Introductory Note

Before discussing what the King Fuʾād Edition of 1924 actually is, a few basic dis­tinctions are needed. They may feel pedantic, but without them the debate becomes a tangle of category mis­takes. Three layers must be kept apart:

1. The oral form

The oral form of the Qurʾān — in this case the reading of Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim — is a system of reci­tation. It defines how the text is pro­nounced, some­times a different vowel, a doubled consonant, or easing of hamza, elon­ga­tions, as­similation, where pauses are mandatory, possible, or for­bidden.
It is transmitted orally, corrected orally, and mastered orally.
It can be written differently ‒ either fixing most aspects or leaving them to be taught orally.

2. The written form

2a the text

The written form is the choice of ortho­graphy: the spell­ing system and graphic code used to re­present Ḥafṣ on the page (or in the data stream) ‒ a bundle of deci­sions:
‒ the rasm, the letter skeleton;
‒ the spelling of long vowels;
‒ spelling initial hamza;
‒ mute/otios letters;
‒ the writing of (partial) assimila­tion;
‒ auxiliary signs: pause marks, verse numbers, saǧada signs, juzʾ and ḥizb markers, saktah signs, and the like.
Some aspects follow early manu­scripts (in which alif, waw and yāʾ were not only written for /ʾ, w, y/ and /ā, ū, ī/, but for /a, u, i/, for dif­feren­tiat­ing between words that would be homo­graphs without an imposed spelling dis­tinc­tion and for marking the end of a word ending with a letter without an explicit end-of-word-form (waw, dāl, ḏāl, rāʾ, zai).
In Asia/India/Indone­sia long vowels are written by long-vowel-signs while Africa/Andalusia/the Maġrib has only three short vowel signs, needs extra length­en­ing letters: when there is no ḥarf al-madd in the rasm a small vowel letter is added.
initial hamza on alif is not marked in Asia (here an inital alif is a hamza) while in the West a small ʿain i.e. hamza-sign is needed
‒ both vowel dots/strokes and the hamza sign did not exist when spelling was fixed.
This layer is often misunder­stood. It is a spell­ing system, chosen and applied by human editors. Different systems can re­pre­sent the same reci­ta­tion; the same system can be used for dif­ferent reci­ta­tions.

2b the graphic form

While the text is the data, the graphic form is the text rendered as an image ‒ the text is basic, the graphic forms are just variants.
First different forms of ḍamma ‒ they are the same whatever Unicode says.

next different forms of sukūn:

in the middle you see an East African muṣḥaf in which fatḥa+sukūn when the follow each other are joined (as if one sign)







below nūn ṣīla (nūn quṭnī) by the same calligapher, Hafiz ʿUṯmān the Elder: wheter the nūn is near the tanwīn or below the alif does not matter, it is the same. Whether it has an extra kasra nor not, either.

3. The book form

The book form is the physical and typo­graphic reali­za­tion: page size, margins, type­face, layout, title pages, appendices, indices, catch words, headers .... This layer answers questions like:
‒ How many lines per page?
‒ Is there extra space bet­ween words?
‒ Is there a numbers after each verse, and are alter­native ends of verse in­dicated?
‒ Must each juzʾ begin on a right‑hand page?
‒ Is there in the left bottom always an end of verse?
‒ Is there an index? A colo­phon? A table of aḥzāb? ‒ Are the suras counted or named only?
‒ Is the chronology of revelation indicated?
This layer is the most visible to readers, yet the least under­stood in scholar­ship. It is also the layer in which printers, not scholars, often have the final word.

The legends

Around the 1924 print, a cluster of per­sistent claims has grown. According to these stories, it was: ‒ the “Cairo Edition”, as if Cairo had produced only one muṣ­ḥaf;
‒ the Azhar Qurʾān, as if it had been conceived, edited, and issued by al‑Azhar;
‒ the product of a committee of four scholars working for seven­teen years;
‒ a critical restora­tion of the Qurʾān based on the rasm treatise of Ibn Naǧāḥ.
‒ the first print with the rasm ʿuṯmānī instead of being imlāʾī¹
‒ it was an immediate suc­cess all over the Muslim world.
‒ it spread the reading of Ḥafṣ
These narratives are tidy, appealing ‒ and wrong.
Ḥafṣ was made dominant by non-Arab ruler (the Mamelucks, the Ottomans, Safavid, Timurids) because Ḥafṣ is closes to normal Arabic.
In reality, the text was prepared by one man. There is no trace of de­li­be­ra­tion, no evi­dence of a com­mis­sion, and no sign that the text was syste­ma­tically dis­cussed with others before it went to press.

What G24 actually did

The 1924 text — which I call G24, because the King-Fuʾād-Edition was printed in Giza — fixed a specific ortho­graphic system for Ḥafṣ. It is not new at all. Muḥammad (ibn) Ḫalaf (ibn) ʿAlī al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād al-Malakī just switched from the Ottoman ver­sion of the Asian spelling to the Maġ­ribī or Anadu­sian system. This orthography and pause system is possible in letter­press, litho­graphy, or manuscript form ‒ or as digital text.

What KFA/kfa actually are

The book form that carried this text existed in two stable sizes only:
‒ KFA for the 27‑cm format,
‒ kfa for the 20‑cm format.
(more about the differences later)
Both contain 826 pages of Qurʾān text plus 23 pages of dedication, explana­tion, index, and colophon.
The smaller kfa is not a shortened version. It is the same book, reduced in size. The type area — the text block — is only about ten per­cent smaller. What dis­appears is the margin: the generous white space of the KFA is reduced to the width of the medail­lions for ǧuz, ḥizb, saktah and saǧada.

The KFA was the first offset muṣ­ḥaf, it was a govern­ment edition, meant for students in government schools, who should be able to read it easily without a šaiḫ reciting it for them. That is why its initiator Ḥifni Bey Nāṣif wanted that only about 300 sorts were used = no stacked ligatures, no vertical ones like on the right. This baseline-aligned script was new ‒ and lives on in the ʿUṯmān Ṭaha Madina muṣḥaf.

Thus:
‒ G24 = the text (ortho­graphy, pause signs, liturgical divisions: juzʾ and ḥizb).
‒ KFA/kfa = the book (827+20‑pages, no title page, no duʿāʾ, two sizes).

  the Indian text I call IPak, its book forms IPak611 (berkenar), IPak848 (South Africa), IPak 549 etc.
  the Maġribī text And(alūs), the Ottoman text Ott, the modern Turkish standard CT
  MNQ522 and MNQ604 are by Muṣṭafā Nāẓīf Qadirġalī
  Kazan is a text standard, so are MSI 1983, MSI 2002, MSI 2019 for Indonesia
  Ṭabo-Našr has a rasm of it own, a nIran spelling convention, but prints maṣā­ḥif an other spellings too


For centuries, the peda­gogy of Qurʾānic recita­tion has been built on differen­ces. Students did not merely learn one read­ing; they learned how each reading diverged from the others. The Šāṭibīya is the classic monu­ment of this culture: a mnemonic archi­tecture in which the variants of the seven canoni­cal readings are encoded verse by verse. Tens of thousands of Muslims memorized these dif­ferences, and the great reciters carried them effort­lessly. A master like Muḥammad Ḫalaf ʿAlī al‑Ḥusainī al‑Ḥad­dād al‑Malikī could recite the diver­gences bet­ween Ḥafṣ and Warš as naturally as other people recall their own birth­days. This was the pro­fes­sional world of the Šaiḫ al‑Maqāriʾ al‑Miṣrī, the man who pre­pared the 1924 text. He was a guar­dian of the oral form of the Qurʾān — not a specia­list in early manu­scripts, not a reader of ad‑Dānī or Ibn Naǧāḥ, not a calli­grapher, and not a type­setter. His task was not to recon­struct an ancient rasm. What he actually did was straight­forward: he took a printed Moroc­can Warš muṣ­ḥaf from Fès — at that time the only widely available Warš edition in print — and mapped the oral Ḥafṣ reading onto its Maġ­ribī written form. In other words, the 1924 text is the result of apply­ing an Egyptian oral tra­di­tion to a Fès‑based Maġ­ribī textual tem­plate. That was the entire edito­rial operation. If not convinced, read this.