Braille

In 1951 a UNESCO conference defined Braille for Arabic. Soon Jordan (1954), Pakistan (1963), Egypt, Kuwait, Turkey, Saudi Arabia (1997) moved toward pro­ducing Braille maṣāḥif. N. Suit has seen several in Cairo with the text in two lines: one for the "letters" and one above for the "dia­critics". Since I have no informa­tion about it, I'll just write about the Indonesian Al-Qur'an Mushaf Standar Braille pro­duced in 2012/3, that puts every­thing in one line, basicaly a sequence of consonnant and vowel sign.
The Doubling-Sign (šadda) is put before the letter, madda ‒ if used ‒ after the vowel sign.
A foun­da­tion for the blind (Yaketunis: Yayasan Kesejah­te­raan Tuna­ne­tra Islam) and the Mini­stry for Reli­gious Affaires (Kemenag) made two basic decisons:
‒ to be faithful to the pro­nounci­ation (not to the "ʿUṯmānic writing")
‒ to divert some­times from Braille for Arabic or Malay in Arab script (Jawi).
So first: words that have /ā/ with­out alif (ṣalāt, kitāb, hayāt, ribā, maulāhu ...) are brail­li­zed as if they were written with alif. For رحمن this is not done, because Saudi scholars claim that it is for­bid­den.
The same is true for words with /ū/ but without a leng­thening waw in the rasm, where the Wester­ners/Anda­lusian/modern Arabs add a small waw, and the Easter­ners/Asians/In­dians&Co use a turned ḍamma. In Braille a normal waw is en­coded e.g. لَا يَسۡتَوُۥنَ or لَا يَسۡتَوٗنَ as لَا يَسۡتَوُونَ
That was true before 2020. I think now the turned ḍamma sign für /ū/ is used.
The Braille mushaf has Braille signs for many unpro­nounced letters like alif wiqāya after final wau, accusa­tive alif (after an-tanwīn) and most otiose alifs and waws, but not for otiose yā's (bi’aidin 51:47, bi’ayyikumu 68:6).
Although there is a Braille code for إ
it is not used in the Braille Qur'ān: just أ for all three vowels,
becauseit is not needed ← kasra ( ِ ) is obli­gatory.
Qurʾānic madd has a Braille sign, but was not used by all publishers. Now, there is a tendency to come closer to the written/type set maṣāḥif. The original decision to follow the sound is replaced by: to follow the rasm if it does not confuse to much. Today all signs used in a printed Indonesian muṣḥaf have a Braille equivalent, even nūn qutnī. Alif madd is used (as in normal Arabic) for /ʾā/)

While the first punched books were either just جزء عم Juz ʿAmma or com­prised several volumes, now­a­days there are tabletts that create touch­able text on the fly. This allows soft­ware to test new appro­ches, e.g. to de­fine Braille code for iẓḥar, idġām, iqlāb, iḫfa' Unlike printed maṣāḥif in with coloured letters, in Braille maṣāḥif a "read­ing sign" is placed bet­ween the chang­ing and the chang­ed letter.







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the edition on 848 pages with 13 lines

The Taj Company Ltd.

produced editions with nine, ten, eleven, twelve, 13, 16, 17 and 18 lines. Those on 611 pages (15 lines) and 848 pages (13 lines) are reprinted in India, Saudi-Arabia, China, South Africa, Bangla Desh ...

I admit: I do not have a Taj print with 13 lines but since Adrian Alan Brockett had copies of it and affirms that the 1398/1978 South African edition is based on it (STUDIES IN TWO TRANS­MIS­SIONS OF THE QUR'AN 1984, p22, 26, passim) I assume that he is right.
Water­val Islamic Institute (Johannisburg) made a second print in 1400/1980, a third in 1405/1985, a fourth in 1409/1989, a fifth in 1413/1993, a sixth in 1417/1996, a seventh in 1420/1999, a eighth in 1423/2003, a ninth in 1428/2007, a tenth in 1432/2011, an eleventh 1435/2014, a twelfth in 1437/2015, plus two more before they had one set in a font with the ʿUthman Ṭaha handwriting.

There is an edition cir­cula­ting in South Africa that is line identical to this Taj edition: written by (ʿAbdul-)Ḫalīq (al-)Asadī without Yāʾ Barī and the cut off tails of خ ح ج ع غ typi­cal for the Lahorī style. Unlike the Taj/Water­val Islamic Institute edition it has catch­words.
Nurul-Huda (South Africa) even uploaded a pdf of that mushaf to which it added the title page of Water­val Islamic Insti­tute.
Since 2022 there is a Water­val Islamic Institute edition that is page identi­cal but ‒ for­tunate­ly ‒ not line iden­tical: when­ever a line ended with "و/and" that letter was moved to the next line where it belongs according to the rules of Arabic ‒ once even to the next page.
This new edition is not an offset repro­duc­tion of a hand­written muṣ­ḥaf, but set on a computer ‒ and printed in India

on the left: Taj/WII. in the middle the new WII, on the right part of Ḫalīq Asadī

Nurul-Huda has made a font set muṣḥaf on 848 pages (the South African "norm") but it is not line iden­tical: when ever possible verses end in the last left cor­ner of the page. So, one of the SA publi­sher has made a print with a font that looks like ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (with moved waws) and an other pdfs in an "Paki­stani-like" font with slightly diffe­rent pages.

Unfortunaley Nurul-Huda places the long fatḥa after the upright hamza, not after it, as it does for lām: (/lā/ but /āʾ/).

Whereas South African do not understand that initial "alif" is a hamza, and that its vowel sign must sit above, below or after (never before), Indo­nesi­ans (and the King Fahd Complex) know it.

In the columns on the right (Pak Company/Dar us-Salam and King Fahd Complex) and the two on the left (from Indo­nesia) the vowel sign for /ā/, the up-right fatḥa, is always behind the hamza, the big alif. But in South Africa (the columns in the middle) often /āʾ/ is written for /ʾā/.
Here an other example of wrongly placed standing/turnded/long fatha

ʾauliyā'uhumu










not
ʾauliāy'uhumu




different, but with­out fault in the 16 liner by Dar­as-Salam, Uṯmān Ṭaja (Giza1924) and Indo­nesian:

While outside of Pakistan ‒ e.g. India and South Africa ‒ publisher just steal the Taj Ltd. muṣḥaf, in Pakistan itself other pub­lishers (like Pak Company, Qudrat­ullah, Gaba) have calli­graphers make line iden­ti­cal copies, so there are at least ten 13liners on paper and on the web, in black and white and with colours for tajwīd.

a book by Saima Yacoob, Charlotte, North Carolina

At the start of this year's Ramaḍān Saima Yacoob, Char­lotte, North Caro­lina published a book on diffe­rences bet­ween printed maṣā­ḥif. Although her start­ing point and her con­clusions are worthy, the book is full of mis­takes.
Let's start with the positive:

• I believe that it would be a great loss to our um­mah if we were to insist on abandon­ing [the exist­ing] diver­sity [in] apply[ing] the rules of ḍabṭ ...
• The framework of the science of ḍabṭ is that dia­critics be used to ensure that the Qurʾān can be recited correctly by the average Muslim, and that there is enough regional standardi­zation ... that the people of an area may read the Qurʾān cor­rect­ly through the maṣāḥif published ... in that area.
• Because of the flexibility [in] the science of ḍabṭ, new conventions of ḍabṭ may be added even today to meet the chang­ing needs of Muslims in a parti­cular region. A modern example of this is the tajwīd color coded maṣā­ḥif.

This is an important point: maṣāḥif do not have to be identical to be valid. Only the last remark is wrong: color coded maṣāḥif are not "particular [to a] region".
I will give an example that springs from a particular region: The Irani Muṣḥaf with simple vowel signs:

While we used to have two basic ways of writing vowels (the Western/"Afri­can" with three vowel signs, sukūn, and three small leng­then­ing letters, the Eastern/"Asian" with three short vowel signs, three long vowel signs, and sukūn/ǧasm)); now there is a third (the new "Iranian" with six vowel signs in which the sign for /ū/ is not a turned ḍamma as in Indo-Pak and Indonesia, but looks like the Maġri­bian/Afro-Arab small waw, without sukūn, but with a second color for "silent, unpro­nounced"):

Only the vowel signs count, vowel letters are ignored when the con­sonant before has a vowel sign and they have none; when a con­sonant has no vowel sign it is read with­out vowel (sukūn is not needed). When a "vowel letter" has a vowel sign, it is a con­sonant. There is no head of ʿain on/below alif (when there is a vowel sign, hamza is spoken). There are no small vowel lettes ‒ instead of "turned ḍamma/ulta peš" a small waw is used: it look like the small letter used in the West/Maghrib/Arab Countries, but is a vowel sign.


