oddity from Pakistan

While India has a long tradition of spelling maṣāḥif,
there is one šaiḫ, Ẓafār Iqbāl as-Sīālkōtī, who published a mix of Indian and African spelling:
he keeps the long vowel signs
he adds hamza sign (which in IPak is included in vowel sign)
he adds differenciated tanwin signs (an improvement, but not necessary: determined by the following letter)
he does not differentiate between ī and ĭ (determined by the following letters)
he has both the normal ǧazm/head of ǧim without dot and the "Calcutta" angle for sukūn (why?)

No Standard ‒ Main Points

there is no standard copy of the qurʾān.
There are 14 readings (seven recognized by all, three more, and four (or five) of contested status).
there are 14 canonical transmissions (riwājāt) (two of each of the Seven),
each of which has ways/paths (ṭuruq) and versions/faces (wuǧuh).

All of this is not our main interest, because
‒ except in the greater Maghrib, Sudan, Somalia and Yaman and among the Bohras ‒
rank and file Muslims read only one riwāja: Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim.

The second big dif­ference between copies of the qurʾān that does not inter­est us here, is the rasm: there are three main rasm au­tho­ri­ties to follow: ad-Dānī, Ibn Naǧāḥ, al-Ḫarrāz, and al-Ār­kātī

As far as I know most editions follow a mix of diverent authorities ‒ the Lybian Qālūn Edition (muṣḥaf al-jamāhīriya, 1987, second ed. 1989, Libyan after the death of the prophet 1399) fol­low­ing ad-Dānī being an ex­ception. Authorities in Iran and Indo­ne­sia publish lists where they follow whom, others just have their (secret) way.

What interests me is
the spelling and
the layout.
Other points are important, like the
pauses and
the divisions (juz, ḥizb, para, manzil, niṣf ...),
but I do not know enough to post about them.

There are two main spellings: western and eastern
IPak is THE eastern spelling;
Ottoman, Persian, Turk, Tartar, NeoIran, Indonesian are eastern sub-spellings.
G24 and Q52 are realisation of the western spelling, Mag being their "mother".

The main difference between West and East is the writing of long vowel.

While in the East the (short) signs are turned to make them long,

in the West a leng­then­ing vowel has to follow: either one that is part of the rasm or a small sub­stitute.










G24/Q52 differentiate between /a/ and /ā/, but not between /i/ and /ī/ when there is a yāʾ in the text.
IPak always makes the difference.
(just to make clear: in the middle column, in /hāḏā/ the dagger in IPak is a vowel sign, in Mag it is a small letter leng­thening the sign before it ‒ al­though they look the same, they are dif­ferent things)

Mag, G24, Q52 have three kinds of tanwin, Bombay instead has izhar nun, IPak, Osm ... have nothing

Maybe the most remarkable difference are the initial alif: the Africa they have ḥamza-sign or a waṣl-sign. In Asia a voyell-sign includes ḥamza, absence of all sign signifies "mute" or waṣl.

Because letters without any sign the four yāʾs in the three lines standing for ī need a sukūn not to be ignored.
all in all: a large part of the letters have a different sign in Africa and Asia.

Another differences lies in as­simila­tion: both Mag and IPak do mark assimi­la­tion, Osm, Turk, Pers, NIran do not.

While IPak has three different madd signs, Mag/G24/Q52 have only one.

The main feature of page layout is the number of lines per page.
Leaving the layout with a page for a thirtieth or sixtieth on the side
there are layouts with nine to twenty lines per page,
the berkenar with 604 pages of 15 lines being the most common
  (due to Hafiz Osman and ʿUṯmān Ṭaha).

My motivation was anger about old German orientalists calling the King Fuʾād Edition "the Standard Edition";
later I came across young orientalist calling it "CE" / "the Cairo Edition",
althought there are more than a thousand maṣāḥif printed in Cairo,
more than a hundred conceived in Cairo,
so calling one of these the "CE" is madness, ignorance, carelessness.
The only new thing about the KFE: it is type set, but offset printed;
its text is not new, but a switch.
It turns out that there are different KFEs, 27 cm high ones printed 1924, 1925, 1952, 1953 in the Survey of Egypt in Giza, later in the press of Dar al-Kutub in Gamāmīz,
and 20 cm high oneS printed in Būlāq;
there is one written by Muḥam­mad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḫalaf al-Ḥusai­nī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī al-Ḥad­dād
and one revised under the guidance of ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm al-Maṣrī aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ.
The text of 1924 is history,
the text of 1952 survives in the "Shamarly" written by Muḥammad Saʿd Ibrāhīm al-Ḥaddād
and in the Ḥafṣ 604 page maṣāḥif written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha.
The Amīriyya itself printed the text of 1952 in the large KFE printed in Gamāmīz
and the Muṣḥaf al-Azhar aš-Šarīf (with four in-between-pause-signs merged into one) printed in Būlāq;
but their small kfes have the '24 text with a few '52 changes ‒ a strange mix that stayed largely unnoticed.

Just as there are seven different KFE/kfe, there are four different UTs:
UT0 1399‒1404 with (up to) five mistakes, basically KFE II, without after­word ‒ printed in Damascus, Istanbul, Tehran
UT1 1405‒1421 without mistakes, with a dagger under hamza in 2:72, and the small sīn under ṣād elimi­nated in 8:22 ("photo­shopded") ‒ first with the 1924 after­word, later with "mostly" added ‒ printed in Madina and many places
UT2 1422‒'38 without space between words and no lead­ing bet­ween lines (written by UT in Madina) ‒ and printed in Madina
UT3 since 1438 without headers at the bottom of pages, with­out end if aya at the beginn­ing of lines, with cor­rected sequen­tial fathatan ‒ rearranged and printed in Madina

When you compare UT2 (above) with UT3 you see:
they are very similar;
but while there are small differences between the same words in UT2
the same word in UT3 is identical.

Another difference: in UT2 sometimes there is zero space between words;
that does not occur in UT3.

­‒

a book by Saima Yacoob, Charlotte, North Carolina

At the start of this year's Ramaḍān Saima Yacoob, Char­lotte, North Caro­lina published a book on diffe­rences bet­ween printed maṣā­ḥif. Although her start­ing point and her con­clusions are worthy, the book is full of mis­takes.
Let's start with the positive:

• I believe that it would be a great loss to our um­mah if we were to insist on abandon­ing [the exist­ing] diver­sity [in] apply[ing] the rules of ḍabṭ ...
• The framework of the science of ḍabṭ is that dia­critics be used to ensure that the Qurʾān can be recited correctly by the average Muslim, and that there is enough regional standardi­zation ... that the people of an area may read the Qurʾān cor­rect­ly through the maṣāḥif published ... in that area.
• Because of the flexibility [in] the science of ḍabṭ, new conventions of ḍabṭ may be added even today to meet the chang­ing needs of Muslims in a parti­cular region. A modern example of this is the tajwīd color coded maṣā­ḥif.

This is an important point: maṣāḥif do not have to be identical to be valid. Only the last remark is wrong: color coded maṣāḥif are not "particular [to a] region".
I will give an example that springs from a particular region: The Irani Muṣḥaf with simple vowel signs:

While we used to have two basic ways of writing vowels (the Western/"Afri­can" with three vowel signs, sukūn, and three small leng­then­ing letters, the Eastern/"Asian" with three short vowel signs, three long vowel signs, and sukūn/ǧasm)); now there is a third (the new "Iranian" with six vowel signs in which the sign for /ū/ is not a turned ḍamma as in Indo-Pak and Indonesia, but looks like the Maġri­bian/Afro-Arab small waw, without sukūn, but with a second color for "silent, unpro­nounced"):

Only the vowel signs count, vowel letters are ignored when the con­sonant before has a vowel sign and they have none; when a con­sonant has no vowel sign it is read with­out vowel (sukūn is not needed). When a "vowel letter" has a vowel sign, it is a con­sonant. There is no head of ʿain on/below alif (when there is a vowel sign, hamza is spoken). There are no small vowel lettes ‒ instead of "turned ḍamma/ulta peš" a small waw is used: it look like the small letter used in the West/Maghrib/Arab Countries, but is a vowel sign.


The main point of Differing Diacritics is: there are different ways to mark the fine points, and that's okay. The maṣāḥif have the same text, but the notation is not exactely the same.

On page 2 of the book the diactrics are defined. Šaiḫa Saima Yacoob states that there are three kinds:
1.) "letters that are addi­tional or omitted in the rasm"
2.) "fatḥah, kasrah, ḍammah, shaddah, etc."
"Thirdly, those markings that aid the reader to apply the general rules of tajwīd correctly, such as the sign for madd, or a shaddah that indicates idghām, etc."

ALL wrong.
First come the dots that distinguish letter with the same shape:
د <‒>ذ   ص <‒> ض   ب <‒> ن ي   ط <‒> ظ
Second: fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma, šaddah, sukūn, plus in "Asia" turned fatḥa, turned kasra, turned ḍamma
Third: tanwīn signs and signs for madd ‒ in Asia there are three kinds of madd signs, in "Africa" three kinds of tanwīn signs for each of the short vowels
‒ small vowel "letters that are addi­tional or omitted in the rasm" exist only in the African/Andalu­sian/Arab system
the tiny groups of small consonant letters (sīn, mīm, nūn) that modify pro­nounciation,
and the signs for išmām and imāla come fourth and fifth.
(In Turkey "qaṣr" and "madd" are a sixth group.)

On page 4 the šaiḫa writes: "the reader could easily get con­fused by the two sets of dots, those for vowels, and those that distin­guished similarly shaped letters from each other"
I disagree: the dots for vowels are in gold/yellow, green, red or blue (and usually big), those distin­guishing letters with the same base form are in black (like the letters, because they are part of the letters). How can one con­fuse (big) coloured and (smaller) black dots?
BTW, "distinguished similarly shaped letters from each other" ‒ what I called the first func­tion of diacritics ‒ is missing from her definition of ḍabṭ on page 2.

Yacoob sometimes repeats what is written in well known books, but makes no sense:
"symbols [for vowels] were taken from shortened versions of their original form, such as ... a portion of yāʾ for kasrah" (p.4).
While fatḥa and ḍamma look like small alif resp. waw, kasra is neither a shortened yāʾ nor a part of yāʾ ‒ to me it looks like a transposed fatḥa.

Unfortunately, I found very little information about the ḍabṭ of the South Asian muṣḥaf in Arabic. (p. 7)

okay, she did not find anything, but it is available and it is all in Arabic (although written by a Muslim from Tamil Nadu).

the Chinese muṣḥaf. (p. 7)

As far as I know, there is no printed Chinese muṣḥaf, definetly not "the Chinese muṣḥaf". I have two maṣāḥif from China: a Bejing reprint of the King Fuad Edition of 1924/5 and a Kash­gar reprint of the Taj edition with the text on 611 pages like the South Asian one printed by the King Fahd Complex.
That a reprint of a Taj edition follows the IndoPak rules goes with­out saying, but that is not "the Ch. m."!


Enough, it goes on like this: mistake after mistake. I don't under­stand how a care­ful person can write a book like this ‒ and not revise it in due course.


­