Showing posts with label ġāliban. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ġāliban. Show all posts

Monday, 21 October 2019

Kein Standard Two (How did they make Gizeh 1924?)

Angelika Neuwirth, an expert on the genesis of the Qur’an before 623,
knows nothing about the history of printed maṣāḥif,
but she writes about it:
the mushaf, i.e. the text put onto sheets, bound between two covers, was trans­mitted through the centuries, genera­tion by generation ... to end up in the last century, in 1925, in the form of a printed text
A. Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010. p. 190
I fail to understand, what Neuwirth wants to say.
Does she ignore that the Qur’an was printed in 1537, in 1694, in 1698, in 1787 for the first time by Muslims in St. Peters­burg, in 1834 in Leipzig, in the 1830s ten diffe­rent prints in Persia and India?
Does she ignore that from 1875 each year thousands were printed in Istan­bul and India?
What does she mean by "end up in the form of a printed text"?
What does she want to say by "trans­mitted genera­tion by genera­tion"?
Okay, before sound could be recorded, the oral text had to be taught from teacher to pupil:
it was indeed transmitted through the ages.
But was that necessary for the muṣḥaf?
Was it not possible to read (and copy) a muṣḥaf written by a person dead at the time of reading the manu­script?
It was not common to give an isnād of scribes who each have learned the art of writing a muṣḥaf from an older scribe/ ḫaṭṭāṭ.
When we believe the main editor of the King Fuʾād Edition it was a re­con­struction,
based on the oral text and Andalusian books from the 11th and 14th century on the ortho­graphy of the qurʾān.
I believe it was an adaptation of a printed copy of the trans­mission Warš to the normal Egyp­tian reading of Ḥafṣ.
For sure, it was not the last in a chain of trans­mitted maṣāḥif, from Egyp­tian scribe to pupil (through the gene­rations).

Neuwirth has never seen the King Fuad Edition.
Consistently she cites it wrongly.
The book has no title on the cover, no title page; the first page is empty,
the first page with something on it, has the Fatiḥa.
In the afterword, it refers to itself as "al-muṣḥaf aš-šarīf,"
in the dedication to King Fuʾād it calls itself "al-muṣḥaf al-karīm".
Because it has no title, according to the German library rules,
the given/ assumed/ generic title is in brackets: "[qurʾān]",
but Neuwirth gives two different one in the notes:
„Al-Qur‘ân al-Karîm, Kairo 1925“ (Der Koran als Text der Spät­antike, p. 30)
and „Qur‘ân karîm 1344/1925“ (Der Koran als Text der Spät­antike,. p. 273).
Neuwirth has never read the information/ تعريف at the back of the King Fuʾād Edition,
nor read and understood the article Gott­helf Berg­sträßer wrote about it.
Otherwise, she would know that the editors claim to have re­con­struc­ted the muṣḥaf from scratch.
The chief editor is not a scribe, but the chief reader/ qāri of Egypt: he knows the qurʾān by heart ‒ in seven to twenty trans­missions.
In the تعريف he states that he has tran­scribed the oral text according to a didactic poem based on two medieval books on the basic letters for writing the qurʾān,
on a Maghrebian book on vowelling but with Eastern vowel signs and other books ...
I interrupt, because I do not believe, what is written in the تعريف
I am convinced that the editor took a Warš muṣḥaf and adopted it to Ḥafṣ.
For the vowelling, he did not have to replace Maghre­bian signs by Eastern signs because the system developed by Al-Ḫālil ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī was current in the West because printing colour dots was too complicated/ expensive at the time.
The "information" further informs us that verse numbering and litur­gical divisions are according to a recent Egyptian scholar, Abū ʿĪd Riḍwān ibn Muḥammad ibn Sulaimān al-Muḫalla­lātī, again not informing us that they adopted the Moroccan system in which a ḥizb is half a ǧuz ‒ not a quarter as before, as in Turkey, Persia, India, Nusantara.
There are many more things, in which Egyptian maṣāḥif used to be like Ottoman, Persian, Indian and Indone­sian maṣāḥif,
in which from now on they are like Moroccan ones ‒ with­out giving an authority to whom the King Fuʾād Edition is said to adhere.
—> The KFE just follows Maghrebian maṣā­ḥif, a switch of tra­dition, the opposite of what Neu­wirth wrote, the opposite of what Berg­strä­ßer believed.
The KFE has three different forms of tanwīn, and three dif­ferent forms of sukūn ‒ to be precise: the Moroccan sukūn for "un­pro­nounced" (circle or oval) and the Indian sign for "un­vowelled" (clearly the first letter of ǧazm without the dot not "ḫa with­out the dot" as they write).
Egyptian prints used to have signs for long vowels, now they have the Maghre­bian system, in which a vowel sign AND a vowel letter (ḥarf al-madd) is needed (hence a small letter is added when­ever neces­sary).
When a word starts with /ʾā/ they used to write the letter hamza (i.e. an alif) + a turned fatḥa,
now they copy the Maghrebian practice:
seatless hamza-sign+fatḥa followed by a lengthe­ning alif.
This does not change the rasm, it is not mentioned in the scholarly litera­ture cited.
Vowelless nūn not followed by h,ḥ,ḫ,ʾ,ʿ,ġ used to have a sukūn (as in Osm, Soltani, IPak), now they have nothing because they are not pro­nounced (clearly as them­selves - not iẓhār) because they are (partly) assimilated or reduced.
compare the beginning of al-Baqara from Bombay vs. Medina (aka IPak vs. Q52):

There used to be two (or three) different madd signs, now there is just one.

In all these things the King Fuʾād Edition clearly copies Maġribi Warṣ muṣāḥif ‒ unlike pauses, numbering, rasm, dotting they are not described in books ON the matter, al-Ḥaddad could only copy them from maṣā­ḥif. Strangely neither Berg­sträßer, nor anyone else noticed that.
And there is more: no more sign for Baṣrī numbers, no more small nūns, when tan­wīn before alif is spoken as a/u/i-ni (called "ṣila nūn" or on the sub­continent "quṭnī nūn"/tiny nūn).
To summarize:
Except for the transmission of Ḥafṣ, the Kufī numbering, and a new pause system (based on Saǧāwandī), and the letter font of the Amiriyya (by Muḥammad Ǧʿafar Bey)
this is Maghribian.
That the rasm was not ad-Dānī, not al-Ḫarrāz was clear. When people found out that it was only 95% Ibn Naǧāḥ, the editors in Medina and in Tunis added "mostly" (ġāliban / fĭ l-ġālib) to the informa­tion at the end of the book. Since it is 99% Maghribian, I guess al-Ḥaddād just adopted an existing muṣḥaf ‒ the "reconstruction" is a myth.

The other great German qurʾān expert, Hartmut Bob­zin, gives the right year, he writes:
the publication of the so-called "Azhar Koran" on 10 July 1924 (7.Dhū l-hiǧǧa 1342 in the Islamic calendar)
FROM VENICE TO CAIRO: ON THE HISTORY OF ARABIC EDI­TIONS OF THE KORAN (16th ‒ early 20th century), in Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution A cross-cultural encounter. West­hofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima 2002. p.171
which is not correct either: on that day the printing was finished,
before the book could be published it had to be bound.
One can be a good translator of the qurʾān, without knowing a thing about publishing,
but maybe it is not a good idea to write about publish­ing without knowing a thing about it.
And the King Fuʾād Edition is not the Azhar-Koran, nor known as such.
It was produced by the Govern­ment Press under the direction of the Chief Qārī of Egypt, assisted by men from the Education Ministry and the Pedago­gical College on Qaṣr al-ʿAinī.
In the end, the chief of al-Azhar and the chief copy editor of the Govern­ment Press vouched for correct­ness.
Only 1977 to 1987, an "Azhar Koran" was printed ‒ in five different sizes, different bindings and get-ups (with two reprints in Qaṭar, the last one in 1988)



Everything Bobzin writes is completly wrong
Der "Azhar-Koran" löste eine wahre Flut gedruck­ter Koran­ausgaben in allen isla­mi­schen Ländern aus, da man sich nun für den Koran­text auf eine aner­kannte Auto­rität stützen konnte.
The "Azhar Koran" prompted a veritable flood of printed editions of the Koran through­out the Islamic world, as there was now a recognized authority on which the Koran text could be based. ibidem
 
If there was a wave of prints after 1924 ‒ unsubstantiated by Bobzin ‒ it was to due to offset printing, has nothing to do with the KFE. The only print caused by it, the Kabul print of 1934, is "unknown" by the experts.
Die Entscheidung der Kairiner Gelehrten für den Text nach der Les­art "Hafs 'an 'Asim" ver­schaffte ihr nunmehr gegen­über allen anderen Les­arten einen ent­schei­denden Vor­teil.
there was a pronounced tendency to understand the "Azhar Koran" as virt­ually a "textus recep­tus", in other words as the only binding Koran text. The decision by the scholars in Cairo in favour of the text in the "Hafs 'an 'Asim" version secured it a decisive advan­tage over all other versions. ibidem
That Ḥafṣ experienced an upsurge due to the KFE is nonsense. Only in the Sudan it gained a bit ‒ but only because it is closer to the Arabic taught in state schools (which had more pupils now).
Allen "modernen" Koranaus­gaben bleibt eine Gemein­sam­keit ..., daß für die Her­stellung des Satzes keine be­weg­lichen Lettern ver­wendet werden, son­dern stets ein kalli­graphisch ge­stalteter Text zu­grunde liegt, der ent­weder litho­gra­phisch oder photo­mecha­nisch ver­viel­fältigt wird.
all the "modern" editions of the Koran still have one thing in common ... above all in the fact that no movable type is used to set the pages, which are, instead, always based on a
calli­graphi­cally designed text which is reproduced either by litho­graphy or by photo­mecha­nical pro­cesses.

Untrue: KFE'24, Kabul'34, Hyderabad'38 and the Muṣḥaf Azhar aš-Šarīf are type set.
Im Hinblick auf den Text folgte [Flügel] nicht einer einzigen Les­art, son­dern bot einen Misch­text (wie das übri­gens in den meisten Hand­schriften der Fall ist).
As regards the text itself he did not adhere to a single reading, but instead provided a mixed text (as was the case in most manu­scripts). p.169
Again, Bobzin states a fact ("most manu­script editions are a mix of readings") without proving it. It would be inter­esting to get informa­tion about one or two, not to mention "most" manuscripts mixing readings!

In the meantime, young brilliant scholars have surpassed Neuwirth and Bobzin in writing nonsense. Although there are more than a thousand editions printed in Cairo, they call the first (and for over fifty years: the only) Gizeh print "the Cairo Edition (CE)". It is as calling Notre-Dame de Paris "the Paris Novel (PN)."





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Tuesday, 21 May 2019

millions good editions possible

There is only one qur'ān.
But there are many differences in the editions.
‒ differences in the style of writing, the gra­phic form
‒ different divisions (verses, manāzil, aḥzāb, pages ...)
BTW: the suras and their order are the same in all editions,
      but their names can be different,
      the informa­tion given in the Header can be dif­ferent,
‒ differences in the words, the sound of the qurʾān, the (micro)­meaning ‒
      this is meant with the ten canoni­cal readings,
      the twenty trans­missions, the four ad­ditional
      (less canonical) readings plus all the variants that are not re­cognized.
HERE I do not talk about the recitation style, nor about the (national) accents of re­citors,
but just about
‒ differences in the letters, writing of the words = the rasm,
‒ differences in the additional signs for vowells, doubeling,
      extra length, silence, required response.
When you multiply all of these, there are thousands of pos­sibili­ties.
You might say, but when one writes in Fāsī style, it is the trans­mission of Warš, the rasm of Ḫarrāz with Maġri­bian sub­divisions and additonal signs, Medinese verse endings.
Yes, very likely, but not certain.
Here images from two printed Tunisian editions
      of the trans­mission of Ḥafṣ written in Maġribī style:
If you a sceptical and lazy, here is mālik from the Fatiḥa with /ā/ red added alif:
And here the one verse where Ḥafs allows both fatḥa (black) and ḍamma (red): /ḍaffin/, /ḍuffin/

And when you think, that for the rasm there are five, six or maybe ten pos­si­bili­ties, you are wrong.
When you write a muṣḥaf (or prepare a printing) you do not have to stick to one authority.
You are free to write one word (even a word at one particular place) with a vowel letter or without.
The King Fahd Complex has adopted the rasm of the Qahira1952 Edition (which is rather obscure) changed one word (in 2:72), Qaṭar has changed another word (in 56:2). Indo­nesia (Ministry of Reli­gious Affairs) and Iran (the Center for the Printing and Dis­tri­bution of the Holy Quran) have made wild choices ‒ at least these are docu­ment­ed (albeit not in the muṣḥaf).
BTW, I called Q52 obscure, because it does itself not stick to an authority. There­fore careful editors have added "mostly"/ġāliban or "in the most"/fil ġālib to the state­ment made in the afterword, that the rasm is according to Ibn Naǧāḥ.

So millions of different ‒ equally valid ‒ editions are possible, thousands do exist.


I am mainly interest­ed in ortho­graphy:
i.e. the list of the written words ‒ but unlike Webster or Le Dictio­naire de l'Aca­démie Fran­ҫaise a word can be written dif­ferently at different places
(سِيمَىٰهُمۡ (7:48
(2:273, 47:40, 55:41) سِيمَـٰهُمۡ
(سِيمَاهُمۡ (48:29
The German expert for Qurʾānic paleo-orthography, who has studied the old mss.
‒ Diem has "just" studied the Nabataen precursor ‒
is convinced that first the yāʾ was used for writing the /ā/,
then nothing, before the modern strategy ‒ using an alif ‒ became common.
I do not give his name because I have to critize him strongly:
Although quoting the text of the Gizeh Qurʾān (1924/Būlāq 1952), which he calls "The Standard Text", he uses a dotted yāʾ where Gizeh uses an un­dotted one,
and he uses the circle for sukûn, where Gizeh uses the Indian (by now Qurʾānic) Jazm-sign.
He does not see that graphic style, di­visions, rasm writing, and the way of voweling are inde­pendent of each each.
what I have shown above.
Or even more to the point:
the differences in sounds (the qiraʾāt) reflected in very few differences in the rasm,
in few cases by different diacritical points,
but mainly by hamza sign, šadda and vowel signs
and most rasm differences (dif­ferences in writing long vowels)
are two separate things.

Just because the only edition of the trans­mission of Qālūn according to Nāfiʿ he owns, follows the rasm described by ad-Dānī in the Muqnī,
he calls that rasm "the Qālūn rasm",
he takes the delivery boy for the pizza backer.

Okay, I went too far.
Between Kufa (Ḥafṣ and five others) and Medina (Warš and Qālūn) there are 30 differences in the rasm.
When you look at the beginning of 46:15 in my pictures, there are two differences:
aḥsana(n) vs. ḥusna(n); this is a difference in sound, a difference between qiraʾāt, and
insān written with alif or without (i.e. with substitution alif = dagger alif = small alif = quṣair); this is a difference in writing only, a difference in the rasm.
The three last lines are all the trans­mission of Qālūn, the last but three with the Dānī-rasm, the two at the very bottom with Ibn Naǧāḥ's rasm,
which is common for Warš and Qālūn ‒ except for the edition pushed by Qaḏḏāfī ‒ and is used for Ḥafṣ since 1924 (common by now).
There are a few thousand difference in words/sound/local meaning ‒ rarely changing great things.
There are a few thousand difference in writing ‒ not affecting the sound/words/meaning at all.
Qālūn vs. Ḥafs belongs to the first category,
rasm writing (according to ad-Dānī or al-Arkātī or based on nine good editions) on the second.
And there is a little overlap: 30 differences in the rasm reflecting differences in the "readings".
but the Qālūn muṣḥaf the expert had in his hand is now called muṣḥaf ad-Dānī, because that's what sets it apart, not the reading.

Merkaz Ṭab-o Našr

from a German blog coPilot made this Englsih one Iranian Qur'an Orthography: Editorial Principles and Variants The Iranian مرکز...