Before discussing what the King Fuʾād Edition of 1924 actually is, a few basic distinctions are needed. They may feel pedantic, but without them the debate becomes a tangle of category mistakes. Three layers must be kept apart:
1. The oral form
The oral form of the Qurʾān — in this case the reading of
Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim — is a system of recitation. It defines how the text is pronounced, sometimes a different vowel, a doubled consonant, or easing of hamza, elongations, assimilation, where pauses are mandatory, possible, or forbidden.
It is transmitted orally, corrected orally, and mastered orally.
It can be written differently ‒ either fixing most aspects or leaving them to be taught orally.
2. The written form
2a the text
The written form is the choice of
orthography: the spelling system and graphic code used to represent Ḥafṣ on the page (or in the data stream) ‒ a bundle of decisions:
‒ the
rasm, the letter skeleton;
‒ the spelling of long vowels;
‒ spelling initial hamza;
‒ mute/otios letters;
‒ the writing of (partial) assimilation;
‒ auxiliary signs: pause marks, verse numbers,
saǧada signs,
juzʾ and
ḥizb markers,
saktah signs, and the like.
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/, for differentiating between words that would be homographs without an imposed spelling distinction 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, needs extra lengthening letters: when there is no
ḥarf al-madd in the
rasm a small vowel letter is added.
initial
hamza on alif is not marked in Asia (here an inital alif
is a
hamza) while in the West a small ʿain i.e.
hamza-sign is needed
‒ 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 is the data, the graphic form is the text rendered as an image ‒ the text is basic, the graphic forms are just variants.
First different forms of
ḍamma ‒ they are the same whatever Unicode says.
next different forms of
sukūn:
in the middle you see an East African
muṣḥaf in which
fatḥa+sukūn when the follow each other are joined (as if one sign)
below
nūn ṣīla (nūn quṭnī) by the same calligapher, Hafiz ʿUṯmān the Elder: wheter the nūn is near the
tanwīn or below the alif does not matter, it is the same. Whether it has an extra
kasra nor not, either.
3. The book form
The book form is the physical and typographic realization: page size, margins, typeface, layout, title pages, appendices, indices, catch words, headers ....
This layer answers questions like:
‒ How many lines per page?
‒ Is there extra space between words?
‒ Is there a numbers after
each verse, and are
alternative ends of verse indicated?
‒ Must each
juzʾ begin on a right‑hand page?
‒ Is there in the left bottom always an end of verse?
‒ Is there an index? A colophon? A table of
aḥzāb?
‒ 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.
The legends
Around the 1924 print, a cluster of persistent claims has grown. According to these stories, it was:
‒
the “Cairo Edition”, as if Cairo had produced only one
muṣḥaf;
‒ the
Azhar Qurʾān, as if it had been conceived, edited, and issued by al‑Azhar;
‒ the product of a
committee of four scholars working for seventeen years;
‒ a critical
restoration of the Qurʾān based on the
rasm treatise of Ibn Naǧāḥ.
‒ the first print with the
rasm ʿuṯmānī instead of being
imlāʾī1
‒ it was an immediate success all over the Muslim world.
‒ it spread the reading of Ḥafṣ
These narratives are tidy, appealing ‒ and wrong.
Ḥafṣ was made dominant by non-Arab ruler (the Mamelucks, the Ottomans, Safavid, Timurids) because Ḥafṣ is closes to normal Arabic.
In reality, the text was prepared by
one man. There is
no trace of deliberation, no evidence of a commission, and no sign that the text was systematically discussed with others before it went to press.
What G24 actually did
The 1924 text — which I call
G24, because the King-Fuʾād-Edition was printed in Giza — fixed a specific orthographic system for Ḥafṣ.
It is not
new at all.
Muḥammad (ibn) Ḫalaf (ibn) ʿAlī al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād al-Malakī just
switched from the Ottoman version of the Asian spelling to the Maġribī or Anadusian system.
This orthography and pause system is possible in letterpress, lithography, or manuscript form ‒ or as digital text.
What KFA/kfa actually are
The
book form that carried this text existed in two stable sizes only:
‒ KFA for the 27‑cm format,
‒ kfa for the 20‑cm format.
(more about the differences
later)
Both contain 826 pages of Qurʾān text plus 23 pages of dedication, explanation, index, and colophon.
The smaller kfa is not a shortened version. It is the same book, reduced in size. The
type area — the text block — is only about ten percent smaller. What disappears is the margin: the generous white space of the KFA is reduced to the width of the medaillions for
ǧuz, ḥizb, saktah and
saǧada.
The KFA was
the first offset muṣḥaf, it was a government edition, meant for students in government schools, who should be able to read it easily without a šaiḫ reciting it for them. That is why its initiator Ḥifni Bey Nāṣif wanted that only about 300 sorts were used = no stacked ligatures, no vertical ones like on the right. This baseline-aligned script was new ‒ and lives on in the ʿUṯmān Ṭaha Madina
muṣḥaf.
Thus:
‒ G24 = the text (orthography, pause signs, liturgical divisions:
juzʾ and
ḥizb).
‒ KFA/kfa = the book (827+20‑pages, no title page, no
duʿāʾ, two sizes).
the Indian text I call IPak, its book forms IPak611 (berkenar), IPak848 (South Africa), IPak 549 etc.
the Maġribī text And(alūs), the Ottoman text Ott, the modern Turkish standard CT
MNQ522 and MNQ604 are by Muṣṭafā Nāẓīf Qadirġalī
Kazan is a text standard, so are MSI 1983, MSI 2002, MSI 2019 for Indonesia
Ṭabo-Našr has a rasm of it own, a nIran spelling convention, but prints maṣāḥif an other spellings too
For centuries, the pedagogy of Qurʾānic recitation has been built on differences. Students did not merely learn one reading; they learned how each reading diverged from the others. The Šāṭibīya is the classic monument of this culture: a mnemonic architecture in which the variants of the seven canonical readings are encoded verse by verse. Tens of thousands of Muslims memorized these differences, and the great reciters carried them effortlessly. A master like Muḥammad Ḫalaf ʿAlī al‑Ḥusainī al‑Ḥaddād al‑Malikī could recite the divergences between Ḥafṣ and Warš as naturally as other people recall their own birthdays. This was the professional world of the Šaiḫ al‑Maqāriʾ al‑Miṣrī, the man who prepared the 1924 text. He was a guardian of the oral form of the Qurʾān — not a specialist in early manuscripts, not a reader of ad‑Dānī or Ibn Naǧāḥ, not a calligrapher, and not a typesetter. His task was not to reconstruct an ancient
rasm. What he actually did was straightforward: he took a printed Moroccan Warš
muṣḥaf from Fès — at that time the only widely available Warš edition in print — and mapped the oral Ḥafṣ reading onto its Maġribī written form. In other words, the 1924 text is the result of applying an Egyptian oral tradition to a Fès‑based Maġribī textual template. That was the entire editorial operation. If not convinced, read
this.
