Hassan Chahdi on the King Fu'ad Edition

There is a text in the web

Chahdi is an expert on The Qur’an, its Transmission and Textual Variants: Confronting Early Manu­scripts and Written Traditions,
Le muṣḥaf dans les débuts de l'islam.
Le paradoxe de la transmission du Coran : entre riwāya et qiyās ?
Entre qirā’āt et variantes du rasm

He gives as his main interests:
Élaboration des textes fondamentaux de l'islam : contexte et processus de canonisa­tion.
Manuscrits coraniques : graphie (rasm) et variantes de lec­tures (qirā'āt)
Écoles théologiques et systèmes juridi­ques des débuts de l'islam : fonde­ments et doctrines
Littérature et poésie arabe (pré-islamique, islamique et moderne) : analyse lingu­isti­que, stylisti­que et métrique,
Histoire des pouvoirs et des savoirs.

As the history of printed maṣāḥif is not among his interests,
the third of his article that is devoted to it, is just rubbish
and the two good thirds of the article have hardly to do with the KFE.

He starts like this:

The Cairo edition was published in 1924 by the printing press of Bulaq... This edition is also called the “Royal edition” (al-malikiyya or al-amīriyya)

Yes, it might have left the printing press in 1342/1924,
but the press of the Survey of Egypt, which lies not in al-Qāhira, not in the City of Cairo, not even in the Cairo Gover­nor­ate, but on the left side of the Nile: in Giza.
yes, it was published by the Goverment Printing Press in Bulāq, the Amīriyya, but in 1343/1925:
type set in Bulāq, printed in Giza, bound, stamped and published in Bulāq.

طبعة الحكومية المصرّية
        -- . --
    ١٣٤٣ هجرّية
                سـنة
As indicated in the bibliography, it is called "Muṣḥaf al-misāḥa wal amīriyya" after the institution that printed it (al-misāḥa = l'office national de l'information géo­graphique = Egyptian General Survey Authority = Grundbuchamt = الهيئة المصرية العامة للمساحة) and the institution that published it (al-amīriyya).
After the stamp, it is called "Egyptian Government Edition" or "der amtliche ägyptische Koran" (G.Berg­sträßer), or "the 12 liner/مصحف 12 سطر" or "the 1925 King Fuʾād Edition" because there are slightly different editions in 1926,1927,1929 and an edition with almost 1000 changes (mostly just different pause signs) from 1952 ‒ all are called "Muṣḥaf al-Amīriyya", the first (al-Muṣḥaf al-misāḥa wa'l amīriyya) was made by al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād al-Mālikī (d. 22.1. 1939) and the 1952 one by ʿAlī Muḥammad aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ(1304/1886-1380/1960) ‒ only the large editions (27 x 20 cm) were printed by al-misāḥa in Giza (already in 1925 there was a smaller offset print­ing press in Bulāq ‒ the one in Giza could print large maps). And while the early editions have no­thing to do with al-Azhar, in 1952 ʿulemāʾ were involved.
BTW, 1952, but before the revolution. 12 line is special, most others in Egypt (Muṣṭafā Naẓīf, aš-Šamar­li/Mu­ḥammad Saʿd Ibrāhīm al-Ḥaddād (1919-2011), Haǧǧ Ḥāfiẓ, ʿUṯmān Ḫalīfa Qayiš­Zāde an-Nūrī al-Bur­durī d. 1894,ʿUṯmān Ṭaha) have 15 lines on a text page,
the South African edition on 848 pages has 13 lines; just Pakistan where every­thing from 9 to 18 lines is common (even 6liner and 21liner exist), produces copies with 12 lines of Arabic text (both with and without inter­linear trans­lations).

This edition is also called the “Royal edition” (al-malikiy­ya or al-amīriyya)

This is gram­matical­ly im­possible, would have to be al-muṣ­ḥaf al-malikī or al-amīrī. In fact the first name is not used for the KFE and the second is short for al-muṣḥaf al-maṭbaʿa al-amīriyya: the Goven­ment Press Edition.

So, here are some of Chahdi's statements ‒ and the facts:
first prints in Iran en 1831-1833
  ‒ really 1829 in Tehran, '30 in Shiraz, '31 in Tebriz and in Tehran ‒ first type than litho­graphy.
en Inde (en 1852)
  ‒ really in 1829 as Mūẓiḥ al-Qurʾān (with an Urdu trans­lation) and many from than on
En Égypte même, on imprime le Coran en 1833
  ‒ there exists no trace of this print : it never existed, not even a complete ǧuz
L’édition du Caire [1924] est par conséquent la première édition publiée dans le monde arabe
  ‒ first Cairo edition was 1299/1881/2, many for the next forty years in al-Azhar Library;
    to my knowledge Faz/Fès where a muṣḥaf was produced in 1879
    lies in the Arab world
The first com­plete Qurʾān printed in Cairo is the Bulaq 1299/1881/2 print ‒ both in one volume and in 10 leather­bound parts. It is well known both from the Enyclo­pedia of the Quran and from Kein Standard:

It has 13 lines per page, 603 pages in the one-volume-edition.

In 1308/1890 the most important of all Cairo editions was published: "al-Muhallalātī":

In 1885 an other important Cairo edition saw the light of day ‒ this one as well with "ar-rasm al-ʿuṯmānī":

Let's mention more early "Cairo Editions":
All written by they same calli­grapher who wrote the tre­men­dous­ly important 1308/1890 edition, ʿAbd al-Ḫālliq Ḥaqqī Ibn al-Ḫawaǧa, by the editor Šaiḫ Aḥmad bin ʿAlī al-Melīǧī al-Kutbī, who had a press near al-Azhar until 1919.

From a copy held in a Catholic Theological Seminar in Frankurt/Main, printed 1315/1898 on 468 pages with 17 lines:

Innahu li-Qurʾān karīm fī kitāb maknūn lā yamassahu illā al-muṭahhirūn tanzīl min ...
Miṣr : al-Maṭbaʻah al-ʻĀmirīyah, 1318 [1900]
364 pp. 19 lines ; 20 cm.

all from before "the first print in the Arab world":

« le manuscrit coranique inté­grale­ment écrit de la main du savant ... al-Muhallalātī »
  ‒ was a book printed in 1890 in al-Qāhira (see above and below)
La commission mandatée par le roi Fouad est composée d’éminents savants
  ‒ there was no commission, they never met, they dit not discuss the text of the edition
  The chief reader قارئ of Egypt Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād
  was the only Islamic scholar in the "commission";
  the other three are from the Minstry of Education or the Pedagogical College next door:
Hanafî Nâsif
  ‒ really Ḥifnī Bey Nāṣif (on his visting card: Nassef) d.1919
ʿAnānī
  ‒ Muṣṭafā (al-)ʿInānī (d.1362/1943)
Aḥmad al-Askandarānī
  ‒ Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī ibn ʿUmar al-Iskandarī (1292‒1357/1875‒1938)

  ‒ Ḥifnī Bey Nāṣif died before any work on the edition started.
    I assume it was mainly his idea; the date given for the signatures is
    just before his death thus honouring the initiator of the edition.
among the countries that have editions of their own Pakistan is mentioned,
  ‒ but not India, although there were important edition
  before and after 1947 (in Calcutta, Hooghli, Kanpure, Lucknow, Bombay, Delhi ...)

Mais seule l’édition saoudienne de Médine fait vraiment concurrence à celle du Caire
  ‒ I'd say the opposite: first the KFE was hardly bought by Arabs,
    but the edition that I call "Uṯmān Ṭaha 1 / UT1" made in Medina
    is the one that enshrines the text of the KFE
    albeit the one of the 1952 edition with minor differences
le ductus consonantique correspond , schématiquement , au squelette orthographique
  ‒ orthographique skeleton is fine, but as the Arabic script has letters
    (not vowels and consonants) the first expression makes no sense
La commission pour l’édition du Caire se fonde sur le système de lecture de Hafs
Ibn Sulaymân, ou plus précisément sur le manuscrit coranique inté­grale­ment écrit
de la main du savant égyptien Radwân b. Muhammad al-Muhallalātī
  ‒ Abū ʿĪd Riḍ­wān ibn Muḥammad ibn Sulai­mān al-Muḫal­la­lātī ( ١٢٥٠-١٣١١/1834-1893)
    was the editor of the important edition, but the scribe was
    ʿAbdel­ḫāliq al-Ḥaqqī Ibn al-Ḫo­ǧa/Ibn al-Ḫa­waǧa;
    al-Muḫallalātī's edition is important, he broke with the Ottoman ortho­graphy,
    instead followed in some respects the Indian system ‒
    and is closer to ad-Dānī's rasm
    BUT al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād did not follow his orthography,
    but more the Moroccon (Andalu­sian, Western) orthography ‒
    and is closer to Abu Sulaimān Ibn Naǧāḥ's rasm.

And there is something that could be misunderstood:
on retrouve [dans les codices anciens] notamment des variantes de lecture extra-canoniques, antérieures à la période de standardisation du corpus coranique.
  ‒ Marijn van Putten and others have shown that ALL manuscripts follow the ʿUṯmānic rasm (diacritica and voweling non conforming to any of the canonical readings do not amount to differences in the rasm)
    with the exception of the erased text of the Sanaʾa Palimpsest.
    If it were « antérieures à la période de standardisation» des qira'āt,
    riwayāt et ṭuruq, it would have been clearer.




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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.

Giza 1924 ‒ better ‒ worse

The Egyptian Goverment Edition printed in Gizeh in 1924 was the first offset printed mushaf,
It was type set (not type printed).
It used smaller subset of the Amiriyya font not because the Amiriyya laked the techni­cal pos­sibi­lity for more elaborate ligatures,
((in 1881 when they printed a muṣḥaf for the first time,
  they used 900 different sorts, in 1906 they reduced it to about 400,
  which they used in the backmatter of the 1924 muṣḥaf,   in the qurʾānic text even less))
but to make the qurʾānic text easier to read for state school educated (wo-)men.

They did not want that the words "climb" at the end of the line for lack of space,
nor that some letter are above following letters.

It is elegant how the word con­tin­ues a­bo­ve to the right of the base­line waw, but it is against the ra­tio­nal mind of the 20th cen­tury: every­thing must be right to left!








The kind of elegance you have with "bi-ḥam­di rab­bi­ka" is not valued by modern inte­lectu­als.

Here you see on the right /fī/, on the left /fĭ/, a distinction gone in 1924:

And here you see, with which vowel the alif-waṣl has to be read ‒
something not shown in the KFE.
In Morocco they always show with which vowel one has to start (here twice fatḥa), IF one starts al­though the first letter is alif-waṣl, the linking alif, with is normaly silent.
In Persia and in Turkey one shows the vowel only after a pause, like here:

Both in the second and third line an alif waṣl comes after "laziM", a necessary pause, so there is a vowel sign between the usual waṣl and the alif ‒ a reading help missing in Gizeh 1924.

Gizeh 1924 <> Cairo 1928 and after

See the end of Sura 73 in the Gizeh 1924 print (on the left)

and Cairo 1928 (on the right, slightly enlarged -- the Cairo print is a bit smaller and has much less margin).
First line  الن and ان لن
In 1952 it's back to الن

The Bairut (Paris, Amman) reprints oscillate between the two.
The original Damascus ʿUṯmān Ṭaha has   one word:

So has the first Saudi reprint:

But the next, the first done in the new printing complex, has two: