The birth of the King Fuʾād Edition, its development, and its after-life (the Madina-Koran)

In 1924 the Government Press of Egypt published the first offset muṣ­ḥaf ever.
Orientalists wrote extensive­ly about it, but most of what they wrote was funda­men­tally erroneous. Although capable scholars, they had no tech­ni­cal under­standing of printing. Even those who pro­duced valuable work ‒ G. Berg­sträßer, A.A. Brockett, and ʿA. Ḥilāl ‒ were mis­taken on impor­tant points.

The Frame

Before discussing what the King Fuʾād Edition of 1924 actually is, a few dis­tinctions are needed — some­what pedan­tic, but es­sen­tial to avoid cate­gory mis­takes. Three layers must be kept apart:

1. The oral form

The oral form of the Qurʾān, its reading, a system of reci­ta­tion. It defines how the text is pro­nounced, some­times a dif­ferent vowel, a doubled consonant, how hamza is treated, elon­ga­tions, as­simi­lation, where pauses are mandatory, possible, or for­bidden. (Ibn al-Ǧazarī treats in his Kitāb an-Našr not only the rasm, the letters, but the pauses as well.)
It is transmitted orally, corrected oral­ly, and mastered orally (and in scholarly books about it).
It can be written differently ‒ 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 for re­present­ing Ḥafṣ on the page (or in the data stream) ‒ a bundle of deci­sions:
‒ the rasm, the letter skele­ton;
‒ the spelling of long vowels;
‒ the spelling of initial hamza;
‒ mute/otiose letters;
‒ the writing of (partial) assimi­la­tion;
‒ auxiliary signs: verse numbers, signs for pause, saǧa­da, juzʾ, ḥizb and saktah.
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/ as well, dif­feren­tiat­ing between words that would be homo­graphs with­out a con­ven­tionally intro­duced spelling dis­tinc­tion (where one form viola­tes phono­graphic expec­ta­tions) 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, needing extra length­en­ing letters: when there is no ḥarf al-madd in the rasm a small vowel letter is added. (Al­though the dagger/alif ḫan­ǧa­rīya has the same shape ‒ even has the same uni­code code point ‒ in the East it is a vowel sign (khaṛā zabar), where­as in the West it is a small letter or ‒ above yāʾ or wau ‒ a mutating sign).
In Asia alif never has a hamza-sign above (nor below) because it is hamza: the ḥara­ka acti­va­tes its hamza­ness: /ʾa, ʾi, ʾu/, while in the West a small head of ʿain is needed.
‒ both vowel dots/stro­kes and the ham­za did not exist when the qurʾān was first written.
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 (2a) represents the under­lying data, graphic form is how the text is rendered. The text is basic; the graphic forms are variants. Linguistically and com­pu­ta­tionally, a ḍamma re­mains a ḍamma, and a sukūn re­mains a sukūn, regard­less of regional vari­a­tions.
For a visual gallery (including Otto­man, East African, and Indian forms of ḍamma and sukūn), see: A Visual Guide to Quranic Graphic Variants.

3. The book form

The book is the physical rea­li­za­tion: page size, margins, type­face, lay­out, title pages, appen­dices, indices, catch­words, headers .... This layer answers questions like:
‒ Are rukūʿāt marked in the text? On the margin?
‒ Which pages get catch words?
‒ How many lines per page?
‒ Is there extra space bet­ween words?
‒ Are there numbers after each verse, and are alter­native ends of verse in­di­cated?
‒ Must each juzʾ begin on a right‑hand page?
‒ Does every page finish with a verse-end?
‒ Is there an index? A colo­phon? A table of aḥzāb?
‒ Are the cartouches on the margin for aǧāzʾ, sa­ǧadāt, sakta?
‒ Are suras titled only by name, or by name and number?
‒ 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, claims have grown. According to these stories, it was:
‒ the “Cairo Edition”, as if only one muṣ­ḥaf of impor­tance had been pro­duced in Cairo;
‒ the Azhar Qurʾān, as if it had been con­ceived, edited, and issued by al‑Azhar;
‒ the product of a committee working for seven­teen years;
‒ a restora­tion of the Qurʾān based on the rasm treatise of Ibn Naǧāḥ.
‒ the first print with the rasm ʿuṯ­mānī instead of being imlāʾī;¹

rasm ʿuṯmānī vs. "rasm ʿuṯmānī" – "imlāʾī" vs. imlāʾī ...

Both terms are misleading. They suggest a meaning they do not actually carry.
“Rasm ʿUṯmānī” appears to denote the rasm of the 1^st/7^th‑century codices asso­ci­ated with ʿUṯmān. In reality, it refers to the 3^d/10^th‑century codi­fi­ca­tion by Abu ʿAmr ad‑Dānī (and his successors Abu Dāʾūd Sulaimān Ibn Naǧāḥ, al-Balanṣī, al-Ḫarrās, al-Ārkātī). The name evokes an origin and an autho­rity that the system, as we have it, does not possess. The mis­lead­ing effect comes directly from the term’s wording.
“Imlāʾī” func­tions in a similar way. It suggests the modern standard ortho­graphy of MSA. In fact, it refers to the Otto­man Qurʾān‑ortho­graphic con­vention. This becomes imme­dia­tely clear from the spelling of words such as raḥmn (for raḥmān) and ṣalū (for ṣalāt), forms that deli­be­ra­tely diverge from normal. al-Ribā; 2:275 (3x);276;278; 3:130; 4:161; al-Ṣalāt; 70 x ṣalātī; 6:162; ṣalāti r-rasūli; 9:99; ṣalātaka; 9:103; a-ṣalātuka; 11:87; ṣalātihim; 107:5; al-Zakāt; 32x from 2:43 to 98:5; al-Ḥayāt; 55x from 2:85 to 89:24; wa-Manāta; 53:20; al-Najāt; 40:41; ka-miškātin; 24:35; bi-l-ghadāti; 6:52; 18:28;
BTW, compared to the Ottoman rasm, G24 differs only in about 5 150 places where it writes a dagger instead of an alif, whereas its spelling system yields roughly 32 000 different word‑forms when set against IPak.
Except for the sequence Iso­Hamza+Alif, which was adopted from the Maghreb in 1308/1890 and 1342/1924 (alif+madda was not possible, since madda was already taken for elonga­tion ‒ btw, the Būlāq type print of 1299/1881 (Muṣḥaf Taufīq) uses madda for /ʾā/), in the Muḫalla­lātī print of 1308/1890 every­thing is already as in 1924.

Here two title pages of Luck­now prints from 1870 and 1877.


















↩︎ return
In 1895, a Qur'an appeared in Būlāq in ʿuṯmānī rasm, which per­haps meant "un­voca­lised". Kitāb Tāj at-tafā­sīr li-kalām al-malik al-kabīr taʼlīf Muḥam­mad ʿUṯmān ibn as-Saiyid Muḥam­mad Abī Bakr ibn as-Saiyid ʻAbd­Allāh al-Mīrġanī al-Maḥǧūb al-Makkī. Wa-bi-hāmišihi al-Qurʼān al-Maǧīd mar­sū­man bi'r-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī. ↩︎ return

‒ an immediate suc­cess all over the Muslim world;
‒ the result of technical (type setting) restric­tions (Thomas Milo)³

3 Milo thinks that the makers von the KFE wanted for /l-ʾāna/ four marks stacked over nūn. In really, what they aimed for was a clear right-to-left script. You can’t deciffer Milo’s monster = you must know that the hamza comes before /ā/. ↩

‒ made the Ḥafṣ reading dominant.
‒ the first printed muṣ­ḥaf by Muslims (A.Neu­wirth) †.

† Der Text des Koran liegt mitt­ler­weile in zahl­reichen Druck­ausgaben vor, unter denen der für seine Voka­li­sie­rung nach der Tra­dition des Ḥafṣ (gest. 180/796) von ʿAṣim (gest. 128/ 745), Hafs ʿan ʿAsim, zurück­ge­führ­te Text dank des einfluß­reichen ersten inner­islamischen Koran­druckes der Azhar-Hoch­schule (Kairo 1925) besondere Ver­brei­tung erfahren hat (Der Koran als Text der Spät­antike, S.30)
the Ḥafs ʿan ʿĀṣim text, has become par­ti­cular­ly wide­spread due to the impact of the first inner-Islamic Qur’an print­ing prompted by the Azhar school (Cairo 1925)(The Qurʾān and Late Anti­quity, p.8).
Lithographien des Hafs-Textes näherten sich im Laufe der Zeit mehr und mehr der stan­dar­tisier­ten Ortho­graphie pro­faner Texte an. Die erste im Nahen Osten ge­druckte Koran­aus­gabe sollte dieser Tendenz mit puris­ti­schen Prin­zi­pien ent­gegen­wir­ken. (Der Koran als Text der Spät­antike, S.275)
Lithographs of the Ḥafṣ [text] over time as­si­mi­lated more and more to the stan­dar­dized orthog­raphy of secular texts. The first printed Qur’an edition in the Near East (Qurʾān Karīm, 1344/ 1925) backed this tend­ency with purist prin­ciples (The Qurʾān and Late Anti­quity, p. 161)↩

‒ that it prompted a wave of Quran printings be­cause there was finally a fixed, au­tho­rised text (Bobzin).‡.

‡ "The Azhar Koran prompted a veritable flood of printed editions of the Koran throughout the Islamic world, "Hartmut Bobzin: “Von Venice to Cairo: On the History of Arabic Edi­tions of the Koran” in Spra­chen des Nahen Ostens und die Druck­revo­lu­tion, eds.: Eva Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glaß, Geoffrey Roper West­hofen 2002. p. 171
Bobzin's statement that Muslims did not have a text before 1924 is absurd, mis­taking the switch from Otto­man spell­ing and ductus to Maġribī spell­ing, base­line type and post‑verse numbering with the final standar­tiza­tion of the text.↩

‒ that is was edited and calli­graphed by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Rifāʿī (ʾAsmāʾ Ḥilālī)

These narratives are tidy, appealing ‒ and wrong.
Ḥafṣ was made dominant by non-Arab ruler (the Mam­lucks, the Otto­mans, Safa­vids, Timurids) because Ḥafṣ is closes to general Arabic.
The oral form remained entirely unchanged.
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 dis­cussed with others before it went to press. One of the other three men in the "commit­tee" died in 1919, the remain­ing two had no editorial role beyond report­ing mis­takes.
Its book form was the result of two men dead by 1924:
Hifni Bey Naṣīf, director of the Arab department in the Ministry of Edu­ca­tion wanted a script/duc­tus that is strictly right‑to‑left, with the vowel marks placed exactly above or below their letters.
Muḥammad Ǧaʿfar Bey had modernised the sorts of the Government Press: reducing their number from over 700 to around 400 (figures vary because some counts include only Arabic letters, while others also include Persian letters, numerals, and punctuation), and improving the interlocking of the sorts by mortising their lower bodies.

What G24 actually did

The 1924 text — which I call G24, because the King-Fuʾād-Edition was printed in Giza — used the Moroccan spelling. Few things are new. Muḥammad (ibn) Ḫalaf (ibn) ʿAlī al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād al-Malikī just switched from an slightly less deficient spelling to the Moroccan rasm, and from the Ottoman (Asian) ortho­graphy to the Maġ­ribī/ Anda­lu­sian system, a change nobody seems to have written about.
Any spelling is possible in letter­press, litho­graphy, or manu­script ‒ or as digital text.
BTW, it did not FIX the written form; in 1928 there was one change in the qurʾānic text, in 1952 there were 666; the KFC made three changes in 1984, 2009 another forty (no more lāʾs) and 2017 104 changes (fatḥa­tan) ‒ and in 2009 Qaṭar pub­lished its muṣ­ḥaf with one alif less (/kāḏi­ba^tun/ in 56:2)*

*56:2 ↩

‒ and Dār al-Maʿrifa in Damascus, the publisher of taǧīd maṣāḥif and of non-Ḥafṣ reading from 1990 to 2011, from 2007 published "واضح/ob­vious" editions: – in­creased space between words
– boxes around features that did not apply if paused (both ḥarakat, small ḥuruf al-madd, tan­wīn signs and the two dots of tāʾ marbūṭa pronounced as /h/ before a pause),^◉

◉
↩

– white space after possible pauses including places where Indian Saǧa­wand had a pauses but Q52 had none
‒ two or three years later these extra pauses with­out pause sign were removed with­out any explana­tion by Dār al-Maʿrifa^◈

◈

↩

There were mistakes in it, some were corrected in 1952 (most famous­ly 7:137 كلمة instead of كلمت ; with most con­sequence: the assump­tion that the basmala is ommitted when reciting the next sura), some were cor­rected only in this century (the wrong sequen­tial fatḥatan), others were made worse. The most common one: /allah/ instead of /allāh/. A strange mistake starts 1924 and was made common by the KFC in Madina. While Maġri­bians always put the muta­ting small alif and the hamza-sign above (or below) the yāʾ-tooth

the KFE often has it to the left of the tooth, and the lattest Madina Muṣḥaf has it mostly to the left:

(before 1924 nobody placed the hamza in the air after the tooth instead of on the tooth, now, it is common as in Madina ‒ hahaha.)

Otto Pretzl noticed the mis­placed hamza in 4:38 and 8:47, and critzied the dual (which might be due to Ibn Naǧāḥ) — two examples:







The KFE/kfe pro­duced neither a world­wide text nor an im­mut­able one; the “de­fi­ni­ti­ve edi­tion” rested on the fact that no Orien­tal­ist had ever seri­ous­ly ex­am­ined an Oriental Quran print.
Berg­sträßer was the first to do so, and he did it with­out any com­para­tive know­ledge; Fez, and Luck­now were out­side his hori­zon. Under proper com­pari­son, the con­cept of a “defi­ni­tive edi­tion” collapses. Just because the KFE was im­por­tant to Orien­ta­lists — it quick­ly dis­placed the Flügel edi­tion, whose text and verse number­ing they had re­garded as Western im­prove­ments over Muslim texts — they assumed that it was impor­tant for Mus­lims as well.

The book form that carried the G24 text existed in two sizes:
‒ KFE for the 27‑cm format,
‒ kfe 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 the same book (except for the edi­torial appen­dix), 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 car­touches for ǧuz, ḥizb, saktah and saǧada.

