The maker of the 1924 Cairo edition evidently did not understand the function of the mutating small alif: it is not a vowel sign but turns yāʾ or wāw into alif — in other words, a letter that looks like a yāʾ is an alif (alif bi‑šakl al‑yāʾ). In early Warš prints the mutating alif is correctly placed above the yāʾ; the Cairo edition, by contrast, places the sign sometimes, correctly sometimes not.
top line: early Warš prints; second: KFE; third UT0; last: Muṣḥaf al-Muʿallim from Tunis
It should sit above yāʾ, not after it. In Morocco this is always the case, in KFE it is sometimes like it should be, sometimes not.
Mikāl is different from the others, because in the last line (Qālun, Tunis) it is /mikāʾil/. While here there is a hovering sign and a tooth/نبرة/letter, in the other case there is just one letter. What KFE and UT are doing is just wrong: they often have useless tooth/نبرة !
This is the same scribal inconsistency, likely due to carelessness, that Otto Pretzl had already notised.
For good measure I have added a last row in IPak. Here the dagger is neither a small alif, nor a mutating sign, but a ā-vowel sign; it belongs to the consonant, the tooth/nabra is mute.
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