The main point of Differing Diacritics is: there are different ways to mark the fine points, and that's okay. The maṣāḥif have the same text, but the notation is not exactely the same.

On page 2 of the book the diactrics are defined. Šaiḫa Saima Yacoob states that there are three kinds:
1.) "letters that are addi­tional or omitted in the rasm"
2.) "fatḥah, kasrah, ḍammah, shaddah, etc."
"Thirdly, those markings that aid the reader to apply the general rules of tajwīd correctly, such as the sign for madd, or a shaddah that indicates idghām, etc."

ALL wrong.
First come the dots that distinguish letter with the same shape:
د <‒>ذ   ص <‒> ض   ب <‒> ن ي   ط <‒> ظ
Second: fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma, šaddah, sukūn, plus in "Asia" turned fatḥa, turned kasra, turned ḍamma
Third: tanwīn signs and signs for madd ‒ in Asia there are three kinds of madd signs, in "Africa" three kinds of tanwīn signs for each of the short vowels
‒ small vowel "letters that are addi­tional or omitted in the rasm" exist only in the African/Andalu­sian/Arab system
the tiny groups of small consonant letters (sīn, mīm, nūn) that modify pro­nounciation,
and the signs for išmām and imāla come fourth and fifth.
(In Turkey "qaṣr" and "madd" are a sixth group.)

On page 4 the šaiḫa writes: "the reader could easily get con­fused by the two sets of dots, those for vowels, and those that distin­guished similarly shaped letters from each other"
I disagree: the dots for vowels are in gold/yellow, green, red or blue (and usually big), those distin­guishing letters with the same base form are in black (like the letters, because they are part of the letters). How can one con­fuse (big) coloured and (smaller) black dots?
BTW, "distinguished similarly shaped letters from each other" ‒ what I called the first func­tion of diacritics ‒ is missing from her definition of ḍabṭ on page 2.

Yacoob sometimes repeats what is written in well known books, but makes no sense:
"symbols [for vowels] were taken from shortened versions of their original form, such as ... a portion of yāʾ for kasrah" (p.4).
While fatḥa and ḍamma look like small alif resp. waw, kasra is neither a shortened yāʾ nor a part of yāʾ ‒ to me it looks like a transposed fatḥa.

Unfortunately, I found very little information about the ḍabṭ of the South Asian muṣḥaf in Arabic. (p. 7)

okay, she did not find anything, but it is available and it is all in Arabic (although written by a Muslim from Tamil Nadu).

the Chinese muṣḥaf. (p. 7)

As far as I know, there is no printed Chinese muṣḥaf, definetly not "the Chinese muṣḥaf". I have two maṣāḥif from China: a Bejing reprint of the King Fuad Edition of 1924/5 and a Kash­gar reprint of the Taj edition with the text on 611 pages like the South Asian one printed by the King Fahd Complex.
That a reprint of a Taj edition follows the IndoPak rules goes with­out saying, but that is not "the Ch. m."!


Enough, it goes on like this: mistake after mistake. I don't under­stand how a care­ful person can write a book like this ‒ and not revise it in due course.


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orthography (one for two)

And there is the opposite: one tooth (one letter) where two are needed.
I guess this a remnant of the early Hiǧazi pro­noun­ciation being notated in the earliest manu­scripts with few hamzat except at the beginn­ing of a word.
I show just two examples:
Mīkāl <--> Mikāʾīl because here the two tradents of ʿĀṣim diverge:

While the normal way is a "normal" yāʾ and an hover­ing hamza above (or with kasra: below) the connection.
In 26:176 in India the one yāʾ is ambi­guous:
the hamza above is a bit before,
the yāʾ-dots are a bit after the tooth.

in the top lines what is possible on computers (Unicode: hover­ing hamza)


in the middle Indian handwritten ambiguous solutions.




in the bottom line: Warš with one yāʾ