The KFE was the first offset muṣ­ḥaf, it was a govern­ment edition, meant for students in govern­ment schools, designed to make it easy for them to read with­out a šaiḫ recit­ing. That is why its initia­tor Ḥifni Bey Nāṣif wanted only about 300 sorts to be used = no stacked liga­tures, no ver­tical ones like mīm below lām. This base­line-aligned script was new ‒ and lives on in the ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (UT) Madina muṣḥaf.

Thus:
‒ G24 = the text (ortho­graphy, pause signs, liturgical divisions: juzʾ and ḥizb).
‒ KFE/kfe = the book (826+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, Kazan is Ott-like
  MNQ604 and MNQ522 are by Muṣṭafā Nāẓīf Qadir­ġalī (and MNQ486 is a rearranged MNQ522)
  MSI 1983, MSI 2002, MSI 2019 are standards for Indo­ne­sia
  Ṭabo-Našr has a rasm of it own, a neoIran spelling con­ven­tion, but prints maṣā­ḥif with other spellings too.

A brief look ahead

1952 KFE II (KFE52) was published with a text changed at 666 places: Q52
This text ‒ in a com­pletly dif­ferent lay­out ‒ was publi­shed in 1399/1979 in Damas­cus: I call it UT0 (ʿUṯmān Ṭaha Zero) be­cause it had three minor mistakes.
The KFC in Madina published it with­out the mis­takes and with three changes = UT1 in 1405/1985;
1421/2001 the KFC published a freshly written UT2;
1440/2019 UT3 with 104 corrections.
So although the 1924 Edition was never im­portant any­where in the Muslim world, dis­tinguish­ing between its book‑form (KFE) and its texts (G24, later Q52) allows us to see that Q52 lived on first in UT1, later as KFC 2001, then KFC 2019, and today as KFC 2020.

A Switch, not a reconstruction

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 (in their four­teen trans­mis­sions) 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 calli­gra­pher, and not a type­setter.
Gotthelf Bergsträßer, who championed the historical-critical analysis of the earliest manuscripts, was well aware that al-Ḥaddād had not conducted a modern palæo­graphical collation. He also recognized that al-Ḥaddād had not simply copied an Ottoman print or the earlier Cairo edition by al-Muḫalla­lātī. However, because contemporary Moroccan printing houses were entirely out­side his academic horizon, Bergsträßer failed to see the real, material shortcut: that al-Ḥaddād had simply taken a con­temporary Moroccan Warš print from Fès and "Hafsized" it.
Instead, Bergsträßer fell into a theoretical trap. He assumed a reconstruction ad ovo—or rather, ad bocca: a pristine, systematic textualization of the live, oral Ḥafṣ text executed from scratch by rigidly applying the medieval orthographic treatises of ad-Dānī and Ibn Naǧāḥ.
In reality, al-Ḥaddād’s operation was far more pragmatic and geopolitically driven. Egypt, having severed its ties with the Sublime Porte at the end of 1914, sought to break with the centuries-long typo­graphic and ortho­graphic hegemony of the Ottoman Empire. To achieve a non-Ottoman text, al-Ḥaddād did not sit down to invent a new spelling system based on abstract theory. He took the existing Afri­can/Magh­ribi skeletal rasm of the Fès Warš tradition—which inherently favored the severe pruning of structural alifs—and retrofitted it to hold the local Egyptian oral reading. By applying this Ḥafṣ reading onto an imported Maghribi spelling skeleton, Cairo effec­tively executed a structural switch. It systemati­cally rejected the 5,150 structu­ral alifs preserved in the Asian-Ottoman line and replaced its long-vowel notation with the African convention of short vowels requiring ḥurūf al-madd. Cairo did not reinvent the wheel ad ovo; it histori­cally, geo­graphi­cally, and politi­cally switched its allegiance from Asia back to Africa.











He did not apply ad‑Dānī or Ibn Naǧāḥ to a common Ottoman text, but "Ḥafṣi­zed" a Mo­roc­can Warš print from Fès. In other words, the 1924 text is the result of apply­ing the Egyp­tian oral tra­di­tion to a Maġ­ribī spelling. That was the core of the edi­to­rial ope­ra­tion. If not con­vinced.✘

---

1906 improves types

The field of study of printed editions of the Qur'an needs to be cleaned up.
Many German Orienta­lists refer to the offi­cial Egyp­tian edi­tion of 1924/5 as "the stan­dard Qur'an", others call it "Azhar Qur'an". Some call it "THE Cairo Edi­tion/CE" ‒ non­sensi­cal de­signa­tions. Many false ideas cir­culate about the King Fuʾād edition, the Giza Qur'an, the Egyp­tian Survey Autho­rity print (المصحف الشريف لطبعة مصلحة المساحة المصرية), the 12-liner (مصحف 12 سطر).
Some believe they are look­ing at a manu­script.^♦

♦ like Abdel Theo­dore Khoury, ʾAsmāʾ Ḥilālī, sogar A.A. Brockett (Two Trans­missions p. 9) ↩

Andreas Ismail Mohr calls it "type print­ing". Yet the epi­logue ‒ from the 1925 small (Būlāq) edi­tion even more clearly than the first, large one (Giza 1924) ‒ makes every­thing clear: The fair copy writ­ten by Egypt's šaiḫ al-maqāriʾ Muḥam­mad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḫalaf al-Ḥu­sainī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī al‑Ǧir­ǧāwī al-Ḥaddād (1282/1865-1357/ 22.1. 1939) ‒ not to be con­fused with the calli­grapher Muḥammad ibn Saʿd ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ḥad­dād (1919-2011) ‒ was set in Būlāq with five tiers per line (pause signs; fatḥa, damma, sukūn; letters [for base­line hamza includ­ing the vowel sign]; kasra; spac­ing).

In 1906, Muḥammad Ǧaʿfar Bey retired nearly 200 unnecessary ligatures from the Amiriya Press in Būlāq by executing a complete, revolu­tionary recut of the entire Arabic character set. Instead of the traditional, unwieldy library of around 600 separate movable types, he reduced the core system to just 400 essential sorts—not counting a few unlisted pieces for Persian loan­words and punctua­tion. This radical reduction did not result in a frag­mented text; instead, Ǧaʿfar Bey engineered these new lead sorts with precise physical notches and cutouts. As the types were assembled from right to left, these inter­locking bodies allowed the characters to merge seamlessly, integrating the lower diacritics directly into the descender zone and completely eliminating both the unsightly inter-letter gaps and the separate lower diacritic line traditionally required for kasra and kasratain.
In 1906 Būlāq intro­duced tight fitting, inter­locking type bodies and inte­grated the lower dia­cri­tics into the des­cender zone, removing both the inter-letter gaps and the lower dia­critic line (for kasra and kasra­tain).
Before I saw the print from 1911 (below) I as­sumed the well fitting letters were due to off­set, but that was a false idea.

A look at the 1299/1881 Būlāq print (and at Hyderabad 1938 with Monotype clones for Amīrīya types ‒ instead of the original) show the im­prove­ment Ǧaʿfar Bey had brought.
The 1881 and the 1938 kasras sit too low, making the page look dis­jointed and harder to read. (I marked the kas­ras in red that had been "lifted" on the galley proofs for the Giza print).
On the image below I com­pare the Muṣḥaf Taw­fīq of 1299/1881 with Muṣ­ḥaf Malik Fuʾād 1342. In Giza cor­rected rough proofs were made into print­ing plates. The print­ing it­self was done in Giza.
Type printing is relief; offset is planographic. In relief printing the sorts indent the paper and press ink into it. In offset the surface is flat and the paper absorbs the ink — no inden­tations. With his eyes, Mohr saw that it was not hand­written. But he does not know that type print can only be re­cog­nised with the sense of touch.
"That's nonsense, instead of ela­bora­tely type­sett­ing and print­ing that ONCE, why not have a calli­gra­pher write it?" (Mohr) This fails to appre­ci­ate the tech­no­id sense of accuracy of the editors of 1924. The accuracy establi­shed by type­setting and now achieved through Open­Type tech­no­logy is matched by no one but ʿUṯmān Ṭaha: per­fect align­ment with every vowel sign sitting exactly above or below its letter.
Two examples to illu­strate.

While UT clearly reads yanhā, the beau­ti­ful Ottoman hand­writ­ing reads naihā; while the three vowel signs (fatḥa, sukūn, long-ā) are clear­ly in the right order (there is no other way, they are all on top), nūn (per­haps) comes before yāʾ (or does the nūn dot come before the yāʾ dots). Inci­den­tally, the two "tooth" letters have a tooth or spine in UT, but none in court Otto­man! While there is clearly no­thing bet­ween heh (I use the Uni­code name to clearly dis­tin­guish it from ḥāʾ) and alif maq­ṣūra in UT, there could well be a tooth in Otto­man: You only needed to put two dots over it and it would be hetā or some­thing like that.  

2^nd example: wa-ma­lā­ʾi­ka­tihī Whereas the 1924 print (top) and the original ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (next) let the small letter alif‑madda hover in front of the yāʾ‑tooth ‒ an added long‑vo­wel that leaves the tooth free to carry a ham­za di­rect­ly beneath it, yield­ing a hamza‑yāʾ (/ʾ/, not /ī/ or /ā/) ‒ the Qa­ṭar muṣ­ḥaf (third) puts a mu­tat­ing alif‑mad­da direct­ly above the tooth, there­by turn­ing the yāʾ-tooth into a long‑vowel alif, and lets the hamza hover below after it. In the fourth text, the latest muṣḥaf from Madina, both the alif-madda and the hamza are hover­ing freely, the tooth has no clear func­tion. — What is the right spelling?
Now the whole of page 3 in com­pari­son. Giza print and UT: the Amīrī­ya is more calli­graphic than UT, which can be seen in the examples in the right margin.
All in all, ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā writes strictly along the base­line, in a type‑like ductus — clear, right‑to‑left, and with vowels posi­tioned exactly above/below their con­sonants. Only in the spac­ing bet­ween words is it less modern than the Amīrīya (which is why Dar al-Maʿrifa in­creased the spac­ing). While the Amīrīya stacks initial letters using the inter-word space for the first vowel sign, UT copies that only occasionaly.ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā had no objec­tion when the KFC replaced his hand­writing with digital fonts in the third edition — that was exactly how he had always wanted his script to look.

if you don't want to read the whole page, but just some words, in which KFA is more calli­graphic can UT:^◉

◉ ↩

Also from page 3 Com­parison of Muṣḥaf Qaṭar and UT. In the first and last examples, Abū ʿUmar ʿUbaidah Mu­ḥam­mad Ṣāliḥ al-Banki / عبيدة محمد صالح البنكي does not place the yāʾ-dots EXACTLY under the tooth (in the first case because of the close nūn, in the second case with­out need). Three cases show tooth let­ters with­out a tooth. And a cuddle-mīm, which makes its vowel sign sit wrong (for modern readers): the mīm is to the right of the lām, but the mīm vowel sign is to the left, because the mīm is to be pro­noun­ced after the lām. So it is rightly "wrong".

letters from the KFE and from UT1 (below):
In the upper part you see that KFA (white back­ground) is more calli­graphic, UT (yellowish) more type­writer style.
The lower part shows Būlāq sorts not used for the qurʾānic text, i.e. used for the appen­dices or not at all in the KFA.

A map of Cairo in 1917, on which I have marked the Amīrīya and the Land Registry/Survey of Egypt/ الهيئة المصرية العامة للمساحة with arrows in the Nil., as well as Midan Tahrir and the place where the govern­ment print­ing press is now located. Also the Ministry of Edu­cat­ion and the Nāṣi­rīya, where three of the signa­tories of the after­word worked. Although the the offset press lies in the province of Giza, and the type­setting work­shop in Cairo, they are not far apart and well con­nected by car, tram and boat. The assembled pages did not have a long way to go.

The two Arabic texts are the 1924 and 1952 printer's notes, both from the copies in the Prus­sian State Library, which owns five edi­tions. And here is the very last (un­paginat­ed) page of the original print.
"al-Qāhira" has to wait till the fifties to appear.

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Long vowels: East vs. West

Gabriel Said Reynolds and others say that all Qur'anic texts are identical: letter for letter.

the various editions of the Qur'an printed today (with only extra­ordin­ary ex­cep­tions) are identi­cal, word for word, letter for letter.
"Introduction" to The Qur'an in its Histori­cal Con­text, Abing­don: Rout­ledge 2008, p.1.

That’s not the case. There are pro­bably a thousand dif­ferent ways of writing or mak­ing a muṣ­ḥaf.
That does not mean that the prints say dif­ferent things. They don't. They are similar enough → mean the same. The dif­feren­ces that the exact same text allows in inter­pre­tation are cer­tainly 100 times more signi­ficant than all the dif­ferences bet­ween dif­ferent prints. Many dif­feren­ces are purely ortho­graphic (such as folx­her­šaft and Volks­herr­schaft, night and nite, le roi and le rwa), others change the sense of a word, even a sentence, but do not really change the passage.
I am not at all con­cerned with contra­dic­tions in the Qur'an, with dif­feren­ces in con­tent bet­ween one and an­other, I am only con­cerned with dif­fe­rences in ortho­graphy (that is, the spelling rules and par­ticu­lar cases).
Nor am I concerned with the diffe­ren­ces between the seven/ten ca­noni­cal readers, the four­teen/ twenty trans­mitters, the hun­dreds of paths and aspects. These primarily con­cern the morpho­phone­mic struct­ure (plus seldom a "min", "fa" or "wa"); the variants only say whether a vowel is leng­then­ed five­fold or three­fold, whether the bas­mala is repeated bet­ween two suras or a tak­bir is spoken before a parti­cular one. I am not con­cerned with all this.
I am interested in the dif­feren­ces between Otto­man and Moroc­can, Persian and Indian maṣā­ḥif ‒ and how the offi­cial Egyp­tian Qurʾān of 1924 differs from those before it. Because there is a lot of non­sense circu­lating about this.
Qurans differ in a hundred ways. I will not pre­sent this syste­ma­ti­cally. For example, reading (qi­ra­ʾa), ductus, lines per page, whether verses may be spread over two pages, whether 30th must begin on a new page, whether rukuʿat are dis­played in the text and on the mar­gin, whether each verse is followed by a num­ber, whether alter­na­tive count­ing systems are in­di­cated, and whether pages have cus­to­di­ans/catch words on the bottom of each (second) page, whether there are one, three, four, five, six ... or six­teen pause signs. All this can occur, but will not be syste­ma­ti­cally dis­cussed.
I focus attention on two points:
the spelling of words, the Quranic voca­bulary, so to speak ‒ al­though (un­like Le Dic­tio­naire de l'Academie, Meriam-Webster, Duden) the same word is not to be written the same way in all places;
the rules of how vowel length, shorten­ing and diph­tongs are notated, like as­simi­lation of con­sonants, and how hamza at the start of words is written. I am par­ticular­ly inter­ested in prints.

---

There are two main orthographies: the African (Maġ­ribi, Anda­lu­sian, Arab) and the Asian (Indo-Pakis­ta­ni, Indo­nesi­an, Per­sian, Otto­man): The African con­ven­tion requires two signs for long vowels: a vowel sign and a match­ing elong­ating vowel letter; if the latter is not in the rasm, it is added as a small letter (when there is a non-match­ing vowel it is mutated).

this two-sign modell cor­res­ponds to the view of the gram­ma­ti­ci­ans that there is a haraka length­ened by a ḥarf al-madd, while the Asian mo­dell may re­flect the Sans­krit model of matras

Asians have three short vowel signs and three long vowel signs (plus sukūn/ǧazm).
But according to today's IPak rules, short vowel signs are used IF the matching vowel letter follows (which receives a ǧazm, because it would be mute without any sign).
With long ā, Persians and Ottomans/Turks always use the long vowel sign; Indians today use it only if no alif follows (i.e. wau, [dot­less] yāʾ or no vowel at all); if an alif follows, the con­sonant before it   only gets a fatḥa.
For long ū, Turks put "madd" under a wau;

for the elon­gated -hū / -hī in inter­vocalic position, the elonga­tion remains unnoted, as it is assumed to be common knowledge of Turkish readers.

Indians and Indo­nesians use the long ū-sign, but the short u-sign before waw, while before 1800, Indians al­ways used the long-ū-sign, follow­ing wau re­mained with­out any sign: thus was silent (to be ignored when read­ing) ‒ if it is second part of the diph­thong /au/, it got and gets a Ǧazm, thus is to be spoken.
Always the long ī sign.

In 1800, there were two systems of noting long vowels: the Magh­re­b­ian, which always included two parts, a vowel sign (fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma, imāla-point) and a leng­then­ing vowel (belong­ing to the rasm or a small com­ple­ment).







And an Indian system based en­tire­ly on long vowel signs, in which the vowel letters pre­sent in the rasm were com­pletely ig­nored.

In /ṣalāh/ I high­lighted the waw because it is silent as waw, is really an alif made cear by the mutat­ing dagger. The last word in the line /huwa/ has a normal ḍamma.
/yun­fiqūna/ has a ū-sign bet­ween qāf and wāw, above them ‒ a con­sistent left‑shifted placement in this manu­script
/yuʾminūn/ has a selent waw as kursi, and an ū-sign left of "its" nūn.

a few notes on my examples.
Often the ḥaraka is left of the con­sonant, the ū sign is often above the silent waw.
in /ʾulaʾika/ the ḍamma/peš that belongs to alif, sits above waw.

in line 2 /ʾulaʾika/ and /huwa/ again.
/ʾinna-llaḏīna/ alif has no sign (= is mute), yāʾ has no dots, because they are not neces­sary < (left placed) khaṛī zēr/ī/ makes it clear;
in /kafarū/ alif wiqāya has no sign (= is mute)
/sawāʾun/ has a dagger as vowel sign, unlike G24 with a fatḥa
/yuʾminūn/ 2x mit ulta peš/long ḍamma more over waw than over nūn
the the last line /ʿaẓīmun/ with dots below dotless yāʾ as above
/wa-mina-n-nāsi maⁿi yaqūlu/ < the šadda above yāʾ shows that the nūn is assimilated to yāʾ

The Magh­rebi system is used to­day in Africa and Arabia.
The Indian system is used in weakened forms in Turkey, Persia, India and Indo­ne­sia. In India and Indone­sia, IPak applies, where long ā con­tinues to be used before (dotless) yāʾ, but before alif it has been re­placed by fatḥa (like in the African system) Before ī-yāʾ/ ū-waw stand kasra/ḍamma; above the vowel let­ters wau and yāʾ stands ǧazm ‒ other­wise they had no influence on pro­noun­cia­tion. The old Indian system only survives where no vowel letter follows. How wide­spread this clear Indian system was, I do not know. I came across several manu­scripts using it, but no print.

Most of the aspects mentioned are freely mixable; yes, most maṣāḥif in Maġ­ribī have the reading of Warš and the verse count­ing system Madina II, but some have Kufa. And some writ­ing con­ven­tion almost exclude an other fea­ture (when one has iḫfāʾ tanwīn, izḥār nūn is not neces­sarily, but most things can occur or not. While most maṣā­ḥif in the East have ONE alif-waṣl, Morocco put a dot above, in the middle or below the alif ‒ Brunai (very much in the east) adds his (cleverly) to there ʿUṯmān Ṭaha print. ♣.

♣

This is Ḥafṣ although it looks like Warš; writen by Zubair ibn ʿAbdallah al-Ḥanafī for Ḥanafī Otto­mans in Tunis.
Look and qiraʾāt often go together, but they are inde­pendant of each other.
This is even for experts too dif­ficult to grasp: One asserts that Qālūn is written a certain way, al­though he means the ad-Dānī rasm, just be­cause the only Qālūn muṣ­ḥaf he has ever seen is teh one calli­gra­phed by Abū Bakr as-Sāsī al-Maġribī for Lybia.
here the same words six times Ḥafṣ (top), three times Qālūn (below) unten, in the middle Warš, in all riwa­yāt insān can be written either way; The riwāya and the autho­rity respon­sible for the rasm are inde­pen­dent domains. A riwāya frequently follows the same authority, yet this align­ment is contingent rather than necessary, and in several places the rasm diverges.. Of greater importants: an edition can use the rasm of ad-Dānī or Ibn Najāḥ or ʾĀrtākī and write long vowels with long vowel signs or with ḥurūf al-madd.↩

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Giza 1342/1924 vs. Cairo 1371/1952

Page 775 of the Amīrīya print is remark­able because in the first line allan is some­times written ان لن sometimes الن . There is no difference in meaning, no difference in pronoun­ciation.
But it is important to some: they delibe­ra­tely "correct" the spell­ing. Here now, two pages from the Amirīya, both with الن

1924

1952

There are three differences on this page bet­ween the 1924 and 1952 edition, typi­cal dif­fe­ren­ces found through­out the muṣ­ḥaf ‒ there are 650 of these ‒ plus four cor­rections.
On the next pair there is no sura end, no sura title, but again one changed pause sign and on the very last word the hamza has moved from above to below the line (which is one of the four cor­rec­tions mentioned in the afterwork to "the second print­ing").

1924

Hyderabad 1938

1952

not from the Amīrīya but from a Bairut print: the page number is on top of the page and the catch word is missing.

On the last pair there is only one diffe­ren­ce: kali­matu (line 5) is written with ta maf­tuḥa vs. mar­buṭa.

1924

1952

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Some standartisation

from left to right: Syrien, Qaṭar, Kuwait (al-Ḥaddād), Bahrain, Saudia, VAE (both UT1), Dubai, Saudia(UT2), Kuwait (UT1), Oman, Kerbala, Ägypten (Abu Qamar)

Yes, nowaday most maṣāḥif pro­duced in the Arab mašriq are similar, but Morocco, Libya, Sudan, Turkey, Tarta­ris­tan, Brunai, Indo­nesia follow different rules, and the Indian Stan­dard (Pakistan, Bangla Desh, UK, South Africa, Suri­nam, Nepal, Ceylon) is numeri­cally more important and quite diffe­rent.
Only 10,5% of all Muslims are Arabs (Egypt, Syria, ʿIrāq, the Peninsula icl. the diaspora); only these have ‒ post 1985 ‒ what is shown above,
while 33,5% are Indians
16,5% are North-West- and West-Africans
4,5% Iranians
5% East-African
12,5% Indonesian
2% Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indochina, Phili­pines
5% Turcs
6,5% Central Asia, China, Russia
1% balkans
2% Sudan
So, all in all, only about 15% of Muslims world­wide have adopted the specific layout you see above. While the vast majority of the Islamic world con­tinues to read their own long-estab­lished textual tra­ditions ‒ most notably the Indian standard ‒ this particular branch is a layout des­cendant of Küçük Hafez Osman and a textual grand­child of the KFE ‒ some ver­sions retaining the space between words (a KFE heritage), and some without it (the KFC reform of the reform).

"Nowadays" because before 1980 a Ottoman muṣḥaf written by Ḥafiz ʿUṭmān the Elder (1642‒1698) was pre­valent in Syria, and two Ottoman maṣāḥif written by Ḥasan Riḍā and Muḥammad ʾAmīn ar-Rušdī res­pective­ly were pro­duced for Dīwān al-Awqāf al-ʿIrāqī (still 1980 the govern­ments of Qaṭar and Saʿūdī ʿArabia had copies printed of the one based on Rušdī ‒ and 1415/1994 in Tehran): It took some seven­ty years before the 1924 edition (or rather its 1952 off­spring) had created a regional stan­dard.

Because there are THREE well established stan­dards and a few in Indonesia, a new one in Brunei, several (compet­ing ones) in Iran and many all over Africa ‒ where we do not only find different ways of writing the same read­ing (Ḥafṣ ʾan ʿĀṣim) but three more trans­mis­sions (Warš, Qālūn, ad-Dūrī ʿan Abī ʿAmr). And 100 years ago, maṣā­ḥif were less stan­dardized.
There are many more printed in Damas­cus (or Bairūt because of the war), pro­duced in ʿAmman and the UAE and pub­lished on the world wide web, but these are mainly for study, not for devo­tion.

But here I will not focus on the readings (and their trans­mis­sions), but on different ortho­graphies (of the trans­mission Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim).
Already 35 years ago Adrian Alan Brockett found out that the 1342/1924 King-Fuʾād-Edi­tion had not estab­lished THE stan­dard, that even the suc­ces­sor of al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥad­dād as the chief reci­ter of Egypt ‒ hence main editor of the "second edition" of 1952 ‒ ʿAlī Muḥammad aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ (1304/1886-1380/1960), had edited different editions and approved of yet more dis­similar ones.
Brockett studied editions at a time when only Ḥafṣ and Warš were prin­ted. Today one finds many edi­tions of Qālūn, some of Dūrī and both prin­ted ones and just pdfs for most of the others, plus many edi­tions about the 20 cano­nical trans­mis­sions, plus sound files of reci­ta­tions of most trans­missions.       When Brockett wrote, the King Fahd Com­plex had not started to pub­lish dif­ferent vari­ants ‒ Ḥafṣ, Šuʿba, Warš, Qālūn, Dūrī, as-Sūsī writ­ten by ʿUṭmān Ṭāhā plus an Indian Ḥafṣ ‒ but he had no­ti­ced that Gulf States pub­lished a) in the new Egyp­tian style, b) an Otto­man muṣ­ḥaf (the muṣ­ḥaf of Mu­ḥam­mad ʾAmīn ar-Rušdī with minor mo­di­fi­ca­ti­ons), c) in the Indian style.
1952:

Brockett's thesis is still the best English text avail­able on dif­fe­rences bet­ween copies of the qurʾān, al­though it was researched before the inter­net faci­li­tated research, before Uni­code made it easier to re­pro­duce Arabic script,
before it was easy to get hold of all the cano­nical trans­mis­sions and most of the thou­sands of variant readings (now col­lected in two dif­ferent editions ‒ the third was halted).
His main con­clu­sions ‒ the oral trans­mission and the one in writing re­in­forced each other, con­trolled each other, never were left with­out the other,
and there is no single standard of writing, and no single stan­dard of reciting the qurʾān,
and the dif­feren­ces bet­ween trans­mis­sions (and within trans­mis­sions) are minor, they never change the mean­ing of a para­graph ‒
stand intact. But it was a thesis, no published book.
Because the young student was not allowed to have it read by fellow resear­chers, it is full of mis­takes ‒
mis­takes which would not have survived the editing process.
I personally have no use for Brockett's "trans­litera­tion", which is neither that nor a tran­scrip­tion.
I am sure that Brockett ‒ as many readers ‒ did not know what the two terms mean:
a trans­literation must render the Arabic letters faith­fully and must be rever­sible (not neces­sa­rily pro­nounce­able),
a tran­scription must render the sound of the words faith­fully, must be pro­noun­ce­able, should be read­able after some in­struc­tion, but has not to be reversable, because dif­ferent sequen­ces of letters can be pro­nouned (hence be tran­scribed) the same way.
I personally, hate his termino­logy, but at least he defines his ‒ odd ‒ terms at the out­set:
"graphic" means: part of the rasm,
"oral" or "vocal" means: not part of the rasm.
I say: just wrong!
Both the rasm and the later signs (dots, hamza, waṣl, shadda, fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma, signs for imāla, tasḥīl, išmām etc.) are gra­phical,
and have to be pro­nounced = are oral ‒ but there are some otiose letters, which have to be written in a real trans­literation (as in R-G Puin's).
"oral only" is closer to what he means, but "in the oldest manu­scripts not written, at that time: only recited" is it.
Sorry, "oral" is not good enough.
I hardly can read his "trans­cription". Why does "a wavy line" mean some­times "oral", some­times "leng­thened"?
Anyhow, here and now, there is no need for Brockett's "trans­litera­tion", we have Arabic letters!
In spite of my criticism, his thesis is a great work of scholar­ship ‒ and tre­men­dous work, done before we just googled dif­ferent edi­tions of the qurʾān.

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pauses

Although most copies of the qurʾān are very similar to the copy of my neighbour,
when we look at all printed copies in the world, there a thousand dif­ferent prints:
they come in thirty books, ten, seven, six, five, four, three, two and one volume.
Some have marginal notes, others good/bad/in­dif­ferent omen (cf. fāl-i Qurʾān),

some indicate the chrono­logy of reve­la­tion, some suggest end of prayer (because a new theme is treated in the next verse).
Some are "ayat barkenar", i.e. verse do not straddle pages (BTW: in the early manu­scripts words went on into the next line ‒ in some even the next page ‒ without any ado).
There are different systems of cutting the suras into verses.
The number of suras ‒ 114 ‒ and their order are today the same every­where (which was not the case in the first century after the hijra). Their names can differ.
There are differences are in the di­vi­sions of the qurʾān (verses, half, third, seventh/manzil, juz, ḥizb, half, quarter, eighth)
One more element belongs to this group: the pauses.
There are not only different systems of pause signs from 15 (India) to one (Morocco),
even when two copies have the same signs, they can have them at dif­ferent places, or a dif­fe­rent one at the same place.

In the early manu­scripts "end of aya" is marked, but there can be pauses within an aya, and some­times there is no pause between two ayas.
(In some early manu­scripts recommen­dated pauses are marked by an end-of-aya-sign, but these are not counted in the mumber of ayats given in the box at the beginning of the sura.)
Perhaps the best known example for the impor­tance of pauses is 3:7 (the seventh verse of surat Āl ʿImrān)
Here are almost twenty published English trans­lation of the same (exactly the same!) words:

SahihIntern: And no one knows its [true] inter­pretation except Allah.
But those firm in know­ledge say, "We believe in it. All [of it] is from our Lord."
Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilal & Dr Muhammad Muhsin Khani (KFC): but none knows its hidden mean­ings save Allah.
And those who are firmly grounded in know­ledge say: "We believe in it; the whole of it (clear and unclear Verses) are from our Lord."
Yusuf Ali: but no one knows its hidden meanings except Allah.
And those who are firmly grounded in know­ledge say: "We believe in the Book; the whole of it is from our Lord:"
Pickthall: None knoweth its explanation save Allah. And those who are of sound instruc­tion say: We believe therein; the whole is from our Lord;
but none knows their meaning except God;
and those who are steeped in know­ledge affirm: "We believe in them as all of them are from the Lord." But only those who have wisdom under­stand.
Ali Unal: although none knows its inter­pre­tation save God.
And those firmly rooted in know­ledge say: "We believe in it (in the entirety of its verses, both explicit and alle­gorical); all is from our Lord";
Aziz Ahmed: but none know the inter­pre­tation of it except Allah.
And those who are well-grounded in know­ledge say, "We believe in it; it is all from our Lord";
Daryabadi: the same whereas none knoweth the inter­pre­tation thereof a save Allah.
And the firmly grounded in know­ledge Say: we believe therein, the whole is from our Lord.
Faridul Haque: and only Allah knows its proper inter­pre­tation;
and those having sound know­ledge say, “We believe in it, all of it is from our Lord”;
Muh Assad: but none save God knows its final mean­ing.
Hence, those who are deeply rooted in knowledge say:
Shabbir Ahmed: None encompasses their final meaning but God.
Those who are well-founded in know­ledge under­stand why the alle­gories have been used and they keep learn­ing from them. They proclaim the belief that the entire Book is from their Lord.
Sarvar: No one knows its true inter­pretations except God
and those who have a firm grounding in know­ledge say, "We believe in it. All its verses are from our Lord."
Ali Shaker: but none knows its inter­pre­tation except Allah,
and those who are firmly rooted in know­ledge say: We believe in it, it is all from our Lord;

AbdulMannen: But no one knows its true inter­pretation except Allâh, and those firmly grounded in know­ledge.
They say, `We believe in it, it is all (- the basic and de­cisive verses as well as the alle­gorical ones) from our Lord.
Muh. Ali: And none knows its inter­pre­tation save Allah, and those firmly rooted in know­ledge.
They say: We believe in it, it is all from our Lord.
Sher Ali: And none knows it ex­cept ALLAH and those who are firmly grounded in know­ledge;
they say, `We believe in it; the whole is from our Lord.'′
Rashad Khalifa: None knows the true meaning thereof except GOD and those well founded in know­ledge.
They say, "We believe in this - all of it comes from our Lord."

But they are not different because of the English language, but be­cause of a parti­cular pause or absence of a pause;

When you make a pause after "Allāh" he alone knows.
When there is no pause, he and some humans know.

Better known are the different read­ings, their trans­mis­sions and ways/turuq.
These can differ in words, but not in meaning:
"We created" and "He created" are not the same, but they say the same: God created!.
Sometimes the meaning of a verse/aya in one read­ing differs from the same aya in another,
but this never affects the mean­ing of a paragraph.






Kairo 1342/1924 + Beirut Dar al-Kitab al-Lubani 1970. p62 line iden­tical ,

هُوَ ٱلَّذِیٓ أَنزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِنۡهُ ءَايَٰتࣱ مُّحۡكَمَٰتٌ هُنَّ أُمُّ ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ وَأُخَرُ مُتَشَٰبِهَٰتࣱ ۖ فَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ فِی قُلُوبِهِمۡ زَيۡغࣱ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَٰبَهَ مِنۡهُ ٱبۡتِغَآءَ ٱلۡفِتۡنَةِ وَٱبۡتِغَآءَ تَأۡوِيلِهِۦ ۗ وَمَا يَعۡلَمُ تَأۡوِيلَهُۥٓ إِلَّا ٱللَّهُ ۘ وَٱلرَّٰسِخُونَ فِی ٱلۡعِلۡمِ يَقُولُونَ ءَامَنَّا بِهِۦ كُلࣱّ مِّن عِندِ رَبِّنَا ۚ 08f0وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ إِلَّآ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ

Zweite Auflage“ des Kairiner Mus­haf 1371/1952

هُوَ ٱلَّذِیٓ أَنزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِنۡهُ ءَايَٰتࣱ مُّحۡكَمَٰتٌ هُنَّ أُمُّ ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ وَأُخَرُ مُتَشَٰبِهَٰتࣱ ۚ فَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ فِی قُلوبِهِمۡ زَيۡغࣱ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَٰبَهَ مِنۡهُ ٱبۡتِغَآءَ ٱلۡفِتۡنَةِ وَٱبۡتِغَآءَ تَأۡوِيلِهِۦ ۖ وَمَا يَعۡلَمُ تَأۡوِيلَهُۥٓ إِلَّا ٱللَّهُ ۘ وَٱلرَّٰسِخُونَ فِی ٱلۡعِلۡمِ يَقُولُونَ ءَامَنَّا بِهِۦ كُلࣱّ مِّنۡ عِندِ رَبِّنَا ۚ وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ إِلَّآ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ

Kairo 1977 Muṣḥaf al-Azhar aš-Šarīf gesetzt mit den gleichen Lettern wie Kairo 1342/1924

هُوَ ٱلَّذِیٓ أَنزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِنۡهُ ءَايَٰتࣱ مُّحۡكَمَٰتٌ هُنَّ أُمُّ ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ وَأُخَرُ مُتَشَٰبِهَٰتࣱ ۚ فَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ فِی قُلوبِهِمۡ زَيۡغࣱ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَٰبَهَ مِنۡهُ ٱبۡتِغَآءَ ٱلۡفِتْنَةِ وَٱبۡتِغَآءَ تَأۡوِيلِهِۦ ۚ وَمَا يَعۡلَمُ تَأۡوِيلَهُۥٓ إِلَّا ٱللَّهُ ۘ وَٱلرَّٰسِخُونَ فِی ٱلۡعِلۡمِ يَقُولُونَ ءَامَنَّا بِهِۦ كُلࣱّ مِّنۡ عِندِ رَبِّنَا ۚ وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ إِلَّآ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ

:مصحف الفت بخط عبدالمتعال محمد ابراهيم دار الغد العربي Kairo 1988/1409

هُوَ ٱلَّذِیٓ أَنزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِنۡهُ ءَايَٰتࣱ مُّحۡكَمَٰتٌ هُنَّ أُمُّ ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ وَأُخَرُ مُتَشَٰبِهَٰتࣱ ۚ فَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ فِی قُلُوبِهِمۡ زَيۡغࣱ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَٰبَهَ مِنۡهُ ٱبۡتِغَآءَ ٱلۡفِتۡنَةِ وَٱبۡتِغَآءَ تَأۡوِيلِهِۦ ۖ وَمَا يَعۡلَمُ تَأۡوِيلَهُۥٓ إِلَّا ٱللَّهُ ۘ وَٱلرَّٰسِخُونَ فِی ٱلۡعِلۡمِ يَقُولُونَ ءَامَنَّا بِهِۦ كُلࣱّ مِّن عِندِ رَبِّنَا ۗ وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ إِلَّآ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ

Kairo Šamarlī 1944 Kalli­graph al-Ḥaddād

هُوَ ٱلَّذِیٓ أَنزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِنۡهُ ءَايَٰتࣱ مُّحۡكَمَٰتٌ هُنَّ أُمُّ ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ وَأُخَرُ مُتَشَٰبِهَٰتࣱ ۖ فَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ فِی قُلُوبِهِمۡ زَيۡغࣱ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَٰبَهَ مِنۡهُ ٱبۡتِغَآءَ ٱلۡفِتۡنَةِ وَٱبۡتِغَآءَ تَأۡوِيلِهِۦ ۗ وَمَا يَعۡلَمُ تَأۡوِيلَهُۥٓ إِلَّا ٱللَّهُ ۘ وَٱلرَّٰسِخُونَ فِی ٱلۡعِلۡمِ يَقُولُونَ ءَامَنَّا بِهِۦ كُلࣱّ مِّن عِندِ رَبِّنَا ۚ وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ إِلَّآ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ

noch ein paar andere Ausgaben, die der gleichen Ortho­graphie folgen
Damaskus 1977 ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā I (Vorlage für nächste)

هُوَ ٱلَّذِیٓ أَنزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِنۡهُ ءَايَٰتࣱ مُّحۡكَمَٰتٌ هُنَّ أُمُّ ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ وَأُخَرُ مُتَشَٰبِهَٰتࣱ ۖ فَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ فِی قُلُوبِهِمۡ زَيۡغࣱ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَٰبَهَ مِنۡهُ ٱبۡتِغَآءَ ٱلۡفِتْنَةِ وَٱبۡتِغَآءَ تَأۡوِيلِهِۦ ۖ وَمَا يَعۡلَمُ تَأۡوِيلَهُۥٓ إِلَّا ٱللَّه ُ ۘ مِّن وَٱلرَّٰسِخُونَ فِی ٱلۡعِلۡمِ يَقُولُونَ ءَامَنَّا بِهِۦ كُلّ مِّن عِندِ رَبِّنَا ۗ وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ إِلَّآ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ

Medina 1416/1996 ʿUthmān Ṭāhā I – genau so der Damas­zener Taġ­wīd-K.1999

هُوَ ٱلَّذِیٓ أَنزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِنۡهُ ءَايَٰتࣱ مُّحۡكَمَٰتٌ هُنَّ أُمُّ ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ وَأُخَرُ مُتَشَٰبِهَٰتࣱ ۖ فَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ فِی قُلُوبِهِمۡ زَيۡغࣱ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَٰبَهَ مِنۡهُ ٱبۡتِغَآءَ ٱلۡفِtۡنَةِ وَٱبۡtِغَآءَ تَأۡوِيلِهِۦ ۗ wَمَا يَعۡلَمُ تَأۡوِيلَهُۥٓ إِلَّا ٱللَّه ُ ۗ وَٱلرَّٰسِخُونَ فِی ٱلۡعِلۡمِ يَقُولُونَ ءَامَنَّا بِهِۦ كُلࣱّ مِّنۡ عِندِ رَبِّنَا ۗ وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ إِلَّآ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ

:Damaszener Taġwīd-K.2005

هُوَ ٱلَّذِیٓ أَنزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِنۡهُ ءَايَٰتࣱ مُّحۡكَمَٰتٌ هُنَّ أُمُّ ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ وَأُخَرُ مُتَشَٰبِهَٰت ۖ فَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ فِی قُلُوبِهِمۡ زَيۡغࣱ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَٰبَهَ مِنۡهُ ٱبْتِغَآءَ ٱلۡفِتْنَةِ وَٱبْتِغَآءَ تَأۡوِيلِهِ ۗ وَمَا يَعۡلَمُ تَأۡوِيلَهُۥٓ إِلَّا ٱللَّهُ ۗ وَٱلرَّٰسِخُونَ فِی ٱلۡعِلۡمِ يَقُولُونَ ءَامَنَّا بِهِۦ كُلࣱّ مِّنۡ عِندِ رَبِّنَا ۗ ومَا يَذَّكَّرُ إِلَّآ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ

Medina 1424/2003 Uṯmān Ṭāhā II

هُوَ ٱلَّذِیٓ أَنزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِنۡهُ ءَايَٰتࣱ مُّحۡكَمَٰتٌ هُنَّ أُمُّ ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ وَأُخَرُ مُتَشَٰبِهَٰت ۖ فَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ فِی قُلُوبِهِمۡ زَيۡغࣱ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَٰبَهَ مِنۡهُ ٱبْتِغَآءَ ٱلۡفِتْنَةِ وَٱبْتِغَآءَ تَأۡوِيلِهِ ۦ ۖ وَمَا يَعۡلَمُ تَأۡوِيلَهُۥٓ إِلَّا ٱللَّهُ ۗ وَٱلرَّٰسِخُونَ فِی ٱلۡعِلۡمِ يَقُولُونَ ءَامَنَّا بِهِۦ كُلࣱّ مِّنۡ عِندِ رَبِّنَا ۗ ومَا يَذَّكَّرُ إِلَّآ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ

Istanbul 1397/1977 4farb-reprint Hasan Riḍā (Rıza) (605 S.)

هُوَ الَّذٖیٓ اَنْزَلَ عَلَيْكَ اْلِكِتاَبَ ِمْنُه َٰايَاتٌ مُحْكَمَاتٌ هُنَّ ُاُّم اْلِكِتاَبِ َوُاَخُر مُتَشَاِبهَاتٌ ؕ فَاَمَّا الَّذٖينَ فٖى قُلُوبِهِمْ زَيۡغٌ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَابَهَ مِنْهُ ٱبْتِغَآءَ الْفِتْنَةِ وَٱبْتِغَآءَ تَاْوِيلِهٖ ۚ وَمَا يَعْلَمُ تَاْوٖيلَهُۥٓ اِلَّا ٱللّٰهُ ۘ وَٱلرّاسِخُونَ فِی الْعِلْمِ يَقُولُونَ ٰامَنَّا بِهٖ ۙ كُلٌّ مِّنْ عِنْدِ رَبِّنَا ۚ وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ اِلَّآ اُوﰂلُوا الْاَلْبَابِ

Ankara 1398/1978 nur ʿanwān 4farb Hasan Riḍā (Rıza) (604 S.) zig Nachdrucke in verschie­denen Größen

هُوَ ٱلَّذٖیٓ اَنْزَلَ عَلَيْكَ اْلِكِتاَبَ ِمْنُه َٰايَاتٌ مُحْكَمَاتٌ هُنَّ ُاُّم اْلِكِtaَبِ َوُاَخُر مُتَشَاِبهَاتٌ ؕ فَاَمَّا الَّذٖينَ فٖى قُلُوبِهِمْ زَيۡغٌ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَابَهَ مِنْهُ ابْتِغَآءَ الْفِتْنَةِ وَابْتِغَآءَ تَاْوِيلِهٖ ۚ وَمَا يَعْلَمُ تَاْوٖيلَهُۥٓ اِلَّا اللّٰهُ ۘ وَالرّاسِخُونَ fِی الْعِلْمِ يَقُولُونَ ٰامَنَّا بِهٖ ۙ كُلٌّ مِّنْ عِنْدِ رَبِّنَا ۚ وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ اِلَّآ اُو𐻾لُوا الْاَلْبَابِ

مركز طبع ونشر قرآن جمهوريى اسلامى يران / 2005 ʿUṯmān-Ṭāhā-Type ش Tehran 1383

هُوَ الَّذیٓ اَنزَلَ عَلَيكَ الِكِتٰبَ مِنهُ ءايٰتٌ مُحكَماتٌ هُنَّ اُمُّ الِكِتٰبِ وَاُخَرُ مُتَشابِهٰتٌ ؗ فَاَمَّا الَّذينَ فی قُلوبِهِمْ زَيغٌ فَيَتَّبِعونَ ما تَشابَهَ مِنهُ ابتِغآءَ الِفتَنِة وَابتِغَآءَ تَأويلِهۦ ؕ وَما يَعلَمُ تَأويلَهۥٓ اِلَّا اللّٰه ُ ؕ وَالرّاسِخونَ فِی الِعلِم يَقولُونَ ءامَنّا بِهۦ كُلٌّ مِن عِندِ رَبِّنَا ؕ وَما يَذَّكَّرُ اِلّآ اُولُوا الَاَلبابِ

مركز طبع ونشر قرآن جمهوريى اسلامى يران Tehran 1431/ 2010 Nairizi-Type

هُوَ الَّذیٓ اَنزَلَ عَلَيكَ الِكِتٰبَ مِنهُ ءايٰtٌ مُحكَماتٌ هُنَّ اُمُّ الِكِتٰبِ وَاُخَرُ مُتَشابِهٰتٌ ؕ فَاَمَّا الَّذينَ فی قُلوبِهِمْ زَيغٌ فَيَتَّبِعونَ ما تَشابَهَ مِنهُ ابتِغآءَ الِفتَنِة وَابتِغَآءَ تَأويلِهۦ ۚ وَما يَعلَمُ تَأويلَهۥٓ اِلَّا اللّٰه ُ ؗ وَالرّاسِخونَ فِی الِعلِم يَقولُونَ ءامَنّا بِهۦ كُلٌّ مِن عِندِ رَبِّنَا ۚ وَما يَذَّكَّرُ اِلّآ اُولُوا الَاَلبابِ

2x476S. Persia o.J. قرٰان مجيد مصحف شريف قرآن كريم ازروى قرآن سُلطانى بخطّ حسن بريسى

هُوَالّذَٖىٓ اَنْزَلَ عَلَيْكَ اْلِكِتٰابَ ِمْنُه َﮣاٰيَاتٌ مُحْكَمٰاتٌ هُنَّ ُاُّم اْلِكِتٰابِ َوُاَخُر مُتَشٰابِهٰاتٌ َفَاَمَّا الّذَيٖنَ فٖى قُلوُبِهِمْ زَيْغٌ َفَيَتَّبِعُونَ مٰا تَشٰابَهَ ِمْنُه اْبِتَغٰآءَ اْلِفْتَنِة َو اْبِتَغٰآءَ تَاْوٖيلِهِ ۚ َو مٰا َيْعَلُم تَاْوِيَلهُٓ اِلءَّا اللّٰهُ ۘ وَالرّٰاسِخوُنَ فِی اْلِعْلِم َيُقوُلوَنَ ٰامَنّٰا بِهِ كُلٌّ ِمْن ِعْنِد َرِّبَنٰا ۚ َو مٰa َيْذَّكَّرُ اِلءّٰآ ُاوُلوا اْلءَٔا لْبٰابِ

Tehran: Itšārāt Islāmī 1383/2004. قرآن كريم Kalligraph ĠulāmReza ṢafaMahdawi

هُوَالّذَٖىٓ اَنۡزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ الۡكِتٰابَ مِنۡهُ ﮣايٰاتٌ مُحۡكَمٰاتٌ هُنَّ اُمُّ الۡكِتٰابِ وَاُخَرُ مُتَشٰابِهٰاتٌ َفَاَمَّا الّذٖينَ فٖى قُلوُبِهِمۡ زَيۡغٌ َفَيَتَّبِعُونَ مٰا تَشٰابَهَ مِنۡهُ ابۡتِغٰآءَ الۡفِتۡنَةِ وَابۡتِغٰآءَ تَاۡوٖيلِهِ ؕ وَمٰا يَعۡلَمُ تَاۡوٖيلَهٗۤ اِلءَّا اللّٰهُ ۘ وَالرّٰاسِخوُنَ فِی الۡعِلۡمِ يَقوُلُونَ ٰامَنّٰا بِهٖ كُلٌّ مِنۡ عِنۡدِ رَبِّنٰا ۚ وَمٰا يَذَّكَّرُ اِلءّٰآ اُولُوا الۡاَلۡبٰابِ

Delhi 2000 reprint Brokett (p. 26) Taj (1950 ohne Linien, 13 Zeilen 848 Seiten)

هُوَ الَّذِیٓۡ اَنۡزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ الۡكِتٰبَ مِنۡهُ ٰايٰتٌ مُّحۡكَمٰتٌ هُنَّ اُمُّ الۡكِتٰبِ وَاُخَرُ مُتَشٰبِهٰتٌ ؕ فَاَمَّا الَّذِيۡنَ فىۡ قُلُوۡبِهِمۡ زَيۡغٌ فَيَتَّبِعُوۡنَ مَا تَشَابَهَ مِنۡهُ ابۡتِغَآءَ الۡفِتْنَةِ وَابۡتِغَآءَ تَاۡوِيۡلِهٖ ۚ ࣟ وَمَا يَعۡلَمُ تَاۡوٖيلَهٓٗ اِلَّا اللّٰهُ ۘ وَالرّٰاسِخُوۡنَ فِی الۡعِلۡmِ يَقُولُوۡنَ ٰامَنَّا بِهٖ ۙ كُلٌّ مِّنۡ عِنْدِ رَب\nِّنَا ۚ وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ اِلَّآ اُولُوا الۡاَلۡبَابِ

/1991/2 Nachdruck von 1287/1870 Ṭašqend

هُوَ الَّذِیٓۡ اَنۡزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ الۡكِتٰبَ مِنۡهُ ٰايٰاتٌ مُحۡكَمٰاتٌ هُنَّ اُمُّ الۡكِتٰبِ وَأُخَرُ مُتَشٰابِهٰاتٌ ؕ فَاَمَّا الَّذِيۡنَ فِيۡ قُلُوۡبِهِمۡ زَيۡغٌ فَيَتَّبِعُوۡنَ مَا تَشَابَهَ مِنۡهُ ابْتِغَآءَ الْفِتْنَةِ وَابْتِغَآءَ تَـٔاۡ1وِيۡلِهٖ ۚ وَمَا يَعْلَمُ تَـۡأ2وِيلَهٓٗ اِلءَّا اللّٰهُ ۘ وَالرّاسِخُوۡنَ فِی الۡعِلۡمِ يَقُولُوۡنَ ٰامَنَّا بِهٖ كُلٌّ مِّنۡ عِنْدِ رَبِّنَا ۚ وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ اِلَّآ اُولُوا الۡاَلۡبَابِ

Kairo Šamarlī 1944 Kalligraph al-Ḥaddād

هُوَ ٱلَّذِیٓ أَنزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِنۡهُ ءَايَٰتࣱ مُّحۡكَمَٰتٌ هُنَّ أُمُّ ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ وَأُخَرُ مُتَشَٰبِهَٰتࣱ ۖ فَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ فِی قُلُوبِهِمۡ زَيۡغࣱ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَٰبَهَ مِنۡهُ ٱبْتِغَآءَ ٱلۡفِتْنَةِ وَٱبْتِغَآءَ تَأۡوِيلِهِۦ ۗ وَمَا يَعۡلَمُ تَأۡوِيلَهُۥٓ إِلَّا ٱللَّهُ ۘ وَٱلرَّٰسِخُونَ فِی ٱلۡعِلۡمِ يَقُولُونَ ءَامَنَّا بِهِۦ كُلࣱّ مِّن عِندِ رَبِّنَا ۚ وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ إِلَّآ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ

noch ein paar andere Ausgaben, die der gleichen Orthographie folgen
Damaskus 1977 ʿUṯmān Ṭāhā I (Vorlage für nächste)

هُوَ ٱلَّذِیٓ أَنزَلَ عَلَيۡكَ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِنۡهُ ءَايَٰتࣱ مُّحۡكَمَٰتٌ هُنَّ أُمُّ ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ وَأُخَرُ مُتَشَٰبِهَٰتٌۭ ۖ فَأَمَّا ٱلَّذِينَ فِی قُلُوبِهِمۡ زَيۡغࣱ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ مَا تَشَٰبَهَ مِنۡهُ ٱبْتِغَآءَ ٱلۡفِتْنَةِ وَٱبْتِغَآءَ تَأۡوِيلِهِۦ ۖ وَمَا يَعۡلَمُ تَأۡوِيلَهُۥٓ إِلَّا ٱللَّهُ ۘ وَٱلرَّٰسِخُونَ فِی ٱلۡعِلۡمِ يَقُولُونَ ءَامَنَّا بِهِۦ كُلࣱّ مِّنۡ عِندِ رَبِّنَا ۗ وَمَا يَذَّكَّرُ إِلَّآ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلۡأَلۡبَٰبِ

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the IDEO conference

Aziz Hilal's article Le Coran de 1924, histoire et enjeux politiques is excellent, well researched and important, but I see a problem, that I see with many papers given at the IDEO con­ference Le Coran du Caire, 1924 : texte, histoires et perspectives Le Coran du Caire : l’histoire:
he often takes what is said/writ­ten at face value.
E.g. he believes that already in 1912 the govern­ment wanted an new muṣ­ḥaf, that "the commit­tee" started to work long before 1919.

Asma Hilal writes in her intro­duc­tion/"Liminaire" to the journal the opposite, that King Fu'ad initiated the book in 1924

And he believes that its pu­bli­ca­tion in 1924 had to do with Fu'ad's am­bi­tion to become caliph.
So he has to assume that the project got "for­gotten"(ou­blié) and later re­vived (évo­qué à nou­veau),
As I see it, he over­looks three important points:
that Egypt declared its inde­pen­den­ce from the Ottoman Empire at the end of 1914 (after 300 years),
that the KFE was not a newly deviced written ver­sion as the Muḫalla­lati, but that the initi­ators wanted a non-Ottoman ver­sion (in a dif­ferent spelling and not in high-court-nasḫ),
that the main objective of (modernists in the Ministry of Educa­tion like) Hifni Bey was an easily read­able version:
  baseline,
  clear (positional) link between vowel sign and base letter,
  space between words,
  space between lines
I assume that the date of 12/13. January 1919 when the members of the commitee, the proof reader of the press and the Shaikh al-Azhar signed is ficti­tious, it is a couple of days before Hifni Bey died.
I assume that al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād wrote the muṣ­ḥaf to be set half a year or so before the book got printed, but that the govern­ment wanted to include the ini­tiator of the pro­ject among the signia­tories, so it had to be dated before his death.

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Aziz Hilal is better than his co‑presenters because he puts the emergence of the muṣ­ḥaf into a histori­cal context
‒ the power struggle between king/the palace, parlia­ment/the bour­geoisie (and azhar/the ʿulemaʾ) and
‒ the caliphal aspirations after the abolition of the Otto­man cali­phate on 3.3.1924,
forgetting Egypt's having left the Ottoman Empire after the start of WWI
His most original discovery is, that the only discussion of the KFE is by a German, by Gotthelf Berg­sträßer,
that Egyptian, Turkish, Arab, Indian, Indo­nesian and Per­sian ʿulemaʾ, poli­ticans and intel­lectu­als ignore it, or ‒ at least ‒ were silent and mute about it.
As important examples he cites
‒ the Diary/Journal by Muḥammad al-Aḥmadī al-Ẓawā­hirī, Šaiḫ al-Azhar 1929‒1935
‒ al-Azhar by ʿUṯmān Tawfīq and ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Yūnus, 1946
‒ al-Muslimūn wa-l-Aqbāṭ fī iṭār al-ǧamāʿa al-waṭaniyya, by Ṭāriq al-Bišrī, 1981, 899pp.
None mentions the KFE at all.

Ali Akbar and Necmettin Gökkır informed the con­ference that in the Malay world nobody, in Turkey just some experts took note of the event in Egypt.

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Hamdan’s contribution is redundant: it reiterates a con­clusion already stated in the taʿrīf and supports it with examples long available in ad‑Dānī and Abū Dāʾūd. There is no­thing here that advances the field. The real mis­judg­ment is not Hamdan’s, but that of the organisers who chose to present this as research. Mais c’est la vie. If he had compared the KFE with both the Muqniʿ and the Tan­zīl, and with an Indian print, a Maġribī print and the Mu­ḫalla­lātī of 1308/1890 (plus an Otto­man print) instead of only with mss., the paper would have been useful.
I assume that it would have shown that it follows most closely the Maġ­rib (in­dirct­ly Abu Daʾud Sulai­mān Ibn Naǧāḥ).

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some quotes from Azīz Hial's article:
Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl al-Ǧīzāwī (1874-1927), en poste entre 1917 et 1927
Signalons que son nom est mysté­rieu­sement remplacé par « ṣāḥib al-faḍīla, šayḫ ǧāmiʿ al-Azhar ». ‒ In the first small edition there is a seal: Muḥammad ʿAbu'l-faḍl
Dès 1912, le gouvernement égyptien comptait éditer un muṣḥaf qui dépasse en qualité et en précision celui de Riḍ­wān al-Muḫal­la­lātī. no source given
La postface à la première édition date du 10 rabīʿ al-ṯānī 1337 (13 janvier 1919)
Pourquoi ne pas se con­tenter de re­prendre le muṣ­ḥaf de Riḍwān al-Muḫalla­lātī et le corriger ?
si la postface de ce muṣḥaf porte la date du 13 janvier 1919, pour­quoi attendre le 10 juillet 1924 pour le publier ?
C’est dans ce contexte que le muṣḥaf, oublié depuis 1919, est à nouveau évoqué, afin de fournir un supplé­ment de légi­timité à la candida­ture du roi Fuʿād.

I disagree on most points. For me the date 13.1.1919 is fic­tious, it is two week before Ḥifnī Bey's death. It's made to honour him. And the date in al-Ḥaddāds seal is two years later!
Aziz Hilal assumes that making a govern­ment muṣ­ḥaf took a dozen years. I think, it took the one man who pre­pared the text (i.e. the written form ‒ the oral form being fixed for cen­turies) just a few weeks.
A major flaw in the author’s argument is the assump­tion that the 1924 govern­ment muṣḥaf served ‒ or was intended to serve ‒ as “un instru­ment au ser­vice de la candida­ture du roi Fuʾād au cali­fat”. The text asserts that “ce geste ré­haus­se­rait le prestige du roi”, yet simul­tane­ously con­cedes that the edition “est passée in­aper­çue” and that con­tem­porary poli­tical events “l’ont relé­guée au second plan”.
This creates a practical contra­diction. A propa­gan­distic instru­ment can­not have a legitimiz­ing effect if no pro­paganda is actually carried out. There is no evi­dence that the edition was publi­cized, invoked, or even mentioned by any of the religious or political actors of the time. No Azhar scholar refers to it, no news­paper dis­cusses it, and at no cali­phate con­gress it is distri­buted. If the muṣ­ḥaf was meant to strengthen Fuʾād’s can­di­dacy, it is striking that none of the pro­ponents of that candidacy ever mention it.

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The paper by Asma Hilali can be reduced to one sentence:
While in the 19th century, the Flügel edition served many Orien­ta­lists as text of reference,
now Q52, the text of the KFE, the Madina Muṣḥaf (Ḥafṣ by the KFCom­plex) and the simplified text of tanzil.net serve as reference.
Here I have to congratulate. Three years earlier, in the inviation to (her) con­ference, she had written

Le colloque propose une réflexion historique sur l’édition du Coran du Caire établie sous l’autorité du comité d’al-Azhar en 1924... l’édition du Coran du Caire ... est d’une impor­tance capitale dans la société mu­sul­mane moder­ne et con­tem­po­raine ... L’édition du Caire met à dis­position des musul­mans ... une version du texte corani­que qui de­vien­dra pro­gressive­ment la ré­férence reli­gieu­se, litur­gi­que ... la plus popu­laire dans le monde isla­mi­que. ... la popu­larité du Coran du Caire n’a jamais été re­mise en cause. ... un événe­ment religieux s’adres­sant aux musul­mans ... Ainsi, l’avène­ment du Coran du Caire a une portée qui dépasse la sphère de la cro­yance et qui prend sa place dans l’histoire de la civi­li­sation islamique : histoire des insti­tu­tions, histo­ire maté­rielle, histoire de la pensée reli­gi­euse et des études isla­miques.

These grandiose claims are gone. Al-ḥamdu-llāh

So one can't say that A.H. has learned NOTHING in the four years that she pre­pared the con­ference and jour­nal nummer.
But although she thanks Alba Fedeli, Antoi­nette Ferrand and Dennis Halft for comment­ing and correct­ing her text,
she still gets most things about the KFE wrong,
and she is not exactly rigorous with the facts: She writes that Ali Akbar had said that the KFE has no singular place, is just one among maṣā­ḥif from Singa­pore, Bombay, Lucknow and Istanbul.
What Ali Akbar really had said: There is no trace what so ever of the KFE. Maybe, students in Cairo or Mekka pilmgrims have brought a copy, but we do not know!
There are unbelievable statements by A.H.:
Although the KFE is important, because it is the first type set offset print of the qurʾān,
A.H. writes in the intro­duction of the journal that the KFE was both edited and calli­graphed by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Rifāʿī,
who had nothing to do with it. It was edited by al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥad­dād. It was typeset using the Arabic sorts designed by Muhammad G'a'far Bey in 1906.
Is it that A.H. is stupid or is this the con­sequence of the fact that she has never held a copy in her hands, that the IDEO did not acquire one of the many copies on the market?
That she calls putting a number after each verse « versi­fi­ca­tion » (instead of « numé­ro­ta­tion » ) sug­gests the former.
She claims that there was a special Ǧamāl ʿAbd al-Nāṣir edition, which I doubt because she does not give the date of publi­cation, and a King Fārūq Edition, which is defi­net­ly wrong.

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legends about the King Fuʾād Edition aka the CE

the KFA is the first printed qurʾān by and for Muslims
the KFA fixed an ill-defined text
the KFA made Ḥafs ʿan ʿĀṣim predominant
the KFA was an immediate success all ober the Muslim world
... was the first printed muṣḥaf following the rasm al-ʿuṯmānī
... was the child of an Azhar committee
The committee worked 17 years on its text
... was the necessary reaction to tons of mis­takes in impor­tant maṣāḥif (which had to be sunk in the Nile)
the source for rasm are not manu­scripts, but the lite­ra­ture about it; it is therefore a recon­struc­tion, the result of a re­writing of the usual text (Berg­sträßer)
it follows Abū Daʾūd Sulaimān Ibn Naǧāḥ

the taʿrīf says: ad-Dānī and Ibn Naǧāḥ, and when they dis­agree: Ibn Naǧāḥ (hence Ibn N.)

facts about the KFE

the KFA was written by Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḫalaf al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥad­dād alone
it was a sign of the indepen­dance from Istanbul (Nov 1914) (not from the UK Feb 1922, because it did not compete with the Royal British muṣ­ḥaf)
it was the first offset printed muṣḥaf
it was set with less than 300 sorts out of the 470 designed by Muḥam­mad Ǧaʿfar Bey in 1906
(out of which 406 were Arabic sorts, the rest: Persian, numbers, punctuation)
Muḥ Ḥifnī Bey Nāsif had advoated a muṣḥaf for people educated in state schools, reading novels and news­papers: base­line orien­ted with­out stacked liga­tures

before it was printed, all kasras were lifted on the galley proofs

here you see the Amīrīya set text and the same text set in Hyder­abad: mostly the same just with the kasras lifted, in the last example a different form of end-mīm was used (in the first line with the deep mīm kasra­tan are move slightly to the left)

The KFE (resp. al-Ḥaddād) did not recon­struct the spelling ac­cord­ing to Ibn Naǧāh, he just followed a Faz print.
I base this assertion on two groups of facts: the adding of ġāli­ban in the information.
first the original words 1342 to 1414:

the 1420 version

again in 2019

and in the grand edition:

and ‒ on the fact that al-Ḥaddād stated its sources (although ... see below),
He adopted mostly Marġribī features ‒ just the Kufic counting, and the pause signs are Eastern.
    ‒ the Maġribi rasm (largely after Abū Dāʾūd Ibn Naġāḥ)
    ‒ the Maġribī small substitute vowels for elon­ga­tion (needed because
        long vowel signs do not exist in the West)
    ‒ the Maġribī baseline hamzae before Alif at the begin­ning of the word (ءادم instead of اٰدم).
    ‒ the Maġribī distinc­tion into three kinds of tan­win
        (above each other, one after the other, with mīm)
    ‒ the Maġribī absence of nūn quṭni = nūn ṣīla.

    ‒ the Maġribī spelling at the end of the sura, which assumes that the next sura is spoken imme­diate­ly after­wards (and with­out basmala): tanwin is modified accordingly.
    ‒ the Maġribī absence of rukūʿāt.
    ‒ the Maġribī non-spelling of the vowel shortening.
    ‒ the Maġribī (wrong) spelling of /ʾallāh/.
    ‒ the Maġribī (and Indian) attraction of the hamza sign by kasra

in G24 hamza with kasra is below the base­line ‒ in the Otto­man Empire + Iran hamza stays above the line

‒ noted as­si­mi­la­tion like in the Magh­reb (and in India):

the first three lines are Otto­man (Rušdī, Ḥasan Riḍā in ʿIrāqī state edi­tions, Muṣ­ṭafā Naẓīf Qadir­ġalī Cairo 1911),
in the middle Giza 1924
then Maġribī Warš edi­tions ‒ note that in the older edi­tion the second stem (vertical stroke) of لا is lam+šad­da, while in the modern Algerian one, it is the first stroke.
the Maġribī writers, al-Muḫal­la­lātī, and G24 have no sign above the assi­mi­lated latter and a šadda above the assi­mi­la­ting one.



A new feature was the diffe­ren­tia­tion of the Maġ­ribī sukūn into three signs:
‒ the ǧazm in the form of a ǧīm with­out a tail and without a dot for vowel-less­ness,
‒ the circle for never to be pro­nounced,
‒ the (oval) zero: only pro­nounced after a pause.
(while before ‒ as in IPak ‒ the absence of any sign signified "not to be pro­nounced").
Further, word spacing, base­line orien­tation and exact placement of dots and dashes.
In 7:103 und 3:144+21:34 11:97+ 10:75+23:46+28:32+ 43:46 have the same rasm and are pro­nounced the same way, but written diffe­rently:
wa-malaʾihī
IPak: وَمَلَا۠ئِهٖ
Q52: وَمَلَإِي۠هِۦ
Both scripts use a mater lectio­nis in the rasm for /a/ and /i/ ‒ not for 7ā/ and /ī/,
since alif, yāʾ and wāw were the only letters available to signal the pre­sence of a vowel. in India alif is mute (= does not lengthens the fatḥa), yāʾ carries hamza
in the West alif carries the hamza, yāʾ is mute.

In 3:144 + 21:34 ʾa-faʾin
IPak: افَا۠ئِنْ
Q52: اَفإي۠ن
Inder und Türken machen das alif stumm
(früher setzten die Inder NICHTS auf das alif, heute den Stumm-Kreis,
die Türken das Wort qaṣr darunter)
die Araber sehen das alif als Hamza-Träger, das yāʾ als stumm.
Muṣṭafā Naẓīf lässt das stumme yāʾ in seinem (in Deutsch­land und Indo­nesia nach­ge­drucktem) 604er berkenar muṣḥaf in 21:34 weg: اَفَإنْ
Sonst hat er ‒ wie üblich ‒ alif und yā, aber in dem 604er fehlt das yāʾ und die meisten Heraus­geber der Re­prints stört(e) das nicht.

In 21:34 ʾa-faʾin
IPak: افَا۠ئِنْ
Q52: اَفإي۠ن
India and osm/Tur make the alif silent
(Indians used to leave the alif without any sign, now they put the silent making circle,
Turks write qaṣr underneath)
for Arabs alif carries hamza, yāʾ is silent.
Muṣṭafā Naẓīf in one of his manu­scripts (the 604 pages berkenar one) just drops the otiose letter. اَفَإنْ
It does not help to observe that in his other maṣāḥif he has the super­fluous letter. The 604 page muṣḥaf is often re­printed (not as often as the 522 page one, but in different coun­tries) without "correc­tion".
Similar 6:24 min-nabaʾi

al-Ḥaddād switched from وَمَلَا۠ئِهٖ to وَمَلَإِي۠هِۦ , and from افَا۠ئِنْ to اَفإي۠ن , should be proof enough, that he uncrtical­ly copied Morocco.
I do not claim that al‑Ḥaddād is wrong; I merely note that he offers no argu­ment for his choice.
Now alif hosts the hamza while the yāʾ is silent, whereas pre­viously the alif was silent and the yāʾ served as the seat for both the hamza and the /i/ vowel.
















Incidentally, MNQ once forgets to write the otiose letter:

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For me a look at different editions from the period is most revealing. It shows that the text of the KFE was no revo­lution, Muḫallalātī had brought that 35 years earlier. I was "just" an great impove­ment in read­abi­lity.

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Amīriyya 1924 /1342

The first offset‑printed muṣḥaf appeared in 1342/1924.
It had been initiated after Egypt’s inde­pen­dence from the Sublime Porte by Muḥammad Ḥifnī Bey Nāṣif (1271/1855–1337/1919), director of the Arabic Depart­ment in the Ministry of Educa­tion نظارة المعارف .
The typesetting was carried out at the Amīriyya Press المطبعة الأميرية in Būlāq,
and the printing took place at the Survey of Egypt مصلحة المساحة in Giza, which pos­sessed large offset presses for map production.
We have no reliable data on the size of the original print run. What can be said is that, a century later, fewer than a hun­dred copies can be traced in public cata­lo­gues and li­brary hold­ings — the online catalo­gues currently show no surviv­ing copy in Egypt. Since a second print­ing was pro­duced in Giza the fol­low­ing year, the initial edition was pro­bably well under one thousand. Here images from the copies held by Columbia and by Kiel Uni­ver­si­ty from the second run.

It is no accident that the IDEO, when held a conference on the 1924 print, had not a single copy by the Amīrīya, just a book made by Muḥam­mad ʿAbdar­Raḥmān called muṣ­ḥaf al-mu­ʿalim with 15 lines per page (instead of the original 12)

Unlike the Muḫallalātī, the King Fuʾād Edition was not intended for scholars but for students.
It contained no tafsīr,
did not mention any verse‑counting systems other than the Kūfān,
and did not mark any read­ings other than that of Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim — which would have required colour print­ing or a refined system of marginal notes using established abbre­viations.
In contrast to the traditional madra­sa setting, where students memorized the text with a šaiḫ and did not actually read from the page, the new state schools expected pupils to read in the printed muṣ­ḥaf; to make it as easy as possible, fewer than 300 of the 406 sorts de­signed for unvo­welled Arabic by Muḥam­mad Ǧaʿfar Bey in 1906 were used: since lām‑mīm liga­tures or lām‑ḥāʾ‑hāʾ liga­tures, for example, were never em­ployed, all vowel signs could be placed exactly above (or below) the letter. That the text was strictly linear, with no stacked liga­tures — a layout familiar from novels and news­papers — and that each page con­tained only twelve lines, was intended to make it ac­cessible to a “secular” reading public.
Here why it is the King Fuʾād Edition: page alif – i.e. the first page after an empty page 1 and 826 pages of qurʾānic text, and an other empty page – from 1924:

page alif, although no number is shown, but it is alif because three pages later is "dal" (د).

The KFE is not "The Cairo Edition" or "CE", because there are more than hun­dred dif­ferent Cairo editions,
more than five Warš editions are really Cairo editions, some with­out Cairo being men­tioned (many edition for Morocco), or even Algers given as publish­ing Place, others like Muḥam­mad Alī Ṣubaiḥ proudly mention Cairo

repro­duced by N. Suit.
Cairo Warš edition In the period between the "World Wars" several publishers published Warš maṣāḥif. Here some by Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī.

start of ǧuzʾ 30 (Ǧāiš ornamented)

kfe 1925

In 1925/1344 the first small king fuʾād edition was printed in Būlāq.

ZU

The 1924 print was a success, it showed that off­set worked well, but KFE was too heavy and too ex­pensive: only the bour­geoi­sie and orienta­lists could afford it:
The Amīrīya ordered presses of its own, smaller ones: to print books of about 20x15 cm.
1925 saw a second run of the KFE (in Giza), and the first of kfe (in Būlāq)
Except the colophon (see above: Būlāq instead of Giza) two pages were changed:

On the signature page (س ,in Bairut/Damas­cus/ʿAmman and Doha: 842) there are many things remark­able:
The whole page is a fiction. Nobody could have signed on 10.4.1337/12.1.1919 that a book printed in 1342 (or 1344) was fault­less. That the "signed" text changes (أصله is added in 1344)², that it has seals or not, should make experts suspicous, but nobody has noticed.
That the seal of the sole maker of G24, al-Ḥaddād, is marked "1339" but was used by its owner in 1337 is a miracle.
The ḫātima was made up to honor the ini­tiator of the project, Ḥifnī Bey Nāṣif, who had died in Feb. 1919.

note: "he was the one who wrote the book" of 1342 became "... who wrote the setting copy of the book"
Some Egyptians had taken the book for hand­written; it was made clear that this was not the case↩︎ zurück

kfeIb 1344/1926 Būlāq + second print/run stamped 1345/1927: two lines س saktah on (س)

kfeIc 1346/1928 ?????
kfeId 1347/1929 Būlāq this edition has TWO more changes: an added nūn on 775 ان لن for الن
whether 1347 brought this changes in one go or whether 1346 had one of them, I do not know since I have not seen a kfeIc (1346/1928); maybe it does not exist, maybe there was a third run of kfeIb in that year,

    and a changed dedica­tion page mention­ing the crown prince as well

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"reprints", copies, adaptations

Although the KFE was almost only sold to orien­tal­ists, in the seventies many publisher "remade" it on there light tables (lay­out tables): they cut films they had made of the 12 liner and re­arranged them: either just more lines on a page as was first done around 1933 in the "muṣ­ḥaf al-malik" al-maṭbʿa al-miṣiriyya (Muḥam­mad Muḥam­mad ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Ibn al-Ḫatīb):

on right hand pages there are catch words. Ornament lines were added.

The editor published a tafsīr around his re­arranged version:

Marwān Sowār, Damas­cus:

Dār aš-Šurūq:

or more and longer lines:

left: Bairut 1983, center: Cairo 1391/1971, right: Jorda­nian reprint of a Bairut/Damas­cus reprint of Cairo 1952
some editions with tafsīr keep the ori­ginal pages

other rearrange the text

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Only three years after the type set education ministry muṣ­ḥaf a hand written one with 17 lines per page (with 545 pages) was published by al-ʻĀmirah al-Bahīyah
aub aco002371 Cairo: al-Maṭbaʻah al-ʻĀmirah al-Bahīyah, 1346/1927/8 545pp .

(in the last line above, in II:17 you can see a small waw to lenghten ḍamma, a Maġ­ribī feature new to Egypt.)

On the next image you see 73:20 /allan/ without the silent alif, which was only added around 1928 in a small (Būlāq) edition.

Although the new govern­ment muṣḥaf was not written about ‒ neither in the press nor by scholars ‒ and although it took "ages" before the new spelling was standard, there were some publishers, who adopted the "Anadulsian" spelling at once.
While the AUB holds tafsīr al-ǧalālain (in the catalogue as qurʾān karīm ‒ with the definite article!), Havard has the muṣḥaf itself.

Qurʼān karīm Author: Suyūṭī, 1445-1505, author. Suyūṭī, 1445-1505 Maḥallī, Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad, 1389-1459 Muḥammad, ʻAbd al-Raḥmān, compiler. Category: Philosophy. Psychology. Religion Publisher: al-Maṭbaʻah al-ʻĀmirah al-Bahīyah Place of Publication: Miṣr Date of Publication: 1346 H., [1927? M.] Subjects: قرآن ‒ تفسير وتأويل ‒ اعمال قديمة حتى 1800 Qur'an ‒ Hermeneutics ‒ Early works to 1800 Provider: American University of Beirut
Like any specialist I have deviced some terms. For me only a copy by the Amīrīya Press, without a title page, with­out a duʿāʾ, with dif­ferent pagina­tion for the qurʾān and the appen­dixes is a King Fuʾād Edition (even those with­out the de­dication page after the revo­lu­tion, be­cause no­thing was changed after 1952 except names of experts stat­ing that every­thing is correct and infor­ma­tion about the place and date of print­ing/pub­lish­ing).
Only following the spelling and pauses deviced by al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād I call G24 (because first printed in Giza in 1332/1924).
So this is a handwriting litho­graphy using G24.

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Something in between: not a KFE by the Amīrīya, not a small kfe for students (i.e. small and with only 37 important changes to 1925), was published in 1959 by the Ministry of Auqāf: as far as I know: the ori­ginal of 1952 just with­out the decica­tion to the king and with less generous margins:

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Here a good reprint. 1402/1981 my the Muqahwī Press in Kuwait, with a title page:

and with a pagination of its own

But apart from that the 1952 KFA

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How to recognize a non-KFE?

a KFE has no title (i.e. an empty page 1)
no duʿāʾ
a catch word on the right hand page
pagination in the center of the footer
826 pages : an-nās on p.827 because the empty title page is counted
separate pagina­tion for the appen­dixes

The easiest way is: When there is a title page and/or a duʿāʾ

or when you see colour or page numbers higher than 827 – real KFE use separate pagination for the addi­tions.

The frame and the medallions often give away that a print is not by the Amīrīya, but not always: both the Taškent edition and one of the Bairūt editions use the ori­ginal frame, yet they are not KFEs.

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Amīriyya 1952 1371

Although KFE (27 x 19 cm; since 1952) has a different qurʾānic text (pp.2‒827) to the 1924 one (G24),
many experts are not aware of this, because it is the same type, the same page layout
(12 lines on 826 pages, with medallions for ǧuz, ḥizb, saǧa­da and saktha on the margin);

1952 has (ا), where 1924 counted ا , but did not print it.
All KFEs have an empty, un­paginat­ed, but counted title page, 826 pages of qurʾanic text
‒ al-fātiḥa being on page 2, an-nās on page 827 ‒ plus 23 pages, 22 being paginated (the last being ت)
In the KFE II of 1952 the first 845 pages are roughly iden­tical to KFE I,
the only difference being 666 changes in the qurʾānic text and that pages ج and ف are pa­ginat­ed ‒ they used to be counted, but no letter was printed.

No KFE has a prayer/duʿāʾ.
In the last royal edition, KFE II 0, the next page is the im­pressum of 1924

followed by seven pages

In the large KFE II a editions (start­ing in 1953), three pages are gone:
the dedication to King Fuʾād, its empty back­side, and the empty page after س .
The page after س ,the خاتيمة on page ف is moved to after ض ,
some­thing that hurts anyone who under­stands abjad.
ض is 800 in proper abjad, 26 in the KFE-version, fā' is 80 in real abjad, 17 in the simpli­fied version: 17 coming after 26 is a crime (80 after 800 is not better)

Before the four pages Table of Suras (without the sura #) an empty page is inserted.

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mistakes

Professors repeate what colleagues have written: the 1924 muṣḥaf is the standard.
Independent scholars, like A.A. Brockett, A.I. Mohr and myself take the opposite side.

Non‑committal fence-sitters say: Okay, Turks, Indians, Indo­nesians and Afri­cans (80% of Muslims) have nothing to do with it, but it is an immuntable standarad for some.
Not so
‒ the 1952er KFE differs from the 1924 edition in more than 600 places.
‒ "Madina"/the KFC have added a dagger in 2:72, inserted a "sakta" in 69:28‒29, deleted a small sīn in 88:22, and eliminated all لا pauses,
    ‒ added /ġāliban/ in the taʿrīf, acting as their own authority.
    ‒ added in 73:20 a (mute/assimilated) nūn (again).
    ‒ changed the writing in 2:264 /riʾāʾa/ placing hamzaʾ after the tooth/ instead of on it.

‒ Qaṭar got rid of an alif in 56:2


Only after ʿUṭmān Tāhā had written the Moroccan Ḥafṣ rasm according to the Otto­man ber­Kenar lay­out, and in the base­line style of the KFE and its stream­lined pauses signs, did a genuine winning match emerge ‒ becoming standard in the Mašriq.


Until 1970 the most common muṣḥaf in Syria was a 12line 815 pages copy written by Ḥāfiz ʿUṯmān the Elder (BHO for Turks),
while ʿIrāq reprinted version of two Ottoman calligraphers: ar-Rušdī and Ḥasan Riḍā (without assimilation, nor extra iḫfā/idġām tanwīn (as in the West and the KFE), nor adopting the Egyptian pauses.
without mute-circle, but with Ottoman instruction for writing and for reciting ‒
In 1978, 1970, 1980 Saʿudia, Qaṭar, Jor­danien and ʿIrāq again had the ar-Rušdī reprinted.

the category with most changes: in G24 initial alif has an hamza-sign (or a waṣl-sign); next some alifs are now alif ḫanǧarīya, assimilation is noted, three kinds of tanwīn; mute letters get a zero or an oval; fatḥa instead alif ḫanǧarīya including /allah/ for /allāh/; kasra instead of kasra ṭawīla/kesre‑i qāʾime

Even today, the ʿIrāqī state, ad-dīwān al-auqāf as-sunnī, reprints a muṣḥaf by Ḥasan Riḍā (d. 1920). For them 1924 did not make the standard.
That Yaman reprinted a muṣḥaf from the Ottoman period, is another indication of that.⁴

↩︎ return

While /riʾāʾ/ in 4:37 and 8:47 or in 2:264 was a mistake made inadver­tent­ly in Cairo

on 56:2 Qaṭar made a con­scious change

Because 55:2 is written with­out alif in Al-Mushaf Al-Sharif Attributed to Uthman Bin Affan in the Top­kapı Palace published by Tayyar Altıkulaç (İSAM) who adviced the Qaṭāris they followed the old manu­script. A mistake made in Cairo in 1924 got corrected in Madina.
The typesetter in Būlāq made a mistake in 2:264.
ʿUṯmān Ṭaha copied it faith­fully.
It was first corrected in the UT pc set version of the State of Kuwait, printed in Khartum,
later in UT3 of the King Fahd Complex.
The hamza should not sit on the tooth.

Auch wenn viele glauben, die KFA von 1342/1924 sei eine Aus­gabe non varia­tur,
hatte sie eine Reihe von Feh­lern, die ihre Kinder (die Aus­gabe von '52)
und Enkel (die diversen ʿUṯmān-Ṭaha-Aus­gaben) be­rich­tigt haben.

Da sind einmal die Setz­fehler, die nicht auf ihre geisti­gen Väter zurück­gehen. Berg­sträßer be­richtet, dass in 4:165 ein Punkt auf dem zai von /ʿazīzan/ fehlte und in 24:60 auf /bikāḥā/ auf dem hāʾ ein ḫāʾ-Punkt war. Diese Feh­ler wur­den so schnell kor­ri­giert, dass noch keine Bib­lio­thek ein feh­ler­haf­tes Exemplar gemeldet hat.







> Der schlimmste Fehler, der al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād unter­lief, war dass er in 7:137 /kali­mat/ mit ge­knüpften tāʾ schrieb;

das wurde in den großen KFAII-Aus­gaben (auf der Drucke­rei der Natio­nal­bib­lio­thek gedruckt) pro­fes­sio­nell, in den klei­nen kfe II (in Būlāq ge­druckt) not­dürftig kor­rigiert.


Doch war es wirklich ein Fehler? ḤḤ tat was er fast immer tat: er ko­pierte seine Warš-Vorlage ent­waršt (fast immer, weil bei Vers­nummern und Pausen folgte er öst­lich-ägyp­ti­schen Autori­täten, bei den sajā­dāt den Hana­fi­ten, beim Waṣl dif­feren­zierte er nicht nach dem Vokal bei vor­heriger Pause).

Komisch, dass dieser Um­stand vor mir nie­man­dem aufge­fallen ist, ob­wohl DAS neben Offset-Druck und grund­linien-orien­tierter Schrift, DER Punkt der KFA ist.

Alles was aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ 1952 tat, war Indien (und Libyen, Persien und der Türkei) zu folgen:







Anders als bei /kalimat/ (und /niʿamat/), die an einer Stelle so und an einer an­deren an­ders ge­schrie­ben wer­den,
wo entweder ein Alif im rasm steht oder nicht,
verhält es sich bei der Frage, ob kasra das Hamza-Zeichen nach unten zieht oder nicht.
Es ist nur eine Kon­ven­tion, aber eine Kon­vention, die entweder über­all eingehalten wird oder nirgends.

Während in Indien und dem Maghrib kasra das Hamza-Zeichen runter­zieht, tun sie es in Per­sien und im Os­ma­ni­schen Reich nicht ‒ also ta­ten es Ägyp­ter vor dem Er­sten Welt­krieg nicht, und ḤḤ unter­lief es ein­mal, das Hamza oben zu lassen. Dieser ein­deutige Fehler wurden 1952 be­richtigt.

Eine andere Korrektur, die 1952 gemacht wurde: /li‑ṭ‑ṭāġīna/ wurde 1924 mit einem nor­malen Alif, 1952 mit einem "Dolch-Alif" geschrieben. Wieder folgt ḤḤ Marrok­ko (und Libyen), aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ folgt niemandem ...

... Sollte er Parallel­stellen gefolgt sein? Denn auf Abū Dāʾūd Sulaimān Ibn Na­ǧāḥs Muḫ­ta­ṣar at-tibyīn kann er sich nicht berufen (der schweigt dazu). Was ein schlimmer Fehler wäre ...

Ein anderer Fehler ist ein falsch pla­ziertes Hamza. In 2:264 sollte das Hamza hinter dem Zahn sitzen (wie an den andern beiden Stellen). Durch Unacht­samkeit wurde es 1924 falsch gesetzt; später wurde das korri­giert.

Ein anderes Problem in 73:20
in allen großen KFAs steht الن ;
in den kleinen von 1347/1929 bis 1371/1952 ان لن
another problem occurs 73:20
the first KFE (1342/1924) has الن ;
from 1347/1929 to 1371/1952 small kfe's have ان لن
after 1952 both KFE and kfe have الن again; today Madina editions have: ان لن

Between verses 28 and 29 of al-ḥāqq (LXIX) the KFE has assimilation (šadda on /halaka/); Madina put saktah ⇒ no assimilation

Außer bei den Pausen sieht der KFK/Madina noch zwei Fehler in dem KFAs, zumindest berichtigt er die Stellen:

Dass der 1924er Gizeh-Druck voller Fehler ist, kann nicht bestritten werden. Schließlich hat die 1952er KFA (von aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ und Mit-Schaikhs) 900 davon berichtigt, schließlich sagt das König-Fahd-Kom­binat in Medina, dass von Anfang an (und bis 2017 in ihren Ḥafṣ-Druck-Ausgaben) alle 104 sequentiellen Fatḥatans falsch sind – nicht in ihrem online Programm und nicht in den Warš-Drucken.

dass die Typographen, die den 1924er vorbe­reiteten,
einfach das kasratan auch als fatḥa­tan be­nutzt haben;
(die rosa-Linie in dem Bild oben ist als Pfeil zu denken, das Zeichen wurde nach oben ko­piert)
dabei gehen arabische Kalli­graphen
von rechts nach links
von oben nach unten (bei Buch­staben)
vom Inneren der Zeile nach Außen (bei Zusatz­zeichen):
deshalb sitzt das zweite kasra bei kasra­tan links und unter dem ersten;
deshalb müsste das zweite fatha bei fatha­tan links und über dem ersten sitzen – tut es aber nur in den Warš-Ausgaben – auch der frühen und der späten von ʿUṯmān Ṭaha:

Nun könnte man dagegenhalten:
ein paar Fehlerchen, aber Riesen­vorteile,
etwa drei Stummzeichen: waṣla, Kreis und Null,
drei Sorten tanwin (an, in, un je dreifach).
Da bin ich anderer Meinung:
Das Stummzeichen steht nicht immer =
immer, wenn es klar ist, dass ein ḥarf al-madd gekürzt (sprich stumm) ist, steht es nicht.
Inder, Indo­nesier, Perser müssen da lachen (oder weinen): Klar ist denen erst mal gar nichts.
Wenn man kein Stumm­zeichen hat, okay.
Aber sobald man das Zeichen ver­wendet,
warum nicht immer, wenn es am Platz ist?

Und drei tanwīn-Zeichen.
Ich sage: entweder eines (wie bei Persern und Türken, Nord­indern) oder sieben.
Eines reicht, weil die ver­schiedenen Rea­li­sie­rungen des un­vo­ka­lisier­ten nūn eine ein-ein-deutige Kon­sequenz des fol­gen­den Buch­staben sind.

oder acht, weil es acht verschiedene Rea­li­sie­rungen gibt.

Es geht aber auch anders:
in vielen Gegenden (China, Bombay, Kerala, Indo­nesien bis vor zwanzig Jahren) und Zeiten gibt es – neben dem iqlāb mīm – das iẓhār nūn:
aus dem Sultanat von Delhi:

aus China:

aus Indien ("Bihari-Stil") – zwei­mal: in Zeile 2 vor ḫ, in Zeile 4 vor alif
und iqlāb mīm am Ende der dritten Zeile vor dem bāʾ am Anfang der vierten:

aus Daghestan (vermutet E. Cellard aufgrund der Ornamente, Farben usw) von 1290/1872:

die roten Buchstaben: in der ersten Zeile nach den rät­sel­haften Buch­sta­ben: zwei Län­gungs-waus, vorn in der Zeile dar­unter: fatḥa­tan, iẓ­hār-nūn vor ḫ,   gegen Ende der näch­sten Zeile erst ein šadda über wau,   iqlāb-mīm vor ba in der nächsten Zeile   Man beachte, dass nor­male šadda grau sind, nur As­si­mi­lie­rungs­šad­das sind rot.   In der unter­sten Zeile /miu warā᷉ʾī/ (teil­as­si­mi­lier­tes n an wau).   Auf der linken Seite am Anfang der fünf­ten Zeile teil­assimi­liertes nūn an wau,   am Anfang der sech­sten Zeile kasra für die nor­ma­les Lesung (ʿĀṣim) und rotes wau für Warš.

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Šarikat al-ʾiʿālānāt aš-šarqīya 1382/1961

With the next edition we have a problem. As I see it, they good thick paper but bound it cheaply. So most surviving copies have been rebound (i guess early by a careful owner, who knew that the small kfe is useless)

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Ǧaʿfar Muḥammad Muṣṭafà 1961/3
16 lines 486 berKenar pages, jūz/ḥizb, saǧada, sakta in the frame (there is hardly a margin), no catch words

here a (ṣaǧada) cartouche in the frame

important on the next page: although printed in 1961 and 1963, Šaiḫ ʿAbdal-Fattāḥ al-Qāḍī, who had been on the 1952er committee for the new KFE, signed in 1957:

a handwritten duʿāʾ (in a ductus in keeping with the Ǧaʿfar Bey typeface)

note: the 1919 date as in all KFE/kfes

al-Maṭbaʿa al-Miṣrīya wa-Maktabuhā المطبعة المصرية ومكتبتها 1963 1383 (14 lines)

from Dār Šurūq:

the round stamp:
الرحمن علم القران                       Muḥ Muḥ ʿAbd al-Laṭīf ibn Ḫatīb

المطبعة المصرية ومكتبتها
below
تأسست عام ١٩٢٤ محمد محمد عبد اللطيف ابن الخطيب

On the page above the pauses are like 1924 (on the right I added images of the Tschudi copy digitalized in Basel), not like 1952 (of which I do not have a copy by the Amiriyya, only from ʿAmmām – yellowish near the frame – and from Qaṭar

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al-Hayʾah al-ʿĀmmah li-šuʾūn al-Maṭābiʿ al-Amīriyyah الهيئة العامة لشؤون المطابع الأميرية 1961-1966

I said: When there is a title page, it is not a King Fuʾad Edition.
That is the case, but in the 1960s there were official editons on 827+around 20 pages;
they were not royal, not even Egyptian, but from the United Arab Republic

Amīriyya 1978 1398

on the left from the pocket version 1977, on the right the normal one

the large Qaṭarī reprint 1988

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1960s, 1970s, 1980s in the Mašriq

While in Egypt editions on 826/7 pages were replaced by reduced page editions (except some tafāsīr), Bairut, Dimašq, ʿAmmān, Doha and Kuwait printed almost hundred editions, mostly in one volume, some in 30 parts.
While die KFA until the end re­produced both the Pub­lication details of 1924 and 1952, the ʿAmmān edition that survives in archive.org has three colo­phons:

I am unhappy with the pagination in the Bairut, Damas­cus, ʿAmmān, and Doha editions, which dis­pense with the Amīrīya's separate pa­gination for the non‑Qurʾānic material, i.e. running the numbering straight through to 852 or 855 respectively — the Šāmī editions includ­ing seven pages on the dif­ferences from 1924 (as in KFA II), the Qatari one having four pages of duʿāʾ al-ḫātima instead. In doing so, however, all these continuously paginated editions commit a pagi­nation mal­practice: they do not count the blank page between the Qurʾānic text and the ap­pen­dices, so al­though in the Qurʾānic section all even‑number­ed pages are on the right, the ap­pendices have odd‑numbered pages on the right‑hand side.

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some numbers

There are (at least) seven different King Fuʾād editions:
KFEI 1342/1924 printed in Giza + second print 1343/1924
kfeI 1343/1925 printed in Būlāq with six added seals/signatures and added أصله
kfeIb 1344/1926 Būlāq + second print/run stamped 1345/1927: two lines س saktah on (س)
kfeIc 1346/1928 ?????
kfeId 1347/1929 Būlāq this edition has TWO more changes: an added nūn on 775 ان لن for الن .
whether 1347 brought these changes in one go or whether 1346 had one of them, I do not know since I have not seen a kfeIc (1346/1928); maybe it does not exist, maybe there was a third run of kfeIb in that year,     and a changed dedication page mention­ing the crown prince as well

KFEII 1371/1952 printed by Dār al-Kutub in Labūdīya St.
KFEIIa same as above with torn out alif and bāʾ (one leaf)
KFEIII 1952–1965 (or so) same as KFEII but with­out alif and bāʾ (skipped)
KFEII has 666 changes to KFEI:
– about 515 changed pauses
– 114 changed sura title boxes
– 33 changed tanwīn at the end of the suras (i.e. fore the basmala)
– 4 changes in the rasm
– seven pages on these changes including the signatures of the 1952 editors
– س saktah on (س) – the only change taken from the Būlāq editions; neither
    the seals, the changed de­di­cation, ان لن , nor أصله are adopted
later KFE edition (III, IV, V) have just different men stand­ing for the correctness of the edition, and different dates (neither just runs, nor fresh editions)

kfeII is an unimportant "school edition"; the Amīrīya reused the plates of 1347/1929 with 37 changes made on the plates:
37 of the 666 made in the large edition, of course without the added text on the changes,
without the leaner sura title boxes, without the new pauses.
kfaII is so bad that the Amiriyya made an effort for a better small/cheap edition with the correct Q52 text (and pauses), before finally making a freshly set edition on 525 pages
with for possible pauses melted three into one (ۚ   ۗ   ۖ   ۛ →  ۚ )
latter KFE edition (III, IV, V) have just different men standing for the correctness of the edition, and different dates (nor either just runs, nor fresh editions)

btw, the 1952 change section has the same structure of signatures as the 1924 edition:
first, the Chief Qārī of Egypt.
At the end, simply attesting to the correctness:
the chief copy‑editor of the Amīriyya Press and the Shaykh al‑Azhar.
And in between, three more men, one of them an Arabist.
The only difference is: while in 1924 there were three men from the educational sector,
in 1952 three come from the religious sphere.

This picture from Muhammad Hozien shows that KFAII has 54 gatherings with 16 pages each. Probably KFAI has the same binding.

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the afterlife

Although the KFE, the kfes never dominated the book market (even in Egypt!), although the text G24 is history
Q52, the text of KFEII (KFE 52) lives on, both on the net (e.g. tanzil.net, corpus.quran.com, coranica.io quran.com, KFC, quranwbw.com) and in the most common (i.e. the Ḥafṣ) Medina muṣḥaf.

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Claims and Realities

the King Fuʾād Edition was not an Azhar coran, but a government, a Ministery of Education, Government Press Ḥafṣ edition ... was not the fruit of committee deliberations over 16 years, butthe work of one man, the Šaiḫ ʿUmūm al‑Maqāriʾ al‑Miṣrīya, in a few weeks ... did not standarize a fluid text, but was type set and offset printed ... was not an ʿUṯmanī reconstruction, but a switch to Moroccan spelling ... was an immediate successwith orientalists only ... did not fix the text once and for all, but could not fix the oral form, because it had been fixed long ago,
did not fix the written form (ان لن vs. الن) in 1952 515 pauses were changed,
many more in Madina + a saktah, a /s/ ⇒ /ṣ/ ...) ) ... was not valided on 10 rabīʿ aṯ-ṯānī 1337 /13. January 1919, but only before the binding in 1924 ... was not meant for experts, but brought linear type with well placed harakat,
space betwen words and lines, and with numbers after verses


The legends

Around the 1924 print, a thick layer of academic mythology has grown. Western scholarship has uncritically repeated a tidy, appealing narrative: that it is "the Cairo Edition", the "Azhar Qurʾān", the product of a grand committee working meticulously for seventeen years, and a radical palæographical restoration of the pristine rasm treatise of Ibn Naǧāḥ. It is further claimed that it was an immediate commercial success across the entire Muslim world and that its specific orthography prompted a global wave of printing because it finally provided a fixed, authorized text.
Every single one of these assertions is wrong.
A telling symptom of the general blindness toward the material history of the modern mushaf is the widespread conviction that the King Fuʾād Edition was a manual scribal artifact. In her concluding remarks to the proceedings of Le Coran du Caire 1924, Asma Hilali famously claimed that the edition had been "edited and calli­graphed by ʿAbd al‑ʿAzīz al‑Rifāʿī"—an artist who had absolutely nothing to do with the Egyptian project. Yet Hilali is merely the latest to repeat a fundamental category mistake: both Adrian Brockett and the prominent translator A. Theodor Khoury similarly treated the KFA as a handwritten, calligraphed masterpiece.
While this error might seem minor at first glance, it carries significant analytical consequences. By misidentifying a highly engineered industrial product—painstakingly typeset at the Amiriya Press using the 400 physical lead sorts designed by Muḥammad Ǧaʿfar Bey in 1906—as a manual calligraphy, scholarship completely detached the text from its technological reality. It led researchers to look for stylistic and scribal idiosyncrasies where they should have looked for mechanical systems and political-æsthetic decisions. The KFE was an unprecedented triumph of the mechanical composing room, not the calligrapher's reed pen.
Similarly, the narrative of the "seventeen-year committee" falls apart under historical scrutiny. There is no trace of collaborative deliberation or commission debates before the text went to press. In reality, the text was prepared by one single man: the chief reciter Muḥammad Ḫalaf al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād. Of the other three men traditionally listed in the "committee," one had already died in 1919, and the remaining two had no editorial or text-critical role beyond proofreading for typos. The fiction of the committee's signatures, dated to January 13, 1919—just weeks before the project's true political initiator, Ḥifnī Bey Nāṣif, passed away—was a bureaucratic concoction designed post-factum to honor Nāṣif's memory, while al-Ḥaddād’s actual editorial work was executed years later.
Furthermore, the KFE was neither a commercial success nor did it establish a global standard in 1924. The bulky, heavy, and expensive 826-page layout was a commercial failure that only the bourgeoisie and Western orientalists could afford. It did not spread the Ḥafṣ reading across the Islamic world; Ḥafṣ had already been made dominant centuries earlier by the geopolitical expansion of the Mamluks, Safavids, Ottomans, and Timurids. The 1924 text only achieved regional and eventually global standardized dominance decades later, when its specific spelling was uncoupled from its original 826-page book form and piggybacked onto entirely different layouts: the 522-page horizontal rhythm of the Šamarlī (1975) and the 604-page berkenar geometry of the Medina Mushaf (1978).
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