another UT1 from Damascus

BerKenār ʿUṯmān Ṭaha started in Damascus, but today is mostly associated with Madina.
Between 1991 and 2013 when they moved to Bairut, Ṣubḥī Ṭaha and his Dār al-Maʿrifa was well known for photo­shop­ing UT1 for taǧ­wīd and for read­ings other than Ḥafṣ.







From the begin­ning he did not use the Dār aš-Šāmīya muṣ­ḥaf but UT1 from the KFC: the yel­low­ish words are from an early print, the ones below from a recent ob­vious edi­tion. That he had the ṣād-below-sign in 88:22 (p.593) shows – I guess – that the KFC's first print still had it.

In Januar 2008 he published the obvious edition with three in­no­va­tions:
– increased space bet­ween words
– boxes around fea­tures that did not apply if paused (ḥa­ra­kat, small ḥuruf al-madd, tanwīn signs and the two dots of tāʾ marbū­ṭa pro­nounced as /h/ before a pause), – white space after pos­sible pauses inclu­ding places where Indian Sa­ǧa­wan­dī has a pauses but Q52 had none.

Two or three years later these extra pauses with­out pause sign were re­moved with­out any ex­plana­tion. Two or three years later these extra pauses with­out pause sign were re­moved with­out any ex­plana­tion.

(click for better view – as in most blogger posts) –­

UTs with colour

The Quranic Universal Library speaks of four variants of Madina-UT:
KFGQPC V1 layout (1405h print) – written in Damas­cus without the mistakes
KFGQPC V2 layout (1421h print) – written in Madina after UT had writ­ten his first Warš
leaving out V3(UT3 1438h) = no end-of-aya at the start of a line, no sura-title-box at the bottom of a page, and:
KFGQPC V4 layout (1441h print) – with the proper sequential fatḥatan.

These images are from QUL. Whether the marks are made by them or by the KFGQPC I do not know.
Anyhow they are close to Dār al-Maʿrifah (grey = mute, red = very long, orange = long, green = nasal, blue = clear ....) and sign that are in a grey box must be ignor­ed when no pause is made (again: as in later DaM)

the same pages as printed in Madina:

There are two more maṣāḥif on the net. They follow more or less muṣḥaf Wāṯiq allaḥ Brunai 2006, but with­out the green dots above, after, and below alif, but without an extra colour for hamza with­out kursī.

UT1 UT2 UT3

UT1 was without the mis­takes (cor­rected in Photo­Shop), plus the alif dagger under hamza in 2:72, with­out the small sīn in 88:22, and with the taʾrīf ʿUṯmān Ṭaha had copied for them.
from the 1414 print In 1420 they insert half a sentence Instead of claiming to follow always Abū Daʾūd as al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥad­dād had done, they said: we follow him most of the time, some­times his teacher ad-Dānī, and sometimes "other experts." So, after having scrutinize the text and found out that the claim (always Abū Daʾūd Sulaimān Ibn Naǧāḥ) was wrong, they did not adapt the text to Abū Daʾūd's Muḫtaṣar at-Tabyīn li-Haǧāʾ at-Tan­zīl, but changed the taʿrīf.

One of the changes between UT1 and UT2 occurs in 2:72.
While UT0 has just a hamza, UT1 has a dagger under the hamza, UT2 an alif-hamza.
(top: UT0, last two UT2, in between 1404 to 1417: no change: UT1 is stable).


After the King Fahd Complex had printed millions of UT1 they invited ʿUṯmān Ṭaha to Madina to write for them a Warš muṣ­ḥaf, then an im­proved Ḥafṣ ‒ and later Qā­lūn, an other Warš (this time on 604 pages), ad-Dūrī and Šuʿba.
The new script is a bit rounder, bigger (i.e. there is less empty space between lines) and has less letter vari­ants. On the image below middle-hāʾ has three forms on the left, only one on the right, rāʾ (and zai) have two forms on the left, one on the right, tāʾ can have the two dots ver­ti­caly on the left, not on the right, and the two forms of final mīm are equally dis­tri­buted on the left, while on the right the short stroke to the left pre­do­minates.
On the page bellow, the page layout dif­fers (with two more verses on the left), but, if I am not mis­taken, that occurs only in the last ǧuz: all in all minor changes.

The change from UT2 to UT3 brought:
headlines (sura titel boxes) never come at the bottom of a page,
rather as the head of the next;
end-of-aya-numbers never come at the beginning of a line
rather at the end of the line before;
taʿrīf and Index of Suras are bigger, take more pages.

And there is a dif­ference that is con­nected to one of MY observa­tions that is missed by most "ex­perts".
I say: Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḫalaf al-Ḥusainī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī al-Ḥaddād (1282/1865‒1357/ 22.1.1939) adopted many Anda­lusian/Maġ­ribī/Western things without mention­ing it in the post­script, which makes me think that he copied a Moroccon muṣḥaf.
One of the points: Ottoman Egypt, Persia, India and Nusantara have one kind of tanwīn (one an, one un, one in), but indepen­dant Egypt has three just as Morocco, but there is a problem. Ottomans did not know how sequential fathatan is written.
When one com­pares the Warš muṣḥaf and the early Ḥafṣ maṣā­ḥif by UT the sequential fathatan are different.









Because UT is not only a good scribe but also a good ob­server:
he noticed that the second fatha (the left one) is above the first in Morroco, but below in the KFE ‒ I assume that the type setter just used kasratans lifted up.

A couple of years ago Madina noticed the mis­take and asked UT to correct it, which is done in UT3:

Once alerted to this: the old fathatan (light blue background) looks wrong, the two fathas do not follow the natural way of writing from right to left.
‒ ­