Kein Standard, Five

Today I will not give you snippet for snippet,
I will just tell you:
in 2:72 Gizeh1924, Bulaq1952, the Azhar Coran of the 1970s, all had a baseline hamza,
while Moroccans have alif+hamza, Tunisians (& Tripolitanians) dagger alif + hamza.
Both al-Ḥaddād (for Šamarlī) and ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (printed in Damascus, ar-Riyaḍ, Tehran, İstanbul) followed the Amiriyya.
Today all editions of al-Ḥaddad and ʿUṯmān Ṭaha have hamza on a dagger.
Did the King Fahd Complex bring about the change?
Yes, but they did not start it.
Dar al-Faiḥāʾ in Damascus brought it up.
Now it's standard in the Arab East.
The "revolution" took almost a hundred years: from 1890 to 1980.

BTW, when Hythem Sidky tweeted that the CE was "immensely popular" and "brought about a revolution", he did not know, what he said.
Had he spoken with the people of Egypt, he would know, that they
never took to the "Cairo Edition". Had he studied the developments of
printed maṣāḥif, he'd know that it was a slow process.
And: Egypt is not the Islamic World,
Syria followed in the 1970s, Iraq even later.
Africa partly due to Saudi gifts, Malaysia by government degree.
India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey and their diasporas never.
If you read German ‒ else Brockett's Ph.D. thesis.

Kein Standard, Four

Whereas "the second print" of 1952 brought many changes,
in 73:20 "allan" changed all the time (before and after 1952):
In both the 1924 and the 1952 edition it is one word: أَلَّن
In Kein Standard I show lots of examples of Amiriyya and competitors reprints.
In this blog I have already twice shown images.
Both Indian

and Maghrebian prints

have it in two words: ان لن ‒ Warš, Dar at-Tunisīya:


Qālūn, Gaddafi's copy:


Qālūn, Tunisian State Edition:

So I dare to say, the Egyptians made a mistake:

which they corrected in 1929 (or before):

The same in 1354/1935:

But the "second print" reverted to the mistake:

While some reprints follow the Amiriyya (especially the "Communists" in Taschkent and Peking, and in Bairut and Paris as well), another Bairuti print reprinted in ʿAmman (and available in archive.org):


and Cologne (Abu'r Rida Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rassoul, Islamische Bibliothek,
both Arabic only and with German translation)

Gaddafi's Islamic Call Society restores the assimilatet nūn both the Arabic only otherwise photo-reprint ...
and the photoreprint of the Hyderabad 1938 set with Bulāq types correct the mistake

The Amiriyya sticks to their choice, but both Sa'udia (KFC)

and Iran (Center) follow the majority of Muslims:

BTW, the Iranian Center for Printing and Spreading the Qurʾān produce mainly faulty maṣāḥif:
They are the only one who write "an lan" (not al-lan); in a copy that marks silent letters red,
the nūn MUST be red (and the lām must have šadda), what­ever the Center may say.
As I have said elsewhere, once you use signs for silent letters, it is stupid (arrogant, incon­sidered) not to use them everywhere,
when you show when yāʾs are shortend to /a/, you should show when yāʾ is shortend to /i/ as well (but Gizeh24 and Saudi UT do not do it),
when you have signs for /ā/ and /ī/, why not for /ū/ (but Turkish editors do not have it).
There are editors in Damascus, Jakarta, and Tunis that mark ALL silent letters as silent, but others (Dar al-Maʿrīfa and the Iranian Center) do not.

When you show only the words, not how they are pronounced in a particular context, I can under­stand,
but to do it sometimes, I do not understand.

Kein Standard, Three

The Survey Authority Edition (King Fuʾād Edition, Amiriyya, Gizeh 1924) is
‒ not the Azhar Edition,
‒ not a Cairo Edition,
‒ not the first type printed muṣḥaf,
‒ not the first printed by Muslims,
‒ was never popular in Egypt or among Muslims in general,
‒ was not prepared by a committee,
    but made largely by one man: al-qārī al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād,
‒ was not a revolution,
but prepared thirty years before by al-Muḫallalātī
and only its grand-child, written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha, took off ‒ 65 years later,
‒ was not the first with the "ʿUṯmānic rasm",
‒ not the first with an afterword,
‒ not special because it named its sources,
because it is a lie. Nothing of what is written in the afterword
is 100% correct. Although it claims to be a reconstruction based on
Abū Dāʾūd Sulaimān Ibn Najāḥ, it turns out that it just follows the
common Maghribi maṣāḥif, mostly Ibn Najāḥ, but sometimes ad-Dānī, when they disagree
‒ except for the transmission of Ḥafṣ and the Kūfī verse numbering,
plus the pause signs developed by the main editor himself
plus the differentiation between a sign for vowellessness and two signs for unpronouncedness.

When you study the first "normal" page from
an Ottoman muṣḥaf (written by Hafis Osman Nuri)
a 1895 Būlāq print of "ar-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī"
an Algerian print from the period
the Muḫallalātī Cairo print of 1890
and the Survey Authority Edition,
you see, that the 1924 print is no revolution,
it is "just" a switch from the Ottoman to the African writing tradition.
For 398 years Egypt had been part of the Ottoman Empire.
Now it demonstrated that it was part of Africa:
Gizeh 1924 was Bandung avant la lettre.

But it was not free of mistakes, nor did it fix a text.
There were about 900 "mistakes" fixed in 1952
(over 800 different pauses + the changes that result from the [forgotten] inclusion of the basmala in continuous reading) + no more chronology of revelation ‒ in the sura title boxes ‒ because there is no consensus on the matter)
a tāʾ marbuṭa instead of a tāʾ maftuḥa, two alifs, a hamza moved from above the line to below,
two misplaced hamzat (Gizeh 1924 and Saudi UT have a free-floating hamza, India and the Maghreb have a "regular" yāʾ-hamza):


and more ... (in the next post)

the Cairo Committee ‒ ha ha ha

Some time ago I started a blog against the German Orienta­list myth of the King Fuʾād Edition as The Standard: Kein Standard. I had no idea that there are scholars out­side Germany too, who ascribe this and that to this edition.
Let me admit that the edition printed 1924 in Giza, bound and blind-stamped in Būlāq "ṭabʿat al-ḥukūma al-miṣrīya sanat 1343 hijrīya" (1924/5), with­out a title on the cover, the spine, with­out a title page, is im­por­tant, but not as im­por­tant as many think and not for the reasons given.
طبعة الحكومية المصرّية
        -- . --
    ١٣٤٣ هجرّية
                سـنة

The edition is not and never was The Standard, it has not spread Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim (BTW it is not an "Azhar Edition," and no "King Farūq edition" was published in 1936 or any­time). It was not the first that pro­claims to follow the ʿUṯmānic rasm, and it is not type printed ‒ it is type­set, off­set printed (plano­graphic prin­ting just as litho­graphy). It is not the first with a post­script (Luck­now copies from the 1870s onward and the Mu­ḫalla­lātī Cairo 1890 print have post­scripts ‒ although the latter is some­times bound as pre­face ‒ the numbers on the gatherings {malā­zim, sg.: mul­zama} show that it was to be the last section).
Whatever is written by "experts," the 1924 edition was not "im­mense­ly popular": the people of Egypt always pre­ferred other editions: in the 1920s and '30s 522 pages written by Muṣṭfā Naẓīf Qadir­ghali (still reprinted in its Otto­man gestalt in the 1950s), since 1975 (till today) the Šamar­lī (as well on 522 pages), after 1976 for a decade Muṣḥaf al-Azhar aš-Šarīf (525 pages, several sizes), since 1980 editions written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (on 604 pages). The people of Egypt never took to the 844 pages of the "revolu­tio­nary" King Fuʾād Edition (18,5 x 26 x 5 cm). The 1924 edition was never re­printed (the 1955 Peking edition has the same text for the qur'ān and the information, but adds a title page, sup­presses the de­di­cation to the king, has different headers, different frames etc).
To understand what went on, it helps to know that Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire from January 1517 to November 1914. Soon after, the govern­ment found "faults" in Ottoman maṣā­ḥif and asked the chief qārī of Egypt to pre­pare a modern Egyptian edition; a former direc­tor of the Arabic depart­ment of the Ministry of Education and two pro­fessors from the Teachers Training Center Nāṣa­rīya (located next door) were to assist him.
It is important to note that India and the Maghreb had largely kept the qurʾān ortho­graphy of the tenth century, or they had reverted to the old spelling already sometime before.
When Hythem Sidky writes in his review article:

"the [modern] ortho­gra­phic standard of clas­sical Arabic ... charac­te­rized nearly all muṣḥafs" before 1924 (Book Review of Daniel Alan Bru­baker, Cor­rec­tions in Early Qurʾānic Manus­cripts in Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27, 2019. p. 276),

he is com­pletely wrong: There was not a single muṣ­ḥaf written like clas­si­cal Arabic and the majo­rity (in Africa, in India, in Nusan­tara, in Central Asia) wrote accord­ing to ad-Dānī or close to his Muqniʿ. Egyptian ʿulamāʾ had been aware of the old spel­ling; books of ad-Dānī (on the rasm, on the readings, on verse num­bers) were taught and studied.
On the other hand, in Persia and (to a lesser extent) in the Otto­man Empire, the spell­ing had become closer to the "normal" spelling of Arabic ‒ this process has been labelled "clas­si­fi­cation" = writ­ing as if the qurʾān had been put on vellum by Sībawaih & Co.
1924 brought no revo­lution. Already in 1890, a muṣḥaf had been printed that was pretty close to the spel­ling of 1924 ‒ actually closer to ad-Dānī (not to his pupil Ibn Naǧaḥ, preferred in the Maghrib).
Five years later a qurʾān "bir-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī" was type printed on the margin of a com­mentary.

The scholar behind the reform Abū ʿId Riḍ­wān al-Muḫalla­lātī had died the year before, but the makers of the King Fuʾād Edition pay tribute to him.
In 1930 Gotthelf Bergsträßer met Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. Ḫalaf al-Ḥusainī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī al-Ḥaddād (and his suc­ces­sor ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm al-Maṣrī aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ d.1380/ 1961). In "Die Koran­lesung in Kairo" (Der Islam XX, 1932. p. 5) he writes:

Quelle für diesen Konsonanten­text sind natürlich nicht Koran­hand­schriften, sondern die Literatur über ihn; er ist also eine Rekon­struk­tion, das Ergeb­nis einer Um­schrei­bung des üb­lichen Kon­sonan­ten­textes in die alte Ortho­graphie nach den An­gaben der Litera­tur. Benützt ist dafür ...
of course the source for the con­sonan­tal text are not manu­scripts, but the lite­ra­ture about it; hence it is a re­con­struc­tion, the result of trans­forming the [then a.s.] common con­sonan­tal text into the old ortho­graphy ac­cording to the lite­ra­ture, fore­most Maurid aẓ-Ẓamʾān by [abu ʿAbdallāh] Muḥam­mad ibn Muḥam­mad [ibn Ibrāhīm] al-Ummawī aš-Šarīšī known as al-Ḫarrāz and its com­men­tary by ... and a further com­men­tary for the marks (ḍabṭ)

I think Bergsträßer is wrong, and Sidky is wrong, when he writes that the 1924 Gizeh print relied on rasm works. Yes, its makers write in the post­face, that they did, but I am convinced, that in practice al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddad al-Mālikī just copies a Warš muṣ­ḥaf changing it to Ḥafṣ ‒ which is easy for the chief qārī, he knows the dif­feren­ces bet­ween the two readings by heart; the pause signs are his creation, the verse numbers are Kufic based on works by aš-Šāṭibī and al-Mu­ḫalla­lātī.
Marijn van Putten recently tweeted:

The Cairo Edition clearly attempted to get to the original rasm, and was suc­cess­ful to a remark­able extent, but oc­casional­ly failed to get it right, as is clear from manu­script eviden­ce. [Some­times] Rasm works (or, at least those con­sulted by the commit­tee of the Cairo edition) con­sistent­ly get it wrong in com­parison with the actual manu­script evi­dence.

As I see it, MvP makes several mis­takes: there was no committee work; of the four editors men­tioned there was only ONE ʿālim, the others had not the slightest idea about writ­ing and read­ing a muṣ­ḥaf, they just stood for the Giza print as "govern­ment/min­istry of edu­cation muṣ­ḥaf". The editor al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād did not scruti­nize qurʾān manu­scripts, either ancient nor recent. He just adapted a Warš muṣḥaf with verse numbers according to Medina II to the trans­mis­sion of Ḥafṣ with Kūfī num­bers and his own pause signs (based on the system used in the East). Al­though he writes in the after­word that the rasm is based on Ibn Najāḥ, it does not follow him all the time; I have the im­pres­sion that it is not pri­marily based on rasm works (by ad-Dānī, Ibn Najāḥ, al-Ḫar­rāz, aš-Šā­ṭibī, al-Saḫāwī or al-Murādī al-Balansī, nor the Indian al-Arkātī) but on a con­tem­porary muṣ­ḥaf.
I go further: al-Ḥaddād was not even aware of the "Ḥijāzī" manu­scripts. He didn't "get it wrong", because he did not try to do what MvP thinks he tried. He assumed that the Maġribī scholars had pre­served the ʿUṯmānic rasm.

Don't get me wrong. I am contra­dicting PvM not because he is parti­cularly stupid, but because he is especially important. Whereas most scholars are just Nöldeke IV or Spitalerin 1.6 (or try to become those), MvP prepares new paths.

But MvP's "The Cairo Edition" (and Sidky's "CE") is stupidity pure:
There are more than a thousand Cairo editions, but the King Fuʾād / Survey Authority Edition is a Giza edition, not Cairo.
Marijn van Putten and Hythem Sidky are not stupid, they are just like the people of Tiznit, who call Duc Anh Vu, the only Vietnamese in town, "Chinese", they do not know from which city he is, they do not need to know, "Asia some­thing" is good enough for them. Experts in early qur­anic frag­ments do not have to visit the hun­dreds of book­shops in Cairo, Karachi or Jakarta ‒ but still    it would be nice if they stopped calling Duc Anh Vu "Chinese" (or the King Fuʾād Edition "CE") ‒ he/it is not.

Came across a quote by Martha C. Nussbaum, an excellent philosopher and essayist, referring to Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini as "the Ayatollah," because she does not know that there are more than 5000 Ayatollahs in Iran. It seems that some do not know that there are more than a thousand Cairo editions ‒ or they just don't care.

al-muzzammil 20, page 775

In Kein Standard I show 26 images of prints by the Amiriyya and reprints, clones of surat al-muzzammil verse 20.
I started with the two copies held by the National (Prussian) Library: the first print from 1924 and a print with reduced margin from 1929.
American university libraries hold other copies. So here are page 775 from 1925:

and 1930:

Gizeh 1924 <> Cairo 1952 and after

Page 775 of the Amiriyya print (page 574 in editions that end on page 604) 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 Amiriyya, both with الن




There are three differences on this page between the 1924 and 1952 edition, typical differences found throughout the muṣḥaf -- there are more than 800 of these -- plus four minor corrections.

To show that the changes did not stop 1952, I have copied two version distributed by the King Fahd Complex into the Amiriya-frame:
first ʿUṭmān Ṭāha 1

then ʿUṭmān Ṭāha 2

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").
-- the second page is not from the Amiriya but from a Bairut print, hence 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.