a counterfactual history ...

... of Qurʾānic printing.
The revisted KFEII (1952: 827 typeset pages, 12 lines) pro­vided the text (Q52) for three fully ber­Kenar maṣā­ḥif that is, each page begins with a new verse and ends with a verse, with no verse carried across a page break.

One realization was the 1383/1963 Cairo muṣ­ḥaf, a 486‑page edition set in 16 lines, com­plete­ly re‑flowed and strict­ly base­line‑oriented (Cairo: Ǧaʿfar Muḥam­mad Muṣ­ṭafà 1383/1963).

A second written by Šukrī Ḥaršu aš-Ṣīšānī for Ibn Katheer in Damascus: 17 lines on 486 pages (as well). The "winner" was the 1399/1979 Damascus muṣḥaf, the 604‑page handwritten edition by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha in an extremely linear calligraphic style.

Had the 1963 Cairo edition received broader attention — and had the Madi­na/KFC project adopted its dis­ciplined, fully berKenar page archi­tec­ture — it could realisti­cally have become the "stan­dard" UT is today.
In this counterfactual history, the development of Qurʾānic print­ing would have followed the 1963 model: a modern, base­line‑ori­ented ber­Kenar lay­out derived from the 1952 KFAII type, rather than the hand­written 604‑page form that ultima­tely prevailed.





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Lucknow 1890

The first images of a muṣḥaf by Naval Kishore came from Oxford: black and white, wrong order and low resolution. It made be happy.
Now I found a muṣḥaf by him from 1890 in Heidelberg with the opposite problem: too high resolution, as you can see here:




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