalists, German Islamologists ignored South Asian and Malay Islam ‒ even the Maghrib lay outside their interest.
Many German Islamologists had never seen an Indian, Indonesian, or Moroccan muṣḥaf. When they wrote about Indian prints, they relied on lists made by Chauvin (Bobzin) or claimed to have seen books in a library that has no such books (R. Schulze, Bonn university library).
The only early Indian maṣāḥif I had seen, were copies given by the great publisher Munshi Naval Kishore to Oxford University Library and scanned by Google ‒ in the wrong order.
Now there are hundreds of early Indian prints held by the British Libray and scanned by Gale avail­able.
So here are some of these holdings.

this is the beginning of the qurʾān taken from a 1829 print with translation and commentary by Shah ʿAbdul Qadir, a younger son of Shah Waliullah Dihlavi called Mūẓiḥ al-Qurʾān

Before I will show more early prints from India, let me give the global picture.
At the time maṣāḥif were printed in Kazan and Persia (Tehran 1829, Shiraz 1830 Tebriz 1832) ‒ see the next post
In Istanbul there were officially prints from 1875 on; from Cairo we have prints from that period, a bit later (1879,'81,'91, '92,'93,'94, '95,'99, 1900 and 1905) from Faz.



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