e.Conidi II

Emanuela Conidi just informed me that Geoffrey Roper was her source.
Maybe I am too strict, but this book should be burned as a act of faith.
THE BOOK. A GLOBAL HIS­TORY is less than useless <-- it has no notes, no proper (i.e. checkable) sources
The two pages on "printing the Qurʾān" (548-50) shine with inac­curan­cies:

in the 1830s ... the distri­bution of copies was suc­cess­fully blocked [in Egypt] by the reli­gious authori­ties

maybe, but without sources: useless

in the 1850s, some were distri­buted, but only after each indivi­dual copy had been read by a Qur’anic scholar and checked for errors, at great expense.

Does Roper really think that Muslims (because they are Muslims?) are so stupid that they do not under­stand, that they do not have to check "each individual copy" because they are identical????

the Ottoman calligrapher and court chamberlain Osman Zeki Bey (d. 1888) started printing Qur’āns reproduc­ing the hand­writing of the famous 17th-century calli­gra­pher Hafız Osman

According to my sources Osman Zeki Bey died 1890, and he did print maṣāḥif by the 19th century Hafiz Osman, not by the earlier namesake. And more important: the first re­produc­tion of a muṣḥaf was one penned by Şeker­zade Mehmed Efendi (d. 1166/1753) not by any of the Osmans, whose maṣāḥif were often repro­duced later.

(i.e. the form of the text as it appears in the early MSS without voca­liza­tion and dia­critics)

wrong again:
there is not a single very early MSS without voacalization and diacritics

The lead was taken by scholars at Al-Azhar mosque-univer­sity ... After seventeen years of preparatory work, their edition was published in 1924, under the auspices of King Fu’ād of Egypt. It was printed ortho­graphi­cally

the lead was taken by directors in the Ministry of Education,
they and people from the Govern­ment Press decided on the form,
the text given to the type setters had been written by the chief recitor of Egypt;
that the text was not just a copy of the most popular muṣḥaf of the time, the 522-page-muṣḥaf written by Muṣṭafā Naẓīf,
was due to the work done by Šaiḫ Muḫallalātī and the decision of al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād to largely follow the Magh­rebian model.
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E.Conidi on the KFE

In her thesis e.Conidi writes on the King Fuʾād Edition:

The seventeen years required by Egyptian scholars for the preparation of the Fuʾād Qurʾān, from 1907 to 1924, were necessary to ensure the correctness of the text in adherence to ‘the approved norms in terms of content and orthography’, which was an indispensable precondition for accepting the duplication of the sacred text. (Sabev, ‘Waiting for Godot’, 109.)

there is no book Waiting for Godot by O.Sabev, and in his Waiting for Müteferrika there is nothing on the KFE, not on page 109, nor anywhere else.
But in G.Bergsträßer's article Koranlesung in Kairo Part 1 he writes, that a typewritten leaflet claimed that the preparations (Vorbereitungen) started in 1907, that the text was set, checked, revised by the chief recitor ordered to do so by the Azhar (im Auftrag der Direktion der Azhar). That the plan was to have printing plates being made in Germany, but that the outbreak of war had made that impossible, therefore the book was printed in Giza.
First, I do not see what Conidi writes, that seventeen years were necessary to establish a correct text (in Egypt the text could only be the reading of Ḥafs; its oral text is fixed for centuries, and whether one uses the letters defined by ad-Dānī ((as al-Muḫallalātī did in 1890 and much later editors in Lybia)) or the ones defined by his pupil Abu Daʾûd ((as common in Morocco)) is of minor importance -- as I see it, the chief recitor choose the letters used in the Moroccan prints just changing the very few letters special to the reading of Warsh;
(BTW, Indonesian scholar work 1974-84 for there standard, but first they came from all over the country, while Egypt is rather dentralized, and they work on three standards at the time, among them a Braille standard, something completely new.)
and I do not see what scholars were involved beside the chief recitor.
Second, I do not understand what happened between 1907 and the outbreak of the war, and what happened between 1915 and 1924.
It all does not make sense.
As I see it: after November 1914 when Egypt ceased to be a province of the Ottoman empire and the (hitherto) Governor took the same title as his (erstwhile) overlord: sulṭān, Egypt wanted to have a copy of the qurʾān different from the Ottoman model.
And Abū Mālik Ḥifnī Bey ibn Muḥammad ibn Ismaʿīl ibn Ḫalīl Nāṣif (16.12.1855‒25.2.1919) , responsible for state run schools, expressed the wish for a print easier to read for "his" secular students. While the students at religous madrasas were used to the calligraphic style of qurʾān manuscripts, the modern students were used to school book, novels and news papers.
He wanted a print with a clear base line, and clear right-to-left, not top-to bottom as in elegant calligraphy.
For all of this no lengthy deliberations were necessary.