The Pope, The Cairo Edition

Among Catholics one may speak of "the pope", among "normal" people   one SHOULD say "the Roman pope", "the pope of the Occident", "the bishop of Rome", because ‒ leaving meta­phorical use aside ‒ there are two more popes: the Coptic and the Greek "bishof of Alexan­dria and all Africa" in Cairo ((the bishops of Antiochia and All the Orient are not styled as pope)). What is common know­ledge among Egyptian Christians is un­known to many people in the States or in the UK.
Unlike popes, of which there are only three at a time, there are literaly thousand Cairo editions of the qurʾān. But some young scholars write of "The Cairo Edition". Out of ignorance or stu­pi­ti­ty? Maybe they do not know the dif­ference between "a" and "the" ... When I alerted one, s/he added "collo­quially known", an other just shrugged h*r/s shoulders, a third admitted that s/he has never looked into another muṣḥaf ‒ although as Pro­fessor of Isla­mic Stu­dies s/he should have been to a mosque and/or an islamic book­shop and opened a muṣ­ḥaf used by local Muslims (and they certainly do NOT use the KFE/King Fuʾād Edition = idiot's "CE"!)
Sometimes one sees "the St. Peters­burg edition of the Qurʾān". I do not know how many editions exist ‒ certainly not just one: First we know of edi­tions in 1787, 1789, 1790, 1793, 1796 and 1798. Copies of these six edi­tions have no year on the title page or in the back­matter ...

... so one could treat them as one: the 1787-98 Mollah Ismaʿīl ʿOsman St. Petersburg edition: Because there are more, like the 1316/1898 Muṣṭafā Naẓīf Qadirġalī St. Petersburg edition

Note the title: Kalām Qadīm
which does not refer to an antique shop, to antiquarian,
but to the pre-existence of the kalāmullāh ὁ λόγος

"THE St.Petersburg" edition is illogical. Only ignorant or stupid people use that expression. (Of course some are ignorant, stupid AND amoral.))

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:

stupid genius II (the Cairo edition)

van Putten, a linguist, who knows nothing about printed maṣāḥif likes to write about this subject.
He starts a blog:

The most widely accepted qurʾanic text as we know it today, ultimately stems from the 1924 print published in Cairo, colloquially known as the Cairo Edition ... This print has become the de facto standard.

accepted by whom?
Not by the Muslims, just by orientalists ‒ and 50 years later (in a new form) by Arabs (not Turks, Indians, Indonesians).
Hythem Sidky tweeted that CE (Cairo Edition) was "immensely popular".
Actually, the 1924 King Fuʾād Edition (850 big pages, thick paper) was highly unpopular, although cheap for European scholars and the middle class, most Egyptians preferred and prefer cheaper editions on 522 (or 604) pages: first those written by Muṣṭafā Naẓīf ‒ by ten different Egyptian publishers till the 1950s, among them (in the new orthography) the Ministry of Interior.

Reading or listening to Cairo-Editions-narrators one gets the impression that before 1924 there was no text of the qurʾān, just a wild collection of quranic fragments that the wise Cairo committee put for the first time into a proper book.
Utter nonsense.
Above and below we have the Ottoman (!) version written by Muṣṭafā Naẓīf on the right and the adapted version in the 1924 orthography on the left.
For good measure I will add below the Indian version. All three are the same qurʾān. According to Bergsträßer the Indian is the best. And it is the most common. Only because most Orientalists are arabocentered, they ignore the majority of Muslims -- very strange when you consider how many Indians live in England, how many Turks live in Germany, how many Maghrebians live in France, Belgium, the Netherlands & Spain.


Let's go back to the nonsense the Dutch professor writes ("colloquially known as the Cairo Edition").
When I google "Cairo edition" I just get tweeds by the professor and unrelated things, like or this
When I google مصحف القاهرة or إصدار القاهرة no trace of the 1924 edition. المصحف الشريف لطبعة مصلحة المساحة المصرية is a proper name, مصحف 12 سطر another.
1924 did not bring a new text, just space between words.


There are two more reasons why it is stupid to call the King Fuʾād (12 line) edition "the Cairo edition":
the minor reason is: the books were printed in Gizeh, and it is the only muṣḥaf ever printed in Gizeh proper.
the major reason Is: there are more than thousand qurʾān edition published in Cairo.
To speak of "the Cairo edition" like stupid; it is like calling van Putten "the Dutchman" or any film made in North America "the Hollywood movie," or any French novel "the Paris novel." Or like calling Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini "the Ayatollah" although there are more than 5000 in the Iranian Republic alone -- unknown to many (like it is unknown to most younger Orientalists that there are more than a thousand different Cairo editions.

Kein Standard

In 1914 a few English- and Scotsmen controlled more than half of the globe (most of the seas and chunks of land too, includ­ing millions of Indians).
Kaiser Wilhelm found that unfair. He started a war.
Five years later Germany had shrunk.
Adolf Hitler found that unfair. He started a war.
As one of the results, German is not understood (less written) by most scholars and scien­tists anymore.
So today, there are people reading books and blogs that do not under­stand German.
Therefore, I will repeat in the Lingua Franca of the age, what I have written in German.
In 1834, years after an adequate copy of the Qur'ān was set and printed in St. Peters­burg (later in Kazan)
and when lithograph copies began to be produced in India and Persia,
the German orientalist Gustav Flügel came up with a new typeset copy,
with a text of his own ‒ not very different from rasm, ḍabṭ and ḥarakat recognized by Muslims, but different from the can­on­ized variants never­theless,
and with a numbering system of his Hamburg col­league Abraham Hinckel­mann (which diverges from all Muslim systems and places the numbers BEFORE the verse).


Already the cover shows Flügel incompetence: the little hā' above hā' signals "not a tā' marbuṭa", but in this position (above hā' in hudā), hāʾ can not be tāʾ, so it can not carry an ihmal sign:

The alif (before lām mīm) has no madda. raḥmān and ḏālika should have a dagger alif, Flügel's font doesn't have one. How could any scholar use such a print?

Although it came 50 years too late, it became the standard edition of European orientalists ‒ for about a century.
Later the Egyptian King Fuʾād Edition became the standard ‒ not as I see it ‒ because it was really better than most others, but because it was much better than the orienta­list sorry effort, and because most (Central European) orien­talists ignored the Magh­rebian and Indian prints (Ottoman and Persian prints had a few hundred more alifs as matres lectionis which does not make them inferior, but serves as an argument against them, besides them not indi­cating as­simila­tion of nūn sākin. ‒ Although most Muslims in Germany use Turkish prints, these are avoided by the scholars.)


This was typeset in 1299/1881/2 in the Egyptian Government Press and printed both in one volume (Prince­ton library 2273) and in ten and/or thirty leather bound volumes (on the market and "Exhibi­tion Islam," London).
13 years later printed in Bulaq as well:

In 1914 ‒ when the United Kingdom was at war with the Ottoman Empire ‒ Egypt declared its indepen­dence, the ruler changed from Wālī/Governor to Sulṭān ‒ Khedive had been the personal title, not a function or an office.
Now it was urgent that Egypt printed its own maṣāḥif. The statement that the "foreign ones" (Istan­bul was the capital, not foreign before 1915) had mistakes ‒ without given further informa­tion what and where ‒ is propaganda, no real informa­tion. Repetition does not turn it into fact.