The Moroccan Qurʾān / Le Coran maroccain (Anouk Cohen)

For the last fifteen years, Anouk Cohen writes the same article again and again.
There is nothing wrong, with having found one's field.
Everything is wrong when one finds the same mistakes from the first article to the last.
In my view, the last one (Seeing and Hearing the Book: A Moroccan Edition of the Qurʾan) is just a string of errors, not worth listing them.
In it she compares "the Saudi edition" with "the Moroccan Qur'an" aka "the muṣḥaf muḥam­madī" although there are more than a hundred Saudi editions, more than hundred Moroccan Qur'an editions and three very dif­ferent "Muṣḥaf Muḥam­madī" (about ten with minor dif­ferences).
The "differences between THE Saudi and THE Morroccan" do not exist:
Moroccan editions are the trans­mission of Warš following Nafīʿ, with saǧadā signs accord­ing to the Malikī maḏhab, Madinī verse counting, Maġribī hand­writ­ing/font.
What Cohen shows as THE Saudi edition is the trans­mission of Ḥafṣ following ʿĀṣim, with saġadā signs according to the Hambalī maḏhab, Kūfī counting, nasḫī handwriting/font by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha, printed by KFC.
But there are Moroccan reprints of Saudi editions ...

... and the Suʿudī "King Fahd Glorious Quran Printing Complex" (KFC) publishes the Warš transmission in Maġribī hand­writing.

Suʿudī is not always the same. The KFC publishes editions for North-West Africa and for India (but not for Turkey, Iran, nor Indo­nesia).
Here images that show that there is no clear cit between muṣḥaf muḥam­madī"-Malikī and the rest-non-Maliki

According to Cohen this is THE muṣḥaf muḥam­madī fatiḥa:

But this is a muṣḥaf muḥammadī fatiḥa as well:

According to Cohen this is THE Saudi one

But these are two more (out of many) from Madina

To put it bluntly. What Cohen writes is based on 90% ignorance resp. blindness.
p.142: "According to the protocol defined in the 1920s in Cairo by al-Azhar each stage of pro­uction should be sub­ject to control."
    ‒ no source given, de­finetly wrong
p.144: "the Egyptian copy [of the Qurʾān] developed at al-Azhar in 1924
    ‒ just wrong
p.144: "Contrary to the muṣḥaf ḥassanī, which was to be offered to dis­tin­guished guests, the muṣ­ḥaf muḥam­madī was placed under serial and industri­al pro­duction."
    ‒ wrong, both maṣā­ḥif have expen­si­ve (big, colour, glossy paper) versions and cheaper ones, and none is gift only: one could buy them.

Before I move on to the Warš muṣḥaf of 1929: A.Cohen writes three pp. 145-148 on the calli­graphy of the "Mo­roc­can muṣ­ḥaf" incl. strange things like "'The line should not be so long, even if it does not change the meaning. There should be no ex­cessive read­ing.'” quoting a "cleric".
‒ first, the cleric says: "There should be no ex­ten­ded line because that could lead to pro­longa­tion in recit­ing."
‒ second, "of course" there are extended lines in Maġ­ri­bī maṣāḥif to justify lines. The first word /ḏālika/ is from Cohen's text, showing what is forbidden. All others are from Muṣḥaf al-Ḥasanī.

Three pages, but she does not mention THE most important fact:

Muṣḥaf Muḥammadī is not handwritten by PC set!






Let's move to what she calls "the 'Qurʾan of Zwiten,'26 26 ... Until recent­ly, the rights to it be­longed to Dar al-muṣḥaf al-sharīf, in Cairo. See Abdul­razak Fawzi, The King­dom of the Book: The History of Printing as an Agency of Change in Morocco bet­ween 1865 and 1912 (PhD diss., Uni­ver­sity of Boston, 1990)."
Of course A. Fawzi says no­thing of the kind. Why else do we not get a page number, where he would say so? A.Cohen is making it up as in most of her publi­cations: Hot air or lies!
Of course we do not get any infor­ma­tion about this print of re­ference, not even a picture of the cover, nor of any of the pages! ‒ just as in her ear­lier articles she wrote that it was very often re­printed without giving years, nor pub­lishers!
As often, Bergsträßer tells us a lot

He quotes the "Maghribian book sellers" (two members of the al-Ḥabbābī familiy) that Egyptian printers and Šaiḫs could improve the edition, written by Aḥmad bn Ḥasan Zwīten, checked by Moroccan šaiḫs, and again in Egypt, where it was printed ‒ dedicated to Sulṭan Muḥmmad [V.] bn Yūsuf

This Cairo Warš Edition, Cairo 1929 Edition, al-Ḥabbābī edition, Zwīten edition is the first Moroccan edition with numbers after each verse, and ‒ a revolution of sorts ‒ Kufī numbers;
so ʿAlī Muḥammad aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ (1304/1886-1380/1960) writes four pages on the differences between (second) Madani and Kufi mumbering (pages 8-11):

the cover of the first edition

the first three pages:

instead of a title page:

(this is from the copy of the Academy of Sciences in Lissa­bon that is not paginated in quarters, but in halves; its index and the duʿāʾ are set in normal Arabic letters, while hand­written in the original.)
the ʿanwān of the first edition

So are no pagination.
As often, THE Zwīten does not exist, the original one is divided into four parts, and has before the quranic text faḍl al-qurʾān and ādāb at-tilāwa; all is hand­written, the last four pages in eastern nasḫ pointed like in the east (no dots on final nūn, fā' and qāf, fā'-dot below, single qāf-dot above), all other parts in maġribi masbūṭ, while the Lissa­bon copy (in halves) lacks most additions.
Maybe these two strange pages are due to merging quarters into halves (??) Or to have the ḥizb start on a new page?

Normal pages have 15 lines

last page of first half

With a book seller I found a last quarter printed in 1990.

She does not know that most Western readers need the number of suras.
"al-Naml (the Ants)" should be "XXVII" or "an-Naml (27)".
ḫaṭṭ is handwriting, script, not calligraphy which is fann al-ḫaṭṭ.
taḏhīb is gilding, not illuminations.
taškīl is vocalization, not "vocalization signs"; vowel signs are harakāt.
the commander of the believers, not commanders of believers:
Why does she call his function "myth"?
She translates her French "encore" (in Voir et entendre le Livre. Une édition maro­caine du Coran. 2017) (which means here « en outre »/"fur­ther­more, more­over") as "still"/ « tou­jours » « quand même » .

The article feels like written by a large language model artifi­cial intel­ligence.
Some sentences sound reasonable, others like halu­cina­tions

Sometimes the connection is missing: first [he writes] "on paper plates",
which are then "calligraphic tablets".
lawḥ, a wooden tablet, is defined as "a Qurʾanic tablet that com­bines writ­ing and recita­tion"
‒ it has no loud speakers.
First she writes ‒ correctly ‒ of "the seven canonical readings (qirāʾa)",
then ‒ in­correct­ly ‒ of "the seven Moroccan reci­tations";
the seven qirāʾāt (proper plural form) neither being Moroccan, nor reci­tations.
similarly: "the dominant recitation in Morocco (Warsh)" ‒ the ways of recitation (taḥzzabt, muǧawwd, murattal) have nothing special to do with Warš ‒ no more than "high way" with Chrys­ler and Tesla.
her note 2: muṣḥaf = volume, Qurʾān = revelation, while the first is "codex", the second "reading, reci­tation"
In note 20 she cites Gérard Trou­peau with: "To indicate the three short vowels, [Arabic] borrowed three Syriac signs" although Trou­peau has not written this, and it is cer­tainly wrong.


‒ ­

The October-Conference on The Cairo Edition

Last weekend the conference on "the Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān, 1924" took place in a room of the AUinC.
While the Arab titel مصخف الملك فؤاد ١٩٢٤م is fine, the English title (the French one pro­minent at the beginning of the year had dis­apperead) is a testimony to utter ignorance ‒
ignorance either of logic, ignoring the func­tion of the definite article
or ignorance of the world of Cairo prints and book­shops ‒ there are thou­sands of Cairo Edi­tions of the Qurʾān a few miles east of the AUC, even fewer miles south-west of the IDEO.
(Anyhow, I find it strange that the English title is not "the 1924 King Fuʾād Edition of the Qurʾān in the Ḥafