Cairo 1924

Many things experts present as remarkable about the 1924 Egyptian Government print of the Qurʾān, the King Fuʾād Edition, are wrong:
it was not the first print made by Muslims for Muslims (Neuwirth),
it did not finally fix a fluid text (Bobzin),
it did not spread Ḥafṣ through­out the Muslim world (Bauer),
it was not an immediate success with Sunnis and Šiʿites (Reynolds),
its spelling did not impose itself everywhere "(with only extra­ordinary exceptions)" (Reynolds),
it was not edited and calligraphed by a Turkish/Ot­to­man calligrapher (Asma Hilali),
it was not produced to increase King Fuʾād chances to become caliph (Aziz Hilal),
its spelling was not due to the technical constraints of metal type (Milo),
it was not the first in Egypt in "ar-rasm ʿuṯmānī" instead of "imlāʾī",
nor the first world-wide claiming to do so on its title page,
it was not an Azhar Qurʾān,
nor the result of 17 years of delibarations of a committee,
it is not "the Cairo Edition" — not even a Cairo print,
it is not the restoration of the original written text by applying the works of ad-Dānī and Ibn Naǧāḥ to the Ḥafṣ oral text (Bergsträßer).

Muslims had printed maṣāḥif since 1803 (Kazan), 1827, 1829 in Iran and India (from the 1860s on in high runs).
The oral text had been fixed for centuries.
It did not produce a frozen written text (far from becoming the standard):
‒ the Amīrīya itself (resp. its editors al-Ḥaddād and aḍ.Ḍabbāʿ) changed it,
‒ private publisher and foreign states changed their "reprints",
‒ "heirs" like the King Fahd Complex (KFC) and Qaṭar made changes.
Ḥafṣ — being the closest to the standard pronun­ciation — was made the standard reading long before 1924 by the non‑Arab Mamluks, Safavids, Ottomans, and Timurids: thus becoming the reading in Asia.
The 827 page KFE never was a com­mer­i­cal success any­where, not even in Egypt.
Its spelling became a success due to the 522 page Šamarlī (calli­graphed 1975 by Muḥammad Saʿd Ibrāhīm al-Ḥaddād following the page lay­out of Muṣṭafa Naẓīf Qadir­ġalī) and the 604 page Ma­dina Muṣ­ḥaf (calli­graphed 1978 by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha following the page layout of Ḥafiz ʿUṯ­man/Os­man Qayš­zade/Kaış­zade) ‒ the first just in Egypt, the second in the Arab word and in Malaysia (and among Sala­fites) ‒ decenies after 1924 and only for a tiny minority of Muslims (Indo­ne­sians, Indians, Bengalis, Pak­ista­nis, Turks, Iranians, Africans are often over­looked or under­estimated).
pace Reynolds, Iran never reprinted the KFE, nor adopted its spelling; they just adopted the Ottoman 604 pages berkenar layout used by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha.
Asma Hilali demonstrates a misunder­standing of almost regal grandeur regarding the material history of the King Fuʾād Edition. In her concluding remarks to the proceedings of Le Coran du Caire 1924, she claimed that it had been ‘edited and calli­graphed by ʿAbd al‑ʿAzīz al‑Rifāʿī’, although the one thing to know about the KFE is that it was typeset.
There is not the slightest indica­tion that the muṣḥaf should push King Fuʾād to the cali­phat; it was not dis­tri­buted (nor dis­played) at any of the caliphal promotion con­ferences.
Ḥifnī Bey, the initiator of the project, sought a Qurʾān that was easy to read ‒ with a strict right-to-left sequence of charac­ters, determining the temporal order of pronun­ciation, plus exact po­si­tioning of ḥara­kāt ‒ not only in the right order of marks, but also with each sign exactely above, below, or within its letter. ‒ Looking at /alʾān/ (4:18), Muḫalla­lātī and the Indians have the dagger for /ā/ above the hamza, the normal place of a vowel sign. KFE has it to the left: a tiny bit clearer.Type did not force him, he wanted it that way.
In the first years of the 20^th century the normal muṣḥaf in Egypt had been Ottoman (Muṣḥaf Tawfiq 1299 [13 lines 601 pp.], reprints of Hafiz Osman, the Elder [11 lines, 815 pp.] and of Muṣṭafà Naẓīf Qadirġalī [15 lines, 522 pp.]): with proper اللٰه , with both original alif (i.e. hamz when with a haraka-sign), and often alif as mater lectio­nis (5 150 times more often than in the "ʿUṯmānic rasm" ‒ which has 5 150 more dagger alifs). ‒ “Imlāʾī” suggests the modern standard ortho­graphy of MSA, which it is not: This becomes imme­dia­tely clear from the spelling of words such as raḥmn (for raḥmān) and ṣalū (for ṣalāt), forms that deli­be­ra­tely diverge from normal. al-Ribā; 2:275 (3x);276;278; 3:130; 4:161; al-Ṣalāt; 70 x ṣalātī; 6:162; ṣalāti r-rasūli; 9:99; ṣalātaka; 9:103; a-ṣalātuka; 11:87; ṣalātihim; 107:5; al-Zakāt; 32x from 2:43 to 98:5; al-Ḥayāt; 55x from 2:85 to 89:24; wa-Manāta; 53:20; al-Najāt; 40:41; ka-miškātin; 24:35; bi-l-ghadāti; 6:52; 18:28;

The King Fuʾād Edition of 1924 is in the "ʿUṯmānic rasm" but not as the result of tedious, year long dis­cus­sions by a committee (as many experts claim), but as a simple switch. All Fāzī prints are ʿuṭmāni, all Indian prints have /al-ʿalāmīn, mālik, razaq­nā­hum/ with dagger alifs; so has the Būlāq type of 1895 and the very im­portant Cairo Edition of 1308/1890 by Muḫal­lalātī. When you compare a Fāzī print from the 19^th cen­tury, a muṣ­ḥaf by Hafiẓ Osman Kayş­zāde, the 1895 Būlāq print with­out vocal signs, the 1931 Algiers print, and 1890 Muḫal­la­lātī CE with the 1924 KFE, and last a Naval Kishore (नवल किशोर نولکشور) print from 1890 you see, that 1924 did not introduce the rasm ʿuṯmānī to Egypt.
(as always: click the image and choose "open in a new tab" after having clicked the image with the secondary mouse resp. ⌃(Control)-click. In the new tab you can zoom with Ctrl-+ resp. ⌘ + )
(Būlāq 1895 uses madda for /ʾā/ not for extra long elonga­tion)

So what was new?
‒ offset print: technical important, but without consequences for the content, nor for the book form,
‒ streamlined Saǧāwandī pauses signs,
‒ no more references to readings other than Ḥafṣ,
‒ no more references to verse ends other than Kufan → number after each verse,
(( no tafsīr ))
‒ more space between lines, between words,
‒ baseline ductus (no stapled ligatures; all harakat sign excately above/below letter)
    (this is standard now),
‒ three "mute"/not to be prounced-signs: waṣla at the start, zero and circle at the end of words.

So there were many switches:
‒ from scholarly to for state school students and foreigners (base­line, numbers, no alter­natives),
‒ from "isolated words" (Ottoman and Persian) to "words in context" (Ipak and And), i.e. notating assi­mi­la­tion between words,
‒ from having short and long vowel signs to needing always ḥuruf al-madd, there­fore intro­ducing small, sub­stitu­tion vowel letters ( ٰ ࣳ ۧ ), when there are none in the rasm; already Muḫal­la­lātī had this Western system, which follows the Arab grammar,
‒ from "imlāʾī" to "ʿuṯmānī" (rasm),
‒ from Asian to African (spelling):
    ‒ اللَه instead of اللٰه
    ‒ ءادم instead of اٰدم
    ‒إِ أَ instead of اَ   اِ (in Asia alif is hamza, in Africa its "just" the seat of hamza)
    ‒ sequential tanwīn (for iḫfāʾ or id­ġām) instead of iẓhār nūn
    ‒ from notating the difference between spoken /ī/ and shortened /ĭ/ to writing them the same.

But there was no leap from Ottoman to the KFE.
Two developments preceded the KFA (of al-Ḥaddād, of the government or more precisely the Ministry of Education). Between 1904 and 1906 the Būlāq Press improved the sorts, made them inter­locking (the Ministry of Finance had asked for this, Muḥammad Ǧaʿfar Bey was the artis­tique director: he removed more than hundred stapled ligatures, see bottom):

In 1890 and in 1895 two maṣāḥif with the "rasm al-ʿuṯmānī" appeared in Cairo, the muṣḥaf al-Mu­ḫal­la­lātī in al-Qāhira, and a type­set one in Būlāq (both above in the big com­parison table). al-Mu­ḫal­la­lā­tī worked with ad-Dānī's Muqniʿ, and may­be with an Indian print ‒ Indian printers sold lots of books in Egypt, ships needed about ten days from Bom­bay to Ismaʿilia. So the switch from imlāʾī to ʿuṯmānī was made in 1308/1890, not in 1342/1924.
al-Ḥaddād did not copy al-Mu­ḫal­la­lā­tī' s rasm, but to more than 95% the Moroc­can one, and ‒ which was more revo­lu­tio­nary ‒ the Moroc­can ortho­graphy (alifs did not have an inherent hamza = needed a hamza or waṣl-sign; vowel-signs needed lengthening letters to became long, hence sup­plemen­tary small ( ٰ ۦ ۦࣳ ۦ ) letters were written, when the rasm had not a ḥarf al-madd. Of course he did not copy the Western particu­larities about fāʾ, qāf, some end froms (with­out dot having a distinct form) and lām-alif (vs. alif-lām).

What we have in chronolo­gical order, is
‒ (1) the original spelling that we find in the scriptio inferior of the Sana'a palimp­est and in Codex Mash­had
‒ (2) the spelling that we find in the (true) ʿUṯmānic maṣāḥif, like the CPP, or CA1 or other early mss.
‒ (3) the "ʿuṯmānic rasm" as de­scribed by ad-Dānī and collea­guges
‒ (4) the "imlāʾī" text as found in Otto­man and Persian maṣāḥif
‒ (5) the modern spelling (MSA)

Although we find (3) in all Western (Andalus, Morocco, West Africa, Libya) and all Eastern (India, Pakistan, Indo­nesia, South Africa, Ceylon, their dia­sporas) maṣā­ḥif, experts and geniuses call (3) "Cairo": not excact, and the result of flagrant ignorance (what was under­standable for a German scholar in 1930 is inexcus­able for www-verse youngster today. BTW, Bergsträßer calls the KFE explicitly "the offical Egyptian qurʾān" and implictely "the al-Ḥusainī-al-Ḥaddād-muṣ­ḥaf", never any­thing with Cairo ← he and Jeffrey know that there were hundreds of different CEs, no "CE".).

Bobzin, Berg­sträßer, Brockett, Puin, van Putten know a thousand times more about Arabic, the Qurʾān or Islām than I do. Yet, I dare to say: this sentence by XY is nonsense. ‒ Because they do not know enough about printing, or because they do not keep the oral form, the text, the graphic form and the book gestalt apart.¹

Clarification
When we talk about a muṣḥaf (i.e. a written or printed qurʾān) we must keep different things apart:
‒ 1 the oral form, i.e. its reading, a system of reci­ta­tion. It defines how the text is pro­nounced, some­times a dif­ferent vowel, a doubled con­sonant, how hamza is treated, elon­ga­tions, as­simi­lation, where pauses are man­da­tory, possible, or for­bidden. (Ibn al-Ǧazarī treats in his Kitāb an-Našr not only the rasm, the letters, but the pauses as well.)
It is transmitted orally, corrected oral­ly, and mastered orally.
It can be written differently ‒ fixing most aspects or leav­ing them to be taught orally (and in scholarly books about it).
In our case it is Ḥafs ʿan ʿĀṣim.
‒ 2a the text: The written form is the con­crete reali­zation of ortho­graphy: the spell­ing system for re­present­ing Ḥafṣ on the page (or in the data stream), a bundle of deci­sions:
‒ the rasm, the letter skele­ton;
‒ the spelling of long vowels;
‒ the spelling of initial hamza;
‒ mute/otiose letters;
‒ the writing of (partial) assi­mi­la­tion;
‒ auxiliary signs: verse numbers, signs for pause, saǧa­da, juzʾ, ḥizb and saktah.
Some aspects follow early manu­scripts (in which alif, waw and yāʾ were not only written for /ʾ, w, y/ and /ā, ū, ī/, but for /a, u, i/ as well, dif­feren­tiat­ing between words that would be homo­graphs with­out a con­ven­tionally intro­duced spelling dis­tinc­tion (where one form viola­tes phono­graphic expec­ta­tions) and for marking the end of a word ending with a letter with­out an explicit end-of-word-form (waw, dāl, ḏāl, rāʾ, zai).
In Asia/India/Indone­sia long vowels are written by long-vowel-signs while Africa/Anda­lu­sia/the Maġrib has only three short vowel signs, needing extra length­en­ing letters: when there is no ḥarf al-madd in the rasm a small vowel letter is added. (Al­though the dagger/alif ḫan­ǧa­rīya has the same shape ‒ even has the same uni­code code point ‒ in the East it is a vowel sign (khaṛā zabar), where­as in the West it is a small letter.)
In Asia alif never has a hamza-sign above (nor below) because it is hamza: the ḥara­ka acti­va­tes its hamza­ness: /ʾa, ʾi, ʾu/, while in the West a small head of ʿain is needed
Two remarrks:
‒ In Arab grammar the first letter is hamza (just calli­graphers call it alif)
‒ both vowel dots/stro­kes and the ham­za sign did not exist when spelling was fixed.
This layer is often mis­under­stood. It is a spell­ing system, chosen and applied by human editors. Dif­ferent systems can re­pre­sent the same reci­ta­tion; the same system can be used for dif­ferent reci­ta­tions.

‒ 2b: the graphic form
While the text (2a) represents the under­lying data, graphic form is how the text is rendered. The text is basic; the graphic forms are variants. Linguistically and com­pu­ta­tionally, a ḍamma re­mains a ḍamma, and a sukūn re­mains a sukūn, regard­less of regional vari­a­tions.
For a visual gallery (including Otto­man, East African, and Indian forms of ḍamma and sukūn), see: A Visual Guide to Quranic Graphic Variants.

‒ 3: The book is the physical rea­li­za­tion: page size, margins, type­face, lay­out, title pages, appen­dices, indices, catch­words, headers .... This layer answers questions like:
‒ Are rukūʿāt marked in the text? On the margin?
‒ How many lines per page?
‒ Is there extra space bet­ween words?
‒ Are there numbers after each verse, and are alter­native ends of verse in­di­cated?
‒ Must each juzʾ begin on a right‑hand page?
‒ Does every page finish with a verse-end?
‒ Is there an index? A colo­phon? A table of aḥzāb?
‒ Are the cartouches on the margin for aǧāzʾ, sa­ǧadāt, sakta?
‒ Are the suras counted or named only?
‒ Is the chronology of revelation indicated?
This layer is the most visible to readers, yet the least under­stood in scholar­ship. It is also the layer in which printers, not scholars, often have the final word.
↩︎ return

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.
Hartmut Bobzin: “Von Venice to Cairo: On the History of Arabic Edi­tions of the Koran” in Spra­chen des Nahen Ostens und die Druck­revo­lu­tion, eds.: Eva Hane­butt-Benz, Dagmar Glaß, Geoffrey Roper West­hofen 2002. p. 171

Bobzin's statement that Muslims did not have a text before 1924 is absurd, mis­taking the switch from Otto­man spell­ing to Maġribī spell­ing, from Ottoman calligraphy to base­line type, and from informing about several end-of-verse-systems to simple Kufan numbering with the final stan­dar­tiza­tion of the text. His base mistake: He does not see (does not hear), that the oral form was fixed cen­turies ago, and that the graphic ele­ments are not of equal impor­tance: ductus and sura title boxes are not as impor­tant as the rasm, and while some rasm dif­ferences are dis­cussed for a single word (ḥarf → farš al-ḥurūf), others for gramma­tical categories (uṣūl) ‒ and: The King Fuʾād Edition of 1924 is no Azhar Koran!

the various editions of the Qur’an printed today (with only extra-ordinary excep­tions) are identical, word for word, letter for letter.
Gabriel Said Rey­nolds "Introduction" to The Qur'ān in its Histori­cal Context, Abingdon: Routledge 2008, p. 1

Yes, there is less varity than hundred years ago, but maṣāḥif from Kazan, Bakū, Ankara and Istan­bul are very different from those from Dja­karta; those from Casa­blanca, Dakar, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Kano are not only different from each other, but very different from those from Khartum or Karachi. In Bairut, Medina, Tehran maṣāḥif with different spellings are produced.

Quelle für den Konsona­ten­text sind natür­lich nicht Koran­hand­schriften, sondern die Litera­tur über ihn; er ist also eine Rekon­struk­tion, das Ergebnis einer Um­schrei­bung des üblichen Konso­nanten­textes
Of course, the source for the consonant text are not manu­scripts, but the litera­ture about it; it is therefore a recon­struc­tion, the result of a recasting of the usual consonant text
Gotthelf Bergsträßer: "Reciting the Qurʾān in Cairo" in Der Islam XX (1932)

Bergsträßer valued al-Ḥaddād and held his muṣ­ḥaf in high esteem, although it was not a critical edition based on the oldest manu­scripts (something he had wanted to achieve). Seeing that it was not ‒ as is common ‒ an adaptation of a recent print, and having noticed a Tabyīn by Ibn Naǧāḥ in his study, he assumed that the Chief Recitor had recon­structed the old written form by applying the rules of ad-Dānī and Abū Dāʾūd Sulaimān Ibn Naǧāḥ to the oral text he knew by heart.
Yes, al-Ḥaddād had not just adopted an Ottoman muṣ­ḥaf, not even Muḫalla­lātī's of 1308/1890, but his work was based an an existing muṣḥaf, a Warš print from Faz, which he "just" ḥafṣi­fied.
In which treatise, Dr. Bergsträßer, you suppose al-Ḥaddād found that there are three kinds of tanwīn? Where the rule that alifs must have a waṣl-sign or a hamza? Where that he must add sub­stitute vowel letters to lenghten fatḥa, kasra or ḍamma? Where, for God's sake, did he find the rule that /ʾallāh/ must be written as /ʾallah/?? Where did he find that nūn aṣ-ṣilā, rukuʿā signs, and iẓhār nūn do not belong to a proper muṣ­ḥāf?
The only possible explanation I see, is that he adopted a Faz print to the Eastern oral form.
Here the shift from 1911 to 1924:
some big alif are replace by daggers,
some naked alifs get a waṣl-sign,
kaṣra draws the hamza-sign,
sequental tanwīn.

	seq. tanwīn	Assimil	أ	ٱ	ا۟	sub.vow.	long vow.signs
And Maġ	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✘
1911	✘	✘		(✔)	✘	✘
KFE	✔	✔		✔	✔	✔
Otto	✘	✘	✘	✘	✘	✘	✔
IPak		✔
Kaš

And+Maġ and IPak+Kaš have been opposites for some time. KFE adopted And/Maġ completely. 1911 and Muḫallalātī made part of the switch, as you can see here:

Why do the orientalists like the KFE? ‒ It is easy to read ← baseline, space between word, clear right-to-left
‒ easy to navigate ← numbers after each verse
‒ uncluttered (no marginal notes, streamlined pause signs, nothing on alternatve readings)
  (the KFE has space for interlinear remarks and for notes on the margin)

Not the text itself? Not the spendid result of deliberations on the spelling of particular words?
I don't think so. The Naval Kishore (Lucknow) prints were just as good.
And I'm not convinced that on the few places al-Ḥaddād boke with the Moroccan prints, his deviations were well-advised.

it becomes evident that the 1924 edition did not invent a new orthography, but executed a radical geopolitical and text-critical switch. For four centuries, from 1513 to 1914, Egypt had been part of the Ottoman Empire, firmly embedded in the Asian/Ottoman school of orthography and long-vowel notation. The 1924 edition marks the moment Egypt consciously broke with Asia and turned back to its African roots—brutally pivoting away from the Ottoman rasm in favor of the Maghrebian tradition, and replacing the Asian long-vowel marks with the classical system of short vowels lengthened by ḥurūf al-madd. It was not a technological evolution; it was a structural switch.















­ ‒ ­ → ←

some numbers

There are (at least) seven different King Fuʾād editions:
KFEI 1342/1924 printed in Giza + second print 1343/1924
kfeI 1343/1925 printed in Būlāq with six added seals/signatures and added أصله
kfeIb 1344/1926 Būlāq + second print/run stamped 1345/1927: two lines س saktah on (س)
kfeIc 1346/1928 ?????
kfeId 1347/1929 Būlāq this edition has TWO more changes: an added nūn on 775 ان لن for الن
    and a changed dedication page mentioning the crown prince as well
whether 1347 brought these changes in one go or whether 1346 had one of them, I do not know since I have not seen a kfeIc (1346/1928); maybe it does not exist, maybe there was a third run of kfeIb in that year,
KFEII 1371/1952 printed by Dār al-Kutub in Lubūdīya St.
KFEIIa same as above with torn out alif and bāʾ (one leaf)
KFEIII 1952–1965 (or so) same as KFEII but without alif and bāʾ (skipped)
KFEII has about 950 changes to KFEI:
– about 515 changed pauses
– 114 changed sura title boxes
– 33 changed tanwīn at the end of the suras (i.e. fore the basmala)
– 4 changes in the rasm
– seven pages on these changes including the signatures of the 1952 editors
– س saktah on (س) – the only change taken from the Būlāq editions, neither
    the seals, the changed dedication, ان لن , nor أصله are adopted
later KFE edition (III, IV, V) have just different men standing for the correctness of the edition, and different dates (nor either just runs, nor fresh editions)

kfeII is an unimportant "school edition"; the Amīrīya reused the plates of 1347/1929 with 37 changes made on the plates:
37 of the 666 made in the large edition, of course without the added text on the changes,
without the leaner sura title boxes, without the new pauses.
kfaII is so bad that the Amiriyya made an effort for a better small/cheap edition with the correct Q52 text (and pauses), before finally making a freshly set edition on 525 pages
with for possible pauses melted three into one (ۚ   ۗ   ۖ   ۛ →  ۚ ) latter KFE edition (III, IV, V) have just different men standing for the correctness of the edition, and different dates (nor either just runs, nor fresh editions)

btw, the 1952 change section has the same structure of signatures as the 1924 edition:
first, the Chief Qārī of Egypt.
At the end, simply attesting to the correctness:
the chief copy‑editor of the Amīriyya Press and the Shaykh al‑Azhar.
And in between, three more men, one of them an Arabist.
The only difference is: while in 1924 there were three men from the educational sector,
in 1952 three come from the religious sphere.

This picture from Muhammad Hozien shows that KFAII has 54 gatherings with 16 pages each. Probably KFAI has the same binding.































–­

Amīriyya 1924 /1342

The first offset‑printed muṣḥaf appeared in 1342/1924.
It had been initiated after Egypt’s independence from the Sublime Porte by Muḥammad Ḥifnī Bey Nāṣif (1271/1855–1337/1919), director of the Arabic Department in the Ministry of Education نظارة المعارف .
The typesetting was carried out at the Amīriyya Press المطبعة الأميرية in Būlāq,
and the printing took place at the Survey of Egypt مصلحة المساحة in Giza, which pos­sessed large offset presses for map production.
We have no reliable data on the size of the original print run. What can be said is that, a century later, fewer than a hun­dred copies can be traced in public cata­lo­gues and li­brary hold­ings — the online catalo­gues currently show no surviv­ing copy in Egypt. Since a second print­ing was pro­duced in Giza the fol­low­ing year, the initial edition was pro­bably well under one thousand. Here images from the copies held by Columbia and by Kiel Uni­ver­si­ty from the second run.

It is no accident that the IDEO, when held a conference on the 1924 print, had not a single copy by the Amīrīya, just a book made by Muḥammad ʿAbdarRaḥmān called muṣḥaf al-muʿalim with 15 lines per page (instead of the original 12)

(if you do not have an image of a KFE in your head, click here

Unlike the Muḫallalātī, the King Fuʾād Edition was not intended for scholars but for students.
It contained no tafsīr,
did not mention any verse‑counting systems other than the Kūfān,
and did not mark any readings other than that of Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim — which would have required colour printing or a refined system of marginal notes using established abbreviations.
In contrast to the traditional madrasa setting, where students memorized the text with a šaiḫ and did not actually read from the page, the new state schools expected pupils to read in the printed muṣḥaf; to make reading as easy as possible, fewer than 300 of the 406 sorts designed for unvowelled Arabic by Muḥammad Ǧaʿfar Bey in 1906 were used: since lām‑mīm ligatures or lām‑ḥāʾ‑hāʾ ligatures, for example, were never employed, all vowel signs could be placed exactly above (or below) the letter. That the text was strictly linear, with no stacked ligatures — a layout familiar from novels and newspapers — and that each page contained only twelve lines, was intended to make it accessible to a “secular” reading public.
Here why it is the King Fuʾād Edition: page alif – i.e. the first page after an empty page 1 and 826 pages of qurʾānic text, and an other empty page – from 1924:

page alif, although no number is shown, but it is alif because three pages later is "dal" (د).

The KFE is not "The Cairo Edition" or "CE", because there are more than hundred different Cairo editions,
more than five Warš editions are really Cairo editions, some without Cairo being mentioned (many edition for Morocco), or even Algers given as publishing Place, others like Muḥammad Alī Ṣubaiḥ proudly mention Cairo

reproduced by N. Suit, and those by al-Ḥalabi
Cairo Warš edition In the period between the "World Wars" several publishers published Warš maṣāḥif. Here some by Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī.

Some prints are difficult to read. Princeton digitalisated their copy, assuming it was artistically valuable they made it available to the public:

BTW, there are 32 empty lines above sūra title boxes and ten on the bottom of pages:

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facts about the KFE

The KFA was written by Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḫalaf al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād alone.
It was a sign of the inde­pen­dance from Istanbul (Nov 1914) (not from the UK Feb 1922).
It was the first offset printed muṣḥaf.
It was set with less than 300 sorts out of the 470 designed by Muḥam­mad Ǧaʿfar Bey ‒ in 1906 a new set of inter­locking types with improved kerning had been adopted, allowing con­nect­ing strokes to meet with­out visible breaks (there were 406 Arabic sorts, the rest: Persian, num­bers, punc­tu­a­tion ‒ before 1906 there had been over 900 sorts; but even the re­duced set had too many stacked ligatures for Muḥ. Ḥifnī Bey Nāsif; he wanted a muṣ­ḥaf with baseline orientated letters for people educated in state schools, reading novels and news papers.

here you see the Amīrīya set text and the same text set in Hyderabad: mostly the same with the kasras higher, in the last example a different form of end-mīm was used (in the first line with the deep mīm kasratan are move slightly to the left)
the KFE(resp. al-Ḥaddād) did not reconstruct the spelling according to Ibn Naǧāh, he just follwed a Faz print
I base this assertion on two groups of facts: the adding of ġāli­ban in the informa­tion. first the original words 1342 to 1414:

the 1420 version

again in 2019

and in the grand edition:

The information at the end of the book state its sources (although ... see below),
but that many features were Maghribian (Moroccan in fact) al-Ḥaddād kept to himself.
Only the Kufic counting, the partition into aǧāzʾ and aḥzāb,
    and the pause signs were based on Eastern sources.
Western/Morroccan were
    ‒ the rasm (largely after Abū Dāʾūd Ibn Naġāḥ)
    ‒ the small substitute vowels for elongation
    ‒ the baseline hamzae before Alif at the begin­ning of the word (ءادم instead of اٰدم).
    ‒ the distinction into three kinds of tanwin (above each other, one after the other, with mīm)
    ‒ the spelling at the end of the sura, which assumes that the next sura is spoken imme­diate­ly after­wards (and with­out basmala): tanwin is modified accor­dingly.
    ‒ the absence of nūn quṭni.
    ‒ the non-spelling of vowel shortening.
    ‒ the (wrong) spelling of ʾallāh.
    ‒ the Maghrebī (and Indian) attraction of the hamza sign by kasra

in G24 hamza with kasra is below the base­line ‒ in the Ottoman Empire (include Egypt) and Iran hamza stays above the line

‒ noted as­si­mi­la­tion like in the Magh­reb (and in India):

the first three lines are Otto­man (Rušdī, Ḥasan Riḍā in ʿIrāqī state edi­tions, Muṣ­ṭafā Naẓīf Qadir­ġalī Cairo 1911),
in the middle Giza 1924
then Maġribī Warš edi­tions ‒ note that in the older edi­tion the second stem (vertical stroke) of لا is lam+šad­da, while in the modern Algerian Šaḏilī one, it is the first stroke.
the Maġribī writers, al-Mu­ḫal­la­lātī, and G24 have no sign above the assi­mi­lated latter and a šadda above the assimi­la­ting one.

A new feature was the diffe­ren­tia­tion of the Maġ­ribī sukūn into three signs:
‒ the ǧazm in the form of a ǧīm with­out a tail and with­out a dot for vowel-less­ness,
‒ the circle for never to be pro­nounced,
‒ the (oval) zero: only pro­nounced after a pause.
(while before ‒ as in IPak ‒ the absence of any sign signified "not to be pro­nounced").
Further, word spacing, base­line orien­tation and exact place­ment of dots and dashes.
A new feature was the differentiation of the Maghrebic sukūn into three signs:
    ‒ the ǧazm in the form of an ǧīms without a tail and without a dot for vowel-lessness,
    ‒ the circle for never to be pronounced,
    ‒ the (oval) zero for "only pronounced if paused".
(while before ‒ as in IPak‒ the absence of any sign signifies "not to be pro­nounced").
Further, word spacing,
baseline orientation and
exact placement of dots and dashes.

In 7:103 und 3:144+21:34 11:97+ 10:75+23:46+28:32+ 43:46 have the same rasm and are pro­nounced the same way, but written diffe­rently:
wa-malaʾihī
IPak: وَمَلَا۠ئِهٖ
Q52: وَمَلَإِي۠هِۦ
Both scripts use a mater lectio­nis in the rasm for /a/ and /i/ ‒ not for 7ā/ and /ī/,
since alif, yāʾ and wāw were the only letters available to signal the pre­sence of a vowel. in India alif is mute (= does not lengthens the fatḥa), yāʾ carries hamza
in the West alif carries the hamza, yāʾ is mute.

In 3:144 + 21:34 ʾa-faʾin
IPak: افَا۠ئِنْ
Q52: اَفإي۠ن
for Indians and Turks the alif is mute
(in proper IPak there is NOTHING above alif, since 1935 some put a circle,
Turks put qaṣr, Persians bil-qaṣri below)
die Araber sehen das alif als Hamza-Träger, das yāʾ als stumm.
Muṣṭafā Naẓīf lässt das stumme yāʾ in seinem (in Deutsch­land und Indo­nesia nach­ge­drucktem) 604er berkenar muṣḥaf in 21:34 weg: اَفَإنْ
Sonst hat er ‒ wie üblich ‒ alif und yā, aber in dem 604er fehlt das yāʾ und die meisten Heraus­geber der Re­prints stört(e) das nicht.

In 21:34 ʾa-faʾin
IPak: افَا۠ئِنْ
Q52: اَفإي۠ن
India and osm/Tur make the alif silent
(Indians used to leave the alif without any sign, now they put the silent making circle,
Turks write qaṣr underneath)
for Arabs alif carries hamza, yāʾ is silent.
Muṣṭafā Naẓīf in one of his manu­scripts (the 604 pages berkenar one) just drops the otiose letter. اَفَإنْ
It does not help to observe that in his other maṣāḥif he has the super­fluous letter. The 604 page muṣḥaf is often re­printed (not as often as the 522 page one, but in different countries) without "correc­tion".
Similar 6:34 min-nabaʾi

al-Ḥaddād switched from وَمَلَا۠ئِهٖ to وَمَلَإِي۠هِۦ , and from افَا۠ئِنْ to اَفإي۠ن , should be proof enough, that he uncrtical­ly copied Morocco.
I do not claim that al‑Ḥaddād is wrong; I merely note that he offers no argu­ment for his choice.
Now alif hosts the hamza while the yāʾ is silent, whereas pre­viously the alif was silent and the yāʾ served as the seat for both the hamza and the /i/ vowel.
















Incidentally, MNQ once forgets to write the otiose letter:

The Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim King Fuʾād 1924 edition

The field of study of printed editions of the Qur'an needs to be cleaned up.
Many German Orienta­lists refer to the offi­cial Egyp­tian edi­tion of 1924/5 as "the stan­dard Qur'an", others call it "Azhar Qur'an". Some call it "THE Cairo Edi­tion/CE" ‒ non­sensi­cal de­signa­tions. Many false ideas cir­culate about the King Fuʾād edition, the Giza Qur'an, the Egyp­tian Survey Autho­rity print (المصحف الشريف لطبعة مصلحة المساحة المصرية), the 12-liner (مصحف 12 سطر).
Some believe they are look­ing at a manu­script.^♦

♦ like Abdel Theo­dore Khoury, ʾAsmāʾ Ḥilālī, sogar A.A. Brocket (Two Trans­missions p. 9) ↩

Andreas Ismail Mohr calls it "type print­ing". Yet the epi­logue ‒ from the 1925 small (Būlāq) edi­tion even more clearly than the first, large one (Giza 1924) ‒ makes every­thing clear: The fair copy writ­ten by Egypt's šaiḫ al-maqāriʾ Muḥam­mad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḫalaf al-Ḥu­sainī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī al‑Ǧir­ǧāwī al-Ḥaddād (1282/1865-1357/ 22.1. 1939) ‒ not to be con­fused with the calli­grapher Muḥammad ibn Saʿd ibn Ibrāhīm al-Ḥad­dād (1919-2011) ‒ was set in Būlāq with five tiers per line (pause signs; fatḥa, damma, sukūn; letters [for base­line hamza includ­ing the vowel sign]; kasra; spac­ing).
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Type printing is a letter­press pro­cess. Types/sorts leave small inden­ta­tions on the paper: they press the print­ing ink into the paper. Offset is plano­graphic: the paper ab­sorbs the ink; you can't find inden­ta­tions. With his eyes, Mohr saw that it was not hand­written. But he does not know that type print can only be re­cog­nised with the sense of touch.
"That's nonsense, instead of ela­bora­tely type­sett­ing and print­ing that ONCE, why not have a calli­gra­pher write it?" (Mohr) This fails to appre­ci­ate the tech­no­id sense of accuracy of the editors of 1924. The accuracy established by type­setting and now achieved through Open­Type tech­no­logy is matched by no one but ʿUṯmān Ṭaha: per­fect align­ment with every vowel sign sitting exactly above or below its letter.
Traditional letterpress struggles with this layout. While charac­ters on top of the line stay close enough to the eye, the des­cen­ders force the kasras too far below the base­line. This breaks the visual con­nec­tion, mak­ing the page harder to read.
A look at the Hyderabad 1938 print shows what hap­pens when you use (normal, like Monotype) movable-type: kasras sit beneath the des­cender of end-mīm, -lām, -ʿain, and -ḥāʾ, in 1906 Būlāq got new sorts, with notches/morizers these were lifted up next to a stroke, or into a counter. (On the image, I made the Giza kasras red.) The Amīrīya Press got interlocking lead types with precise, complementary notches and mortises along their lateral walls. This mechanical innovation allowed overlapping (kerning) letters and diacritics to seamlessly slide into one another's bodies like puzzle pieces, completely eliminating the vertical gaps of traditional rectangular blocks and achieving the fluid, uninterrupted connecting line of Arabic calligraphy.
When ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (UT) copied the Q52 text into the ber­Kenar lay­out he kept the linear form and the space between words of the 1924/52 print the 1938 kasras sit too low, making the page look dis­jointed and harder to read. (In the image below, I marked the kas­ras in red that had been "lifted" on the galley proofs for the Giza print).
Two examples to illu­strate.

While UT clearly reads yanhā, the beau­ti­ful Ottoman hand­writ­ing reads naihā; while the three vowel signs (fatḥa, sukūn, long-ā) are clear­ly in the right order (there is no other way, they are all on top), nūn (per­haps) comes before yāʾ (or does the nūn dot come before the yāʾ dots). Inci­den­tally, the two "tooth" letters have a tooth or spine in UT, but none in court Otto­man! While there is clearly no­thing bet­ween heh (I use the Uni­code name to clearly dis­tin­guish it from ḥāʾ) and alif maq­ṣūra in UT, there could well be a tooth in Otto­man: You only needed to put two dots over it and it would be hetā or some­thing like that.

2^nd example: wa-ma­lā­ʾi­ka­tihī Whereas the 1924 print (below) and UT (middle) use the small letter alif‑madda hover­ing in front of the yāʾ‑tooth ‒ an added long‑vo­wel that leaves the tooth free to carry a ham­za di­rect­ly beneath it, yield­ing a hamza‑yāʾ (/ʾ/, not /ī/ or /ā/) ‒ the Qa­ṭar muṣ­ḥaf (top) puts a mu­tat­ing alif‑madda direct­ly above the tooth, there­by turn­ing that tooth into a long‑vowel alif, and lets the hamza hover below after it. Sound and rasm re­main the same, but the ortho­gra­phy is dif­ferent ‒ not ad­missi­ble for those who do not to­lerate any ap­proxi­mation in the Qurʾān.
Now the whole of page 3 in com­pari­son. Giza print and UT: the Amīrī­ya is more calli­graphic than UT, which can be seen in the examples in the right margin.
All in all, UT follows the default. Base­line and clear from right to left. Only in the spac­ing bet­ween words is it less modern than the Amīriy­ya (which is why Dar al-Maʿrifa in­creased the spac­ing). While the Amīrīya has bāʾ/tā/ṯāʾ, sīn/šīn, mīm and fā above mim, UT writes it in front (right) of it. Simila­ri­ly: KFE: lām above heh, UT before heh.

if you don't want to read the whole page, but just some words, in which KFA is more calli­graphic can UT:^◉

◉ ↩

Also from page 3 Com­parison of Muṣḥaf Qaṭar and UT. In the first and last examples, Abū ʿUmar ʿUbaidah Mu­ḥam­mad Ṣāliḥ al-Banki / عبيدة محمد صالح البنكي does not place the yāʾ-dots EXACTLY under the tooth (in the first case because of the close nūn, in the second case with­out need). Three cases show tooth let­ters without a tooth. And a cuddle-mīm, which makes its vowel sign sit wrong (for modern readers): the mīm is to the right of the lām, but the mīm vowel sign is to the left, because the mīm is to be pro­noun­ced after the lām. So it is rightly "wrong".

letters from the KFE and from UT1 (below):
In the upper part you see that KFA (white back­ground) is more calli­graphic, UT (yellowish) more type­writer style.
The lower part shows Būlāq sorts not used for the qurʾānic text, i.e. used for the appen­dices or not at all in the KFA.