KFEs (continued)

Although it is often written that the King Fuʾād Edition fixed a some­how unclear text, and established the reading of Ḥafṣ accord­ing to ʿĀsim as pre­dominant, both assertions are rubbish.
How could Islam exist with a chaotic base text? And for about 400 years Ḥafṣ was by far the most im­portant reading. The three gun-powder empires ‒ Safavid, Timurid/Moghul and Ottoman ‒ had made it their imperial read­ing, because it is the easiest for non-Arabs <= the closes to fuṣḥā.
A second reason could be that Timurids and Ottoman adopted the Kūfī maḏhab al-Ḥanafiyya. And like Moroccans follow the Madinese maḍhab al-Mālik­iyya and read accord­ing to the Madinese Warš, so most Ḥanifīs read accord­ing to Ḥafṣ.

All KFEs have an empty, un­paginat­ed, but counted title page, 826 pages of qurʾanic text
‒ al-fātiḥa being on page 2, an-nās on page 827 ‒ plus 23 pages, 22 being paginated (the last being ت)
In the KFE II of 1952 the first 845 pages are roughly identical to KFE I,
the only difference being almost thousand changes in the qurʾānic text and that pages ج and ف are paginat­ed ‒ they used to be counted, but no letter was printed.

No KFE has a prayer/duʿāʾ.
In the last royal edition, KFE II 0, the next page is the im­pressum of 1924

followed by seven pages

In the large KFE II a editions (starting in 1953), three pages are gone:
the dedication to King Fuʾād, its empty back­side, and the empty page after س .
The page after س ,the خاتيمة on page ف is moved to after ض ,
something that hurts anyone who under­stands abjad.

Before the four pages Table of Suras (without the sura #) an empty page is inserted.

I call "King Fuʾād Edition" all Egyptian Government editions with the last sura on page 827.
Egyptian Government Editions on 522 pages (by the Minstry of Interior) or 525 pages (by the Amīriyya Press) are not KFEs.
Editions by Egyptian commercial publishers (with a title page) are not KFEs.

(Those with the set text of a KFE rearranged with more than 12 line per page (whether original lines or longer one) are definetly not KFEs.)

"Reprints" by publishers in Bairut, Damascus, ʿĀmmān are not KFEs

and can not be trusted: the مصلحة المساحة is not in القاهرة but in Giza.

"Reprints" by foreign countries like China (of KFE I ‒ with­out the dedi­cation to the King) ‒

and the Kazach (1960)

and Qaṭar (1985) one of KFE II ,

are not KFEs, but some­times more reliable when it comes to the qur'anic text ‒ just 73:20 is a problem..
Nor is the the Frommann-Holzboog/ITS (Stuttgart 1983) edition a KFE although it has 826 pages of qur'anic text and no title page. Its afterword is set in Stuttgart ‒ the type is not appealing.

The small kfe II b have nine pages less then the large one of 1952:
the dedication page and its backside, plus the seven pages on changes to the editions before 1952.
There is a downloadable pdf of the small 1954 print. There one can see, why the seven pages on the almost thousand changes are missing.
While للطاغين in 78:22 is changed to للطٰغين , in 38:55 it is changed in the large editions, but not in the small ones.

The change in 7:137 is



properly (type set) done
in the large editions (KFE II 0/a),



while it is done by hand in the small editions after 1952 (kfe II b).

By hand are the mīms in the small editions.
on the left the 1924 KFE I, in the middle the large KFE IIa 1952, on the right the small kfe II b after 1952 edition.

While the title box have less information in the 1952 edition, they are the old ones in the small edition.

on top the KFE I, in the middle the Qatari "reprint" of the large 1952 edition, because there is no pdf of either KFE II 0 nor KFE II a   online,
below a title box of a small one (kfe II b).

And page 826 of KFE I, KFE II a, and kfe II b (the small plates are not refreshed):

Of the almost thousand changes descriped on the "Seven Pages" only a handful are im­plemented in the small editions, e.g. the hamza in qāʾim is not moved down:

The chaos in the Amiriyya editions forces the observer to have a close look at private adaptations.
While the base for Marwān Sawār (Damas­cus 1983 - 13 lines per page) is a large one with all changes made by aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ (above 13:33 and below)

Ibrāhīm Muʿallim (al-Qāhira Dār Šurūq 1975) some­times has the old ortho­graphy or it is changed by hand,

Sometimes, when done by private hand, it is not worse: on the left from the large KFE II a, on the right Dar Šurūq:

cf. in German

The Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim King Fuʾād 1924/5 edition

I have just published an essay on Qurʾān prints on Amazon:
I want to blog about that and from it here.
(this is my German post translated by deepl)
In the course of time I will probably bring everything from the book - but slowly...
Since 1972, when thousands of very old Qurʾān frag­ments were discovered in a walled-up attic of the Great Mosque of Ṣanʿāʾ, more precisely since 2004, when Sergio Noga Noseda was allowed to pro­duce high-resolution colour photo­graphs, since scholars have recognised that leaves kept in up to seven different collec­tions formed one codex and that they can be studied thanks to online and printed publications.
Since thousands of short texts carved in stone from Syria, Jordan and Sa'udi Arabia can be read (ever better), research into the Arabic language and script of the cen­turies immedia­tely before and after Muḥammad has been the most exciting part of Islamic studies.
Since the destruction of the Twin Towers in Man­hattan, reflections on Islam as a late ancient civili­sation and/or religion related to Judaism and Christia­nity have been particularly popular.
Unfortunately, experts in these inter­esting fields also comment on a subject they have not studied ‒ because it is not inter­esting enough - and write almost nothing but nonsense about it.

---

The field of printed editions of the Qur'an needs to be cleaned up. And that is what I want to do here. 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" ‒ utter nonsense. 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, Andreas Ismail Mohr and Prof. Dr. Murks call it "type printing". Yet the epilogue ‒ from 1926 even more clearly than the first one (1924/5) ‒ makes every­thing clear: The book written by Egypt's šaiḫ al-maqāriʾ Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḫalaf al-Ḥusainī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī 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).

added later: If you want to see/understand what was made "between Būlāq and Giza"/between type setting and printing" have a look at the Hyderabad print of 1938: they used the same sorts/metal types but not not "lift" kasra, resulting in a less clear lines.
for the latestest on the King Fuʾād Edition

These were made into printing plates in Giza ‒ where they already had ex­perience with printing maps in off­set. Printing was also done there.
Type printing is a letter­press process. The types/sorts leave small inden­ta­tions on the paper: the types/sorts 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 (not by vision). And neither did Prof. Dr. Murks.
"That's nonsense, instead of elabora­tely type­setting and printing that ONCE, why not have a calli­grapher write it?" This fails to appre­ci­ate the technoid sense of accuracy of the editors of 1924. To this day, there is no one except ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (UT) who is as accurate as the type­setting or the computer.
Two examples to illu­strate.

While UT clearly reads yanhā, the beauti­ful Ottoman hand­writing reads naihā; while the three vowel signs (fatḥa, sukūn, Lang-ā) are clearly in the right order (there is no other way, they are all on top), nūn (perhaps) comes before yāʾ (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.

Second example: wa-ma­lā­ʾi­ka­tihī Whereas in the 1924/5 Qur'an (below) and UT (in the middle) there is a substitute alif-with-madda hovering BE­FORE the tooth above the base­line, in Muṣḥaf Qaṭar (above) there is a hamza-kasra hovering AFTER the change alif-with-mad­da below the base­line, which changes the yāʾ-tooth into a (leng­then­ing) alif. There is nothing wrong with this (sound and rasm are the same, after all), but it is a dif­ferent ortho­graphy and should not be, according to the con­ception of people who do not to­le­ra­te any ap­pro­xima­tion in the Qur'an.
Now the whole of page 3 in com­parison. Giza print and UT: the Amiriyya 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 Amiriyya (which is why Dar al-Maʿrifa increased the spacing).

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".
Before I stop (for today): a map of Cairo 1920, on which I have marked the Amiriyya and the Land Registry with arrows in the Nil, as well as Midan Tahrir and the place where the government printing press is now located. Also the Ministry of Edu­cat­ion and the Nāṣi­rīya, where three of the signatories of the afterword worked.
Everything to the right of the Nile plus the islands is Cairo, every­thing to the left (Imbaba, Doqqi, Giza) not only does not belong to the city of Cairo, but is in another province.

Important: the typesetting workshop and the offset workshop were well connected by car, tram and boat. The assembled pages did not have a long way to go.
The two Arabic texts are the 1924 and 1952 printer's notes, both from the copies in the Prussian State Library, which owns five editions. And here is the very last (un­paginated) page of the original print.
"al-Qāhira" has to wait till the Fifties to appear.