gullible or sceptical

Although the title is "Reciting the Qurʾān in Cairo" ("Koran­lesung in Kairo") the first part of G. Berg­sträßer's article in Der Islam XX (1932) is largely on the "official" Egyptian edition of the Qurʾān, der "amtliche", the Govern­ment edition, the King Fuʾād Edition called the "12 liner (muṣḥaf 12 saṭr") by the book sellers or Muṣḥaf al-Amiriyya after the Govern­ment Press ((never The Cairo Edition, nor the Azhar Qurʾān, and please not Mushaf Amiri/Royal Edition)) and about the chief recitor of the time and the one who followed him in that function (which Bergsträßer did not know of course). The article is rich in informa­tion, both what the two men have told him and what is written in the explana­tions (taʿrīf), the afterword of the book.
First Bergsträßer informs the reader on the 22 pages that follow the 827 pages of the qurʾānic text. Then he tells us what is written in an advertising brochure/ leaflet (Pro­spekt); he uses the sub­junc­tive mode of indirect speech leaving it to the reader to believe what is written ‒ or not.
I do not believe one of the type­written words.

In recent times the government had to destroy many imported copies because of mistakes, notably 25 years ago sinking a whole load in the Nile.

As no year is given, no information of the kind of mis­takes, no informa­tion on the printer ("Aus­land") nor the importer, nothing on whom paid an compen­sa­tion for the capital destroyed to whom (how much?), I do not believe it.
The are serveral kind of mistakes possible:
‒ those that are not mistakes at all, just different con­vention (like whether a leading unpro­nounced alif carries a head of ṣād as waṣl-sign or not, or some otiose letters ‒ see earlier posts)
‒ type errors, that can be remedied by including a "list of errors" or by correcting them by hand
‒ binding error: several copies lack a quire having another one twice, or quires in the wrong order.
Copies with binding error can not be sold. That you have to destroy hun­dreds of copies, there must be so many mis­takes that it is virtually im­possible to correct them by hand.
So far Bergstäßer just reports what was written in the brochure.
Now he tells us what the šaiḫ al-maqāriʾ Muḥammad ʿAlī Ḫalaf al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād told him, but here he does not use the sub­junctive of indirect speech, he gives obvious ("natürlich") facts.

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 rewriting of the usual consonant text

The source given for the rasm is a didactic poem Maurid aẓ-ẓamʾān by al-Ḫarrāz based on Abū Dāʾūd Sulaimān ibn Naǧāḥ's ʿAqīla
but
the Indonesian Abdul Hakim ("Comparison of Rasm in Indonesian Standard Mushaf, Pakistan Mushaf and Medinan Mushaf: Analysis of word with the formulation of ḥażf al-ḥuruf" in Suhuf X,2 12.2017), the Iranian Center for Printing and Spreading the Quran and the scholars advising the Tunisian publisher Hanbal/Nous-Mêmes have checked the text (either all of it or "just" a tenth ‒ from different parts) and found out, that the text of the King Fuʾād Edition and the King Fahd Edition do not tally with the ʿAqīla.
While the Muṣḥaf al-Jamāhīriyya follows ad-Dānī's Muqniʿ all the time and the Iranian Center and the Indo­nesian Committee publish lists with words where they follow which authority (or in the case of the Iranian center even apply a different logic) al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād and the Medi­nese King Fahd Complex claimed (!) to follow Abū Dāʿūd. As this is clearly not the case "Medina" and "Tunis" inserted a word in the explanations: ġāliban or fil-ġālib (mostly) and a caveat "or other experts."
So: the KFC admitts that they do NOT follow Abū Dāʾūd all the time.
Al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād had told Bergsträßer what the orientalist wanted to hear. All professional recitors in Egypt know the differences between Ḥafs, Warš and Qālūn by heart. Being the chief recitor and a Malikite, he knew Warš even better than most. So what he really did, he copied an Warš copy into a Ḥafs script ‒ largely Abu Dāʾūd, but not 100 %.
So the KFE was not a revolution, just a switch from Asia to Africa: a "no" to the Ottomans, a "yes" to the Maġrib.
As I have already said, I recomment an old text.

Gabriel Said Reynolds writes rubbish:

The common belief that the Qur’an has a single, un­ambiguous reading ... is above all due to the terrific success of the standard Egyptian edition of the Qur’an, first pub­lished on July 10, 1924 (Dhu l-Hijja 7, 1342) in Cairo, an edition now widely seen as the official text of the Qur’an. ... Minor ad­just­ments were sub­sequently made to this text in follow­ing editions, one pub­lished later in 1924 and an­other in 1936. The text re­leased in 1936 became known as the Faruq edition in honor of the Egypt­ian king, Faruq (The Qur’an in Its Histo­rical Con­text, Lon­don New York 2008. p. 2)

All wrong. The King Fuʾād Edition was not published on July 10, 1924, but the printing of its qurʾānic text was finished on that day. It was really only published after the book was bound in the next year according to the embossed stamp on its first page ‒ or just the second run of the first edition was stamp like this (?).
طبعة الحكومية المصرّية
        -- . --
    ١٣٤٣ هجرّية
                سـنة

There were minor changes between 1343/1925 and 1347/1929 either in the quranic text or in the information that follows it, but there were no changes in 1936; there never was an Faruq (or Farūq) edition; until the revolution of 1952 all full editions of the qurʾān by the Government Press were dedicated to King Fuʾād.



How comes that some youngster call the "King Fuʾād Edition"
"The Cairo Edition" or "the Azhar Edition"?
My guess: because they are so young,
too young to have spent days in the book shops and publishers around the Azhar.
From 1976 to 1985 the most common edition was the "muṣ­ḥaf al-Azhar aš-šarīf" printed by the Amiriyya in many different format, big and small, cheap and ex­penisve ‒ all with the qurʾānic text on 525 pages with 15 lines and only three pause signs (not to be confused with the "muṣ­ḥaf al-Azhar aš-šarīf" by the Azhar, which is a reprint of the 522 page muṣḥaf written by Muṣṭafa Naẓīf.)
But these youngster do not know that there is an "Azhar edition" that came 50 years after the KFE saw the light of day.

And "muṣḥaf al-Qāhira" was the huge manuscript attributed to ʿUṯmān kept at al-Ḥusainī Mosque north of al-Azhar.
From 1880 to today there were more than a hundred editions produced in al-Qāhira, in an industial area nearby, around the main railway station and in Bulāq, no person aware of this could imagine "The Cairo edition",


‒­

Kein Standard Six, Before 1924

When you want to understand The French Revolu­tion, you should not start with Storming the Bastille, but with the economic, social and politi­cal situation in the decade before.

In order to understand the impor­tance of the King Fuʾād Edition,
we will have a look on the techni­cal side of book printing,
the science of "rasm and dabṭ",
the calligraphers writing maṣāḥif.

Let's start with debunking a statement made in the Muqad­dima which was a leaf­let put into the KFE.
In it it is stated that the govern­ment used to import foreign copies to be used in state schools, but that these often had to be distroyed because of mistakes. Around 1900 a sub­stantial num­bers had to be buried in the Nile.
I take it for a mysti­fication. Imports came from Bairut, Damas­cus or Istan­bul, all part of the Ottoman Empire, to which Egypt be­longed upto Novem­ber 1914.
I do not believe a story without exact year, numbers of copies confiscated and a list of mis­takes
‒ and who paid how much in com­pen­sa­tion to the owner of the books.

In the forty years before the KFE
several times the text of the qurʾān had been type printed in Būlāq:
both in Ottoman Style (eg. صِراط) with ḥarakāṭ
and bir-rasm al-ʿUṭmānī: as report­ed in Dānī's Muqniʿ, Ibn Naǧāḥ's Tabyīn or aš-Šāṭibī's ʿAqīla without ḥarakāt (صرط).
Local printers repro­duced Ottoman litho­gra­phies (written by Hâfız Osman (1642–1698), by Haǧǧ Ḥāfiẓ ʿUṯmān Ḫalīfa Qayiš­Zāde an-Nūrī al-Bur­durī d. 1894 or by Muṣṭafā Naẓīf Qadir­ġālī/ Kadir­ğali d. 1913 ‒ do not mix up with his fellow cal­li­grapher Mehmed Naẓīf, who died in the same year) ‒ both with taf­sīr and without.

That something is not the case,
is difficult to prove.
But I declare ‒ whatever others say: A 1833 Būlāq Muṣ­ḥaf does not exist!
Before 1873, in the Ottoman Empire it was for­bidden to print a muṣ­ḥaf.
(For an illegal one see here.)
Starting 1874 many have been printed in Istan­bul ‒ both by private and state presses.
Private printers (notably Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī) are said to have pro­duced litho­graph maṣā­ḥif in Cairo starting in the 1860s.
Because no exact years are given, and no name of the calli­graphers,
and because in the 1880s more copies of Istan­bul litho­graphs were printed in Cairo than local calli­gra­phers,
I doubt that there were many ‒ anony­mous ‒ Egyp­tian muṣḥaf writers before the 1880s.
The first Cairo litho­graph I have seen   is in the Azhar library (several copies there, one in Utah and at least one in Princeton)
In Michael W. Albin's article "Printing of the Qurʾān" in Brill's Ency­clo­pe­dia of the Quran
it is mentioned as two dif­ferent ones: one by the prin­ter Muḥammad Abū Zaid, and one [directed, edited] by Muḥammad Raḍwān [sic].
It is the 1308/1890 copy directed/edited by Abū ʿĪd Riḍ­wān ibn Muḥammad ibn Sulai­mān al-Muḫal­la­lātī ( ١٢٥٠هـ-١٣١١هـ / 1834-1893), written by ʿAbdel­ḫāliq al-Ḥaqqī Ibn al-Ḫo­ǧa/Ibn al-Ḫa­waǧa

Both in Istanbul

and Cairo
type set tafāṣīr with different spellings in the frame and at the margin were pub­lished
‒ in Būlāq the unvocalized rasm at the margin.

Both in large size for the use in Mosques,

gilded, with red as second colour for men of emi­nence,

and small for crafts­men and house­wives
litho­graphies written by the chief calli­grapher of the Otto­man Marine were pub­lished.
Founda­tions, Tombs of Holy Men were offered ex­pensive prints,
schools   sets of cheap ones.
Three of his maṣāḥif are re­pro­duced in other cities:
The one with 15 lines on 522 pages in Bairut, St. Peters­burg, Tehran, in Cairo by ten dif­ferent pub­li­shers ‒ as late as 1954 in the original Ottoman spelling by ʿAlī Yūsuf Sulai­mān 1956
sometimes by the minstery of the Interior in the 1924 spelling,
the one with 15 lines on 604 pages in Tehran and Ger­many with red as ad­di­tional colour,
in Nusan­tara in black and white (en­riched with the {Indian} sign for /ū/,
the one with 17 lines on 486 pages in Damas­cus and by Turks in Ger­many.
Sometimes with tafsīr at the margins.
Sometimes with a different ortho­gra­phy.
Until today the version written by Muḥammad Saʿd al-Ḥaddād for aš-Šamarlī ‒ in style very similar to Muṣṭafā Naẓīf and line by line iden­tical to the 522 page ver­sion is very popular ‒ a thousand times more popular than the Amiriyya prints, whose 855 page edition was never bought by normal Egyp­tians: it is no co­in­ci­dence that the only copies of the ori­ginal Giza prints sur­vive in Orienta­lists libra­ries and studies.

In the 1960s aš-Šamarli had pub­lished the origi­nal by MNQ in the Q52 ortho­graphy (see on the left), but from 1977 he sold al-Ḥaddād in dif­ferent sizes, hard­cover, plastic and soft;
on the right the ori­ginal in Ottoman spelling;
Here a Bairūt edition in Q52 with explana­tions of words on the margin: Here the Ottoman original published by Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalābī before MNQ had died (1913)  

The 815 page muṣḥaf by Hafiz Osman (1642-98) was printed in Cairo with one of the bigger Tafsir around, in Syria it was till about 1960 the muṣ­ḥaf
 

Here pages 2 + 3 from the Cairo print (without the commen­tary)

At least until islamist Qaṭar supplied islamist forces in Syria with arms and money thus starting a bitter "civil" war, in Aleppo "Otto­man" parts of the Qurʾān were printed:

and until 1990 in al-ʿIrāq two Ottoman maṣāḥif were printed by the state.
in the Turkish Republic only expensive fac­si­miles re­produce old manu­scripts,
"reprints" for believers are heavily edited.

In 1370/1951 the ʿIrāqi Dīwān al-ʾAuqāf had it printed under the super­vision of Naǧm­addīn al-Wāʾiz with Kufi numbers after each verse and sura title boxes written by Hāšim Muḥammad al-Ḫaṭṭāt al-Baġdādī,
1386/1966 for the ʿirāqī state by Lohse in Frank­furt/Main,
1398/1978 for the su­ʿūdī govern­ment in West Germany,
1400/1979 in Qaṭar, 1401/1981 for Ṣaddām.
In 1236 Muḥam­mad Amīn ar-Rušdī had written the original muṣḥāf. In 1278 ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz's mother offered it to the tomb of Junaid in Baghdād. Today it is kept in the library of the tomb of Abu Ḥanīfa.
Whereas in the manuscript ‒ as I guess ‒ waṣl-sign were only on alifs before sun-letters, in the ʿIrāqi print most initial alifs have one, which leads to the annomaly that some­times an alif has both "waṣl" under­neath and a waṣl-sign above.

After every tenth verse a yāʾ (in the abjad system: ten) hovers before the number (see above); what was help­ful in the ori­ginal manu­script that had only end-of-verse-markers, is kind of ridi­culous in the printed edi­tion.

Of interest as well: "bi-yāʾ wāhida" under riyyīn in 5:111, which in another Ottoman muṣḥaf is written yāʾ + šadda + turned kasra + yāʾ and in the mordern Turkish ones with one yāʾ and in Q24 with a normal yāʾ plus a high small one. Brock­ett studied in Edin­burgh an Ottoman Manu­script from 1800, in which under 41:47 bi-ʾaidin   bi-yāʾain is written. How-to-write-notes were common (in the same Ms. in 43:3 under a hamza-letter "bi-ġair alif" is written.
The Dīwān al-auqāf pub­lished ‒ with similar front and back matter ‒ re­prints by Ḥafiz ʿUṯmān and Ḥasan Riḍā. 
on the right the cover of the M.A. ar-Rušdī edition, in the middle Ḥasan Riḍā, on the left the editor. ‒ After the US-inter­vention there are two autho­rities: Dīwān al-waqf as-sunnī and ... aš-šiʿī, both pub­lished maṣā­ḥif on 604 pages: the Sunni took the text from KFC (UT1, cf Kein Standard), the Ši'i had the ʿirāqī Calli­grapher, Hādī ad-Darāǧī, write it.  
In anearlier post (and above) I retold the history of the manu­script and its prints.
Except for the back­matter and the di­vision into aḥzāb they are all the same: al-Wāʾiz's edition



Recently I learned that in 1415/1994 an Iranian reprint was made ‒ not based on the manu­script but on the ʿirāqī version.
While the ihmal-sign were deleted already in 1370/1951, forty years later other "con­fusing" stuff had to go:
‒ high yāʾ barī for every tenth verse,
‒ the differentiation between leading alif followed by a ḥarf sākin and others ‒ now ALL alifs-waṣl have a waṣl-sign (head of صـ)
‒ signs for pauses or vowels are placed nearer to "their" base letter
‒ sometimes the space between words is enlarged, a swash nūn replaced by a normal one
‒ a normal ḍamma-sign was replaced by a turned one, where it is pronouinced ū (due to rules of prosody)
‒ Mūsā gets a long-fatḥa,



Is there someone who has images of the manuscript?
on the right the first "normal" page of Muḥ. ʾAmīn ar-Rušdī's muṣḥaf, on the left: Ḥasan Riḍā:
 

Remarkable below:
‒ in lignes 3,5,6,7,9: the boundary between words is between alifs
‒ in lign 2: before (10) a small high yāʾ, which in the manucrpt was needed to signal: 10
‒ some Ihmal-signs below letter signalling: without dot  

India 1800 Long vowels

Gabriel Said Reynolds and others say that all Qur'anic texts are identical: letter for letter.

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

Nonsense! There are probably a thousand different ways of writing or typesetting Qurans.
That does not mean that the prints say different things. They don't. They are similar enough -> mean the same. The differences that the exact same text allows in inter­pretation are certainly 100 times more signi­ficant than all the differences between different prints. Many dif­ferences are purely orthographic (such as folx­heršaft and Volks­herrschaft, night and nite, le roi and le rwa), others change the sense of a word, even a sentence, but do not really change the passage.
I am not at all concerned with contra­dictions in the Qur'an, with differences in content between one and another, I am only concerned with dif­ferences in ortho­graphy (that is, the spelling rules and particular cases).
Nor am I concerned with the differences between the seven/ten canonical readers, the four­teen/ twenty trans­mitters, the hundreds of tradents. These primarily con­cern the phonetic struct­ure (sometimes a "min" or "wa", an alif or a con­sonant doubling more or less); the variants only say whether a vowel is lengthened five­fold or threefold, whether the basmala is repeated between two suras or a takbir is spoken before a particular one. I am not concerned with all this.
I am interested in the differences between Ottoman and Moroccan, Persian and Indian maṣāḥif ‒ and how the official Egyptian Qurʾān of 1924 differs from those before it. Because there is a lot of nonsense circu­lating about this.
Qurans differ in a hundred ways. I will not present this systema­tically. For example, reading style, writing style, lines per page, whether verses may be spread over two pages, whether 30th must begin on a new page, whether rukuʿat are displayed in the text and on the margin, whether verses have numbers and whether pages have custo­dians/catch words on the bottom of each (second) page, whether there are one, three, four, five, six ... or sixteen pause signs. All this can occur, but will not be systematically discussed.
I focus attention on two points:
the spelling of words, the Quranic vocabulary, so to speak ‒ although (unlike Le Dictionaire de l'Academie, Meriam-Webster, Duden) the same word is not to be written the same way in all places;
the rules of how vowel length, shortening and diph­tongs are notated, like assimi­lation of con­sonants. I am particular­ly inter­ested in prints.

---

There are two main spellings/set of rules: African (Maghrebi, Anda­lusian, Arabic) and Asian (Indo-Pakistani, Indo­nesian, Persian, Ottoman): Africans always need two signs for long vowels: a vowel sign and a matching elong­ating vowel letter; if the latter is not in the rasm, it is added in small (or a non-matching one is made suit­able by a Changing-Alif).
Asians have three short vowel signs and three long vowel signs (plus Sukūn/Ǧazm). But according to today's IPak rules, for ū and ī, one uses the short vowel signs IF the matching vowel letter follows (which gets a ǧazm). With long ā, Persians and Otto­mans/Turks always used the long vowel sign; Indians today use it only if no alif follows (i.e. wau, [dot­less] yāʾ or no vowel at all); if an alif follows, the consonant before it only gets a Fatḥa. In the case of long-ī, Persians and Ottomans always used the Lang-ī sign (regard­less of whether it is followed by yāʾ or not); Indians today proceed simil­arly to ā: if it is not followed by a yāʾ, the long-ī sign is used: before yāʾ, however, there is (only) Kasra and the yāʾ gets a ǧazm. (According to IPak, sign-less letters are silent!).
For long ū, Ottomans put "madd" under a wau; for the elongated personal pronoun -hū the elonga­tion remains un­notated. Indians and Indo­nesians use the long ū sign but the short u sign before wau, while before 1800, Indians always used the long-ū-sign, following wau remained without any sign was thus silent (to be ignored when reading) ‒ if it is second part of the diphtong au, it got and gets a Ǧazm, thus is to be spoken. Always the long ī sign. Always the long-ā-sign. In other words:

In 1800, there were two systems of noting long vowels: the Maghre­b­ian, which always included two parts, a vowel sign (fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma, imāla-point) and a lengthening vowel (belonging to the rasm or a small comple­ment). And an Indian system based entirely on long vowel signs, in which the vowel letters present in the rasm were com­pletely ignored. The Maghrebi system is used today in Africa and Arabia. The Indian system is used in weakened forms in Turkey, Persia, India and Indone­sia. In India and Indone­sia, IPak applies, where long ā continues to be used before (dotless) yāʾ, but before alif it has been replaced by fatḥa (like in the African system) Before ī-yāʾ / ū-waw stand kasra / ḍamma; abobve the vowel letter stands ǧazm ‒ otherwise they had no influence on pronounciation. The old Indian system only applies where no vowel letter follows. How widespread this clear Indian system was, I do not know. I came across several manuscripts using it, but no print.