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

editions and race

Most Germans find it strange that Americans are obsessed with race. Yes, some skin is darker, some hair frizzy, but after a beach holiday, a Greek's skin can be darker then that of her African-American neighbour. In 2000 for the first time Americans could be officialy multi­racial or "mixed" as the British say.
For Germans, the very idea of human races is absurd, why should character corelative with skin colour?
How can most "white" Americans forget that not long ago, Italians, Irish and Jews were obviously non-White, that only the numerical decline of English, Scandi­navian, Protestant Dutch and Germans brought them to admit that Serbs and Jews are white alright.
It's not because of the Nazis ‒ who by the way did not write a lot about die "weiße Rasse", but about nordische, westi­sche/mit­tel­meeri­sche, osti­sche/al­pine, dinari­sche, (ost)bal­tische, fäli­sche, sude­tische, vorder­asiatische, orienta­li­sche Rasse und deren Mi­schungen (cf. Hans F. K. Gün­ther: Kleine Rassen­kunde des deutschen Volkes) ‒ but because in German "Rasse" is not only "race" but "breed" --> in German, dogs and horses come in races, not humans; despite US and ZA laws against mis­cege­nation, there are no Kör- und Stut­bücher (lists of re­cognized males and females of a certain human race) re­gulat­ing the status of "true White", "true Jewish", or "true Sephardic").
The language we normally speak shapes the way we think:
For German speakers there is a clear dif­ference bet­ween "Auf­lagen" (runs of an iden­tical book) and "Aus­gaben" (fresh/changed editions) ‒ in English both can be called "editions", although the dif­feren­ce bet­ween "run", "reprint" "re­vised and expanded/ new edition" exists: there is a fog not exist­ing in German. From the 1940s on­ward, one can spot on the copy­right page/impressum a printer's key "10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1" or often "1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2". In Germany mostly two rows of numbers like „26 27 28 29 · 97 96 95 94“ ‒ this is the 26th run in 1994, from the first row each time one numbers is/was scratched from the plate, for the second row the last year was taken away (un­less there was a second run in the same year).

at the bottom right "1": first edition, left "15": 2015

For me the two pages above are from two different Aus­gaben: not the same edition. When you look at the last page/im­pressum of different Amīriyya editions, you find: Gizā+Būlāq, Būlāq, Maṣr, al-Qahira ‒ to me this is not just "second run" and dif­ferent year, the text before the year is so different that it is not the SAME edition.

And in the second edition 1925/6 the word "its origin" (= its modell, seine Vorlage)

and ten signets were added.

Later the dedication page was changed

later yet, الن in 73:20 was changed to ان لن .
When you have in the 1952 aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ Amīriyya edition seven pages

that are missing in the small 1955 aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ Amīriyya edition, they ARE not the same edition, although by the same editor(s), the same publisher!
Yes, there are people who do not care to dis­tinguish between at least four different edi­tions bet­ween the first and 1951, nor between at least two different editions starting from 1952 ((I am willing not to count different year, different place of pub­lication, dif­ferent name of the same printer, different authorities vouch­saving the cor­rect­ness)), not even bet­ween the editions made by al-Ḥusaini al-Ḥaddād and those made by aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ and collea­gues, but they should not hold a con­ference on book editions.

IDEO held a con­ference on the 1924 edition but used some­thing like the 1952 title box. They just don't care, do not know, do not even want to know.
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