orthography again

These last days, I posted again after a break. Orthography or more to the point: the latitude with ortho­graphy is my inter­est.

first half a line from the 15 liner (611 pages), twice Taj Ltd Com. first from the 1960s, than from this millenium, and last from the King Fahd Com­plex; Taj just deleted the hamza sign and moved the fatha on the alif, "Medina" moved the parts of one word closer together.
Now the same verse in the 13 liner (848 pages): top with a hamza sign (aka head of ʿain) and a mute alif, later without a head of ʿain and a fatha on the hamza letter (aka alif); this later version is often pirated.

BTW in 19th century maṣāḥif tabūʾa always has a hamza sign sometimes followed by alif:

‒­

India 1840

In 1840 a lithography, a muṣḥaf with a translation was published in Lucknow with the title سب تعريف واسطى الله كي ثابت هي كه پالنی والا عالمونكا
759 pages

India 1837

The next years saw more typographical masahif, and the first printed in the principality of Avdadh/Oudh: in Kanpur.

That's the part that interests me, the Arabic part. But the readers/buyers were most intrested in the Persian part, or let's say in the whole page:

India 1831

The first qurʾān prints were made in the Calcutta area ‒ Hugli/Hooghli and Serampore lay a bit north, are part of the metropolitan area.
In 1831 a fine Arabic muṣḥaf was printed, good type, quality paper, and unlike the earlier and most later prints without (Persian/Urdu) translation nor commentary:

after the first pages, the last two:






‒­

Shiraz 1830

lithography British Library

‒­

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

A Calcutta print of 1256/1840 is remarably similar:

from Sahib Alam (Egypt, Qatar)

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.



­