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",


‒­

not one, but three, tens, hundreds

Most Indians, most Arabs, most Turks, think that all editions of the qurʾān are the same.
And they are right:
For 150 years most copies printed in Kara­tchi, Delhi, Dhakka, Johannis­burg are the same.
Since 1985 most printed east of Libya and west of Persia follow the ortho­graphy of the 1952 Egyptian state edition,
and most copies printed in Turkey (since 1950 ???) are practically identical.
Nevertheless, Gabriel Said Rey­nolds is completely wrong, when he states

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'ān in its Histori­cal Context, Abingdon: Routledge 2008, p. 1

from left to right: Syrien, Qaṭar, Kuwait (al-Ḥaddād), Bahrain, Saudia, VAE (both UT1), Dubai, Saudia(UT2), Kuwait (UT1), Oman, Kerbala, Ägypten (Abu Qamar)

Yes, nowaday most maṣāḥif produced in the Arab mašriq are similar, but Morocco, Libya, Sudan, Turkey, Tarta­ris­tan, Brunai, Indo­nesia follow different rules, and the Indian Stan­dard (Pakistan, Bangla Desh, UK, South Africa, Surinam, Nepal, Ceylon) is numeri­cally more important and quite diffe­rent. "Nowadays" because before 1980 a Ottoman muṣḥaf written by Ḥafiz ʿUṭmān the Elder (1642‒1698) was pre­valent in Syria, and two Ottoman maṣāḥif written by Ḥasan Riḍā and Muḥammad ʾAmīn ar-Rušdī res­pectively were pro­duced for Dīwān al-Awqāf al-ʿIrāqī (still 1980 the govern­ments of Qaṭar and Saʿūdī ʿArabia had copies printed of the one based on Rušdī ‒ and 1415/1994 in Tehran): It took some seventy years before the 1924 edition (or rather its 1952 offspring) had created a regional stan­dard.

Because there are THREE well established standards and a few in Indonesia, a new one in Brunei, several (competing ones) in Iran and many all over Africa ‒ where we do not only find different ways of writing the same reading (Ḥafṣ ʾan ʿĀṣim) but three more trans­mis­sions (Warš, Qālūn, ad-Dūrī ʿan Abī ʿAmr). And 100 years ago, maṣāḥif were less stan­dardized.
There are many more printed in Damas­cus (or Bairūt because of the war), pro­duced in ʿAmman and the UAE and pub­lished on the world wide web, but these are mainly for study, not for devotion.

But here I will not focus on the readings (and their trans­mis­sions), but on different ortho­graphies (of the trans­mission Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim).
Already 35 years ago Adrian Alan Brockett found out that the 1342/1924 King-Fuʾād-Edi­tion had not estab­lished THE stan­dard, that even the suc­ces­sor of al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥad­dād as the chief reci­ter of Egypt ‒ hence main editor of the "second edition" of 1952 ‒ ʿAlī Muḥammad aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ (1304/1886-1380/1960), had edited different editions and approved of yet more dis­similar ones.
Brockett studied editions at a time when only Ḥafṣ and Warš were prin­ted. Today one finds many edi­tions of Qālūn, some of Dūrī and both prin­ted ones and just pdfs for most of the others, plus many edi­tions about the 20 cano­nical trans­missions, plus sound files of reci­ta­tions of most trans­missions.       When Brockett wrote, the King Fahd Complex had not started to pub­lish dif­ferent vari­ants ‒ Ḥafṣ, Šuʿba, Warš, Qālūn, Dūrī, as-Sūsī writ­ten by ʿUṭmān Ṭāhā plus an Indian Ḥafṣ ‒ but he had no­ti­ced that Gulf States pub­lished a) in the new Egyp­tian style, b) an Ottoman muṣ­ḥaf (the muṣḥaf of M­uḥam­mad ʾAmīn ar-Rušdī with minor mo­di­fi­ca­ti­ons), c) in the Indian style.
1952:

Brockett's thesis is still the best English "book" avail­able on dif­ferences bet­ween copies of the qurʾān, al­though it was researched before the inter­net faci­li­tated research, before Uni­code made it easier to re­pro­duce Arabic script,
before it was easy to get hold of all the cano­nical trans­mis­sions and most of the thousands of variant readings (col­lected in three dif­ferent editions).
His main con­clu­sions ‒ the oral trans­mission and the one in writing re­in­forced each other, con­trolled each other, never were left with­out the other,
and there is no single standard of writing, and no single stan­dard of reciting the qurʾān,
and the dif­feren­ces between trans­mis­sions (and within trans­missions) are minor, they never change the meaning of a para­graph ‒
stand intact. But it was a thesis, no published book.
Because the young student was not allowed to have it read by fellow researchers, it is full of mistakes,
mis­takes which would have been elimi­nated before pub­lication as a book.
I personally have no use for Brockett's "trans­literation", which is neither that nor a tran­scription.
I am sure that Brockett ‒ as many readers ‒ did not know what the two terms mean:
a trans­literation must render the Arabic letters faith­fully and must be rever­sible (not neces­sarily pro­nounce­able),
a transcription must render the sound of the words faith­fully, must be pro­noun­ce­able, should be read­able after some instruc­tion, but has not to be reversable, because different sequences of letters can be pro­nouned (hence transcribed) the same way.
I personally, hate his termino­logy, but at least he defines his ‒ odd ‒ terms at the outset:
"graphic" means: part of the rasm,
"oral" means: not part of the rasm.
I say: utter nonsense!
Both the rasm and the later signs (dots, hamza, waṣl, shadda, fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma, signs for imāla, tasḥīl, išmām etc.) are gra­phical,
and have to be pro­nounced = are oral ‒ but there are some otiose letters, which have to be written in a real trans­literation (as in R-G Puin's).
"oral only" is closer to what he means, but "in the oldest manu­scripts not written, at that time: only recited" is it.
Sorry, "oral" is not good enough.
I hardly can read his "trans­cription". Why does "a wavy line" means some­times "oral", sometimes "lengthened"?
Anyhow, here and now, there is no need for Brockett's "trans­litera­tion", we have Arabic letters!
In spite of my criticism, his thesis is a great work of scholar­ship ‒ and tre­men­dous work, done before we just googled dif­ferent edi­tions of the qurʾān.
The content of this blog and my German one, you can find as book.

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.