When was the KFE made?

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 authors:
he often takes what is said/writ­ten at face value.
E.g. he believes that already in 1912 the govern­ment wanted an new mushaf, 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 fictious, 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 fellows 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.

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Omar Hamdan's article is almost useless.
His conlusion ‒ that the KFE does not closely follow the old mss, but either ad-Dānī/Abu Daʾud or a modern print (maybe the Mu­ḫalla­lātī), was obvious before he started looking at it.
If he had compared the KFE with both the Muqniʿ and the Tanzīl, and with an Indian print, a Maġribī print and the Mu­ḫalla­lātī (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.
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.

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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 the text of the KFE, the Madina Mushaf (Ḥafṣ by the KFCom­plex) and the simplified text of tanzil.net serve as reference.
Here I have to congratulate. Three years ago, in the inviation to (her) conference, she had written

... 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.

All this bla-bla is 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 lies: 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.
During the conference Ali Akbar 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 set with about half of the sorts designed by Muḥammad Ǧaʿfar Bey (m. 1916) ‒ stacked ligatures, and mīm without white in the middle were used in the afterwords, but not in the qurʾānic text because Ḥifnī Bey Nāṣif wanted it to be clear = easily readable.
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.

‒ ­

The Sanaʿāʾ Palimpsest

When I started to blog, I said that the times are exciting because of
old Arabic inscriptions being de­ciphered,
the Sanaʿāʾ fragments, esp. the S.P.,
and because we understand that manu­scripts belonging to different col­lections
once were one muṣḥaf.
One of the first who had access to the high-resolution and to the ultra-violett images of the S.P. made by Sergio Noja Noseda and Christian Robin was Asma Hilali. She was (one of) the first who published about them not on the basis of the UNESCO CD and the Bothmer/Puin black and white images.
She made two mistakes:
She only looked with her eyes, not with her brain.
But where the scriptio superior covers the scrip­tio inferior
one has to connected the visible parts assuming possible letter­forms,
one has to speculate in order to fill gaps ‒ knowing the quranic voca­bulary one has to try to put in as many letters as are fitting.
Because Asma Hilali lacks phan­tasy or abhors specula­tion she reads less than a third of what has been written.

And she mistakes a library signature, a collec­tion con­volute for a meaning­ful document.
As an introduction into the study of Islamic manu­scripts one should read Islamic-Awarness.org.
Please read 3. Ḥijāzī & Kufic Manu­scripts Of The Qur'ān From 1st Century Of Hijra Present In Various Collec­tions; in the first column you see up to seven "Designations" for parts of the same document.
for the Codex Ṣanʿāʾ I
Only if you look at the document as as a whole, you have a chance to make sense of the parts.
Not only did Asma Hilali only study 36 folios of the 81 folios of the surving fragments of the document, she did not sort out the four fragments that do not belong to it that are classified as parts of DAM 01-27.1
That Asma Hilali made these two essential mistakes, is not that bad.
At least she was quick.
But that she refused to learn, declined to revise her findings in light of what others had found out, is a sign of stupidity.
I know: Everybody is polite, just says that she is (overtly) cautious.
I say: She is blind, cowish, mad.
Everybody (Elisabeth, Mohsen, Behnam, Alba, Eléonore, and in the second row Marijn, Nicolai, Fran­ҫois) agree that both levels are part of a muṣḥaf. The quire structure is proof enough, the pages con­tinue where the page before had ended. Asma Ḥilali is alone in postu­lating "scribal exercises".
That dif­fe­rent scribes wrote different pages, is no a valid argu­ment against all being part of one muṣḥaf, because Fr. Deroche had found out, that that was common in the frist two cen­turies.
A positive reviewer, J.A. Gilcher, wrote about The Sanaa Palimp­sest The Trans­mission of the Qur'an in the First Cen­turies AH Oxford University Press 2017:

As Work in Progress, mistakes, corrections, fragmented readings, its intended use written in a frag­mentary fashion consisting of multiple sessions of teaching or dic­tation circle intended for experimental use in workshop-like circles, always destined to be destroyed, didactic tech­niques of a circle of teaching sessions, for Hilali, the fact that the parch­ment was eventually used as a palimp­sest for later text is proof of its purpose from the beginning to be recycled in the future

Given the fact, that her base asumption is wrong, I see no point in going through the 4000 letters were her reading (or absence of reading) differs from that of others. I am sure that in over 98% she is wrong.
It would be nice to see the Documenta Coranica tome by Hadiya Gurt­mann once annouced by Cor­pus Corani­cum, to see how wrong she is. I can only speculate why Michael Marx waits with the pub­lication.
Here is an image of the back­side of the second folio of DAM 1.27.1

And here Hadiya Gurtmann's recon­struc­tion of the lower text (image taken from Fr. Deroche's Le Coran, une histoire plurielle : essai sur la formation du texte coranique, Paris, 2019 ‒ he got it from Michael Marx; Hadiya Gurtmann had worked at Corpus Corani­cum)

I say that A.H. is mad too, because she refuses to learn in the field of Koran prints, too.
In "her" conference the Egyptian librarians all the time spoke of "muṣḥaf al-malik Fuʾād", "muṣ­ḥaf al-Amīriyya", "muṣ­ḥaf al-ḥukūma", she alone refered to "muṣḥaf al-Qāhira" and "ṭabʿa al-Qāhira", al­though the first term is used for manu­scripts and the 1924 copy was printed in Giza, which belongs not even to the gover­norate of Cairo, not printed in al-Qāhira, not even in Cairo.

Above are Cairo editions shown during the conference.
In this blog I have shown many more ‒ especially Cairo editions of riwāya Warš because I find it remark­able that most experts take it for granted that a muṣḥaf contains Ḥafṣ, basta!

And this is the page at the end of the object of the conference
informing everybody willing to take note
that it was printed in Giza. And that's not all.
Not only that it is NOT a Cairo print,
it is not even a 1924 edition.
In 1924 the quranic text was printed,
but after that the backmatter had to be set, made into plates, and printed.
Then the book had to be bound.
By the time it was published, the year was 1925.
Therefore the first edition was embossed:

طبعة الحكومية المصرّية
        -- . --
    ١٣٤٣ هجرّية
                سـنة

The October-Conference on The Cairo Edition

Last weekend the conference on "the Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān, 1924" took place in a room of the AUinC.
While the Arab titel مصخف الملك فؤاد ١٩٢٤م is fine, the English title (the French one pro­minent at the beginning of the year had dis­apperead) is a testimony to utter ignorance ‒
ignorance either of logic, ignoring the func­tion of the definite article
or ignorance of the world of Cairo prints and book­shops ‒ there are thou­sands of Cairo Edi­tions of the Qurʾān a few miles east of the AUC, even fewer miles south-west of the IDEO.
(Anyhow, I find it strange that the English title is not "the 1924 King Fuʾād Edition of the Qurʾān in the Ḥafṣ trans­mission" ‒ multi­lingual con­feren­ces should have the same title in all its lanugages.)
    Sadly, I find both reasons ‒ carelessly calling an edition "the edition"
    and calling an edition "the edition" because s/he never bothered to study different editions,
    plausible.
    It is common among these young scholars to speak of "the palimp­sest"
    for the scriptio inferior of the pamlimpset or the lower text
    ‒ why should they make a difference between "a" and "the"?
    And because they are not interested in having a look into the maṣā­ḥif
    local Muslims use, they just assume that all Muslims have some­thing very
    similar to what most Orienta­lists have. Many scholars explicite­ly wrote that
    the KFE is most common in the Muslim word and for religious purposes.
    Shows that they have no idea of the real Muslim world.
    Sorry: Do not confuse the KFE with Islam on the ground(s).
    Unfortunalely Islamology is 90% theology and philology,
    only 10% social anthropology and sociology of religions.

In the "Call for Papers" (anony­mous, hence offi­cially by the IDEO, in fact by Asma Hilali) one can read about 50 times "l'édition du Cairo, le coran du Caire, ظبعة القاهرة etc.), during the conference all except the Blind African herself spoke of the Govern­ment Copy, the print of the Amī­riyya, the KFE ... ‒ unfor­tunatly the official English title is still the old one, the il­lo­gical one; the IDEO hasn't even made up its mind whether there should be a comma bet­ween "the Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān" and "1924" (cf. the image above) ‒ in both cases the year is an ac­ciden­tal property not an essen­tial one, while in "the 1924 Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān" the year would be es­sential, defining.
Here I repeat what I wrote to the guys in charge in Cairo ten times:
There are about a thousand "Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān" ‒ to put the definite article in front defies logic ‒:
at least ten editions of the Warš trans­mission, one being THE Warš Edition for decades;
here are two of the four title pages (normally bound in one volume):

Here two images from a 1929 Cairo Warš Edition ‒ without a title page, as was common at the time:

And here from two of the oldest al-Qahira pub­lishers, i.e. not from Bab al-Khalq, al-Faggala, from Bulaq or even Giza but from "behind" al-Azhar, first one from Subīḥ:

than from Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, first from 1930 for Maġribian Arabs:

others:

Apart from these 100% Cairo Editions, there are editions con­ceaved in Morocco resp. Algeria, but pro­duced in Cairo ‒ the Moroccan ones without pro­duction place, the Algerian ones with an Algerian publisher's name. (Only the third edition of the third sherifian muṣ­ḥaf was produced in Morocco.)
In the literature another one is mentioned, which I have not seen ‒ so I rest sceptical:
al-Qurʼān al-karīm : innahu li-Qurʼān karīm fī kitāb maknūn
Majmaʻ al-Buḥūth al-Islāmīyah. Lajnah Murājaʻat al-Maṣaḥif
[Cairo]: [Jāmiʻ al-Azhar], [1964]
OCLC-No: 22354261
"Aqarrat hādha al-muṣḥaf al-sharīf wa-diqqah rasmihi wa-ḍabṭihi wa-ʻaddaʼa ayātaha Lajnah Murājaʻat al-Maṣāḥif bi-Majmaʻa al-Buḥūth al-Islāmīyah bi-al-Jāmiʻ al-Azhar bi-al-Qarār ... 1964."
qāf is written with a dot above the letter, fāʼ with one below the letter, and no dot over final nūn 518 pages ; 25 cm
Of two "Cairo Edition"s before 1924 I do have image:
the one written by the same calligrapher as the 1308/1890 edition, ʿAbd al-Ḫāliq Ḥaqqi (?) Ibn al-Ḫawaǧa, produced by a famous printer around the turn of the century (-1919) behind al-Azhar: aš-Ṣaiḫ Aḥmad ʿAlī al-Melīǧī al-Kutubī:

Plus one printed in al-Maṭbaʻa al-ʻĀmiriyya:
InnahuLi-Qurʾān Karīm, 1318/1900:

One of the talks in the IDEO conference led from Venice and Ham­burg, Kazan and Leipzig to the first com­plete Qurʾān printed in Cairo, the Bulaq 1881/2 print ‒ both in one volume in in several (possibly both in 10 and in 30) leather­bound parts. It is well known both from the Enyclo­pedia of the Quran and from Kein Standard:

It has 13 lines per page, 603 pages in the one-volume-edition.

In 1308/1890 the most important of all Cairo editions was published ‒ it was mentioned but no copy was shown ((even the Geburtstagskind, the 1924 Gizeh print was not there)). It was not analysed or discribed in detail. Good heavens!

In 1885 an other important Cairo edition saw the light of day ‒ this one as well with "ar-rasm al-ʿuṯmānī":

Let's mention two more early "Cairo Editions":
One written by they same calli­grapher who wrote the tremend­ously import 1308/1890 edition, ʿAbd al-Ḫālliq Ḥaqqi (?) Ibn al-Ḫawaǧa, by the editor Šaiḫ Aḥmad bin ʿAlī al-Melīǧī al-Kutbī, who had a press near al-Azhar until 1919.

Innahu li-Qurʾān karīm fī kitāb maknūn lā yamassahu illā al-muṭahhirūn tanzīl min ...
Miṣr : al-Maṭbaʻah al-ʻĀmirīyah, 1318 [1900]
364 p. ; 20 cm.

Only one of the participants has made research for the con­ference. Aziz Hilal dis­covered, that he did not find any reports on the pre­para­tions for the edition, nor reports on its pub­li­cations or its re­per­cussions. It was a non-event at the time.
Ali Akbar had to report, that in Indo­nesia (+ Singa­pore, Malaysia, southern Thai­land) no copies of the KFE were sold. Nor could he locate a survving copy Azhar students or pil­grims to Mecca might have brought into the area.
Necmettin Gökkır informed the par­ticipants, that in the Turkish Republic very few experts took note of the edition. Neither the state religious autho­ri­ties nor normal Muslims were inter­ested in the KFE.
Michael Marx's “Inno­vation, Mile­stone, Stan­dard? Remarks and Reflec­tions about the Cairo 1924 Print from a Histo­ri­cal Per­spective” is wrong because there is NO Cairo 1924 Print, the copy was printed in Gizeh, and he did not explain what the ino­vation(s) was resp. were. As for the "standard" he refered to Arno Schmitt.
I could not detect for all the papers which of the topics named in the Call for Papers they dealt with. Only A.Hilali's concluding remarks belonged clearly to a tailor-made topic.
Interesting that the three languages English+French+Arabic
had turned to Egyptian+English+Arabic and that Hilal's talk consisted to 38% in imala (eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh).

Asmāʾ Ḥilālī

Asmāʾ Ḥilālī:

Despite the proliferation of scholarly editions of old Qurʾānic manu­scripts
over the last twenty years,
the popularity of the Cairo edition of the Qurʾān has never been challenged.

What can this mean?
What is the connection between scholarly editions of qurʾānic fragments and
the ‒ supposed! ‒ popularity of the King Fuʾād Edition of the qurʾān,
called by her "the Cairo edition,"
which on its own shows that she is weak on logic.
Since there are more than a thousand Cairo editions of the qurʾān,
to call a particular one "THE Cairo edition" (TCE)
betrays madness ‒ unless one assumes that she ignores
the function of the definite article.

It's like:

Despite the proliferation of sub­urban gardens
the popula­rity of the Amazonas forest has not declined.

or

Despite the popularity of Mara­dona and Rinaldo
the greatness of Maria Callas is unchallenged.

The use of TCE instead of the many good (or less good) names for
the Gizeh print,
the 1924 Amīriyya edition,
the 1924 King Fuʾād edition,
the Amīri edition = here s.o. did not see that Amīriy­ya is short for al-maṭbaʿa
  al-amīriyya, thought that it refered to King Fuʾād ‒>
  corrected it to amīrī, because the King is not a Queen
the 1924 muṣḥaf al-mesāḥa
the Government print, der amtliche ägyptische ...
the 12 liner (مصحف ١٢ سطر) of 1924
shows that Asma Hilali did not know a thing about the Egyptian Govern­ment
Edition of 1924/5 at the time of writing the "Call for proposals".
TCE is a recent coinage by non-English speakers.
The Gizeh print is the ONLY muṣḥaf ever printed in Gizeh proper.
Only the 827plus page editions ‒ without titel page, but more than twenty pages AFTER the qurʾānic text ‒ by the Amīriyya (1924-1975) have 12 lines,
but they are not all the same: the 1952 edition is quite different from the 1924 one:
(and the second and third edition have a few changes NOT included in the 1952 edition)
about 900 differences between 1924/5 and 1952!

During the conference Asma Hilali was the only one who spoke of "muṣḥaf al-Qāhira" (Omar Hamdan spoke of al-Qāhira-print, most spoke of "muṣḥaf al-malik Fuʾād") ignoring that the Amīriyya never refers to al-Qāhira, but to Miṣr, Būlāq, and Gizā.
Before 1920 all private publishers were situated south-west of al-Azhar, late comers were situated in al-Faggāla St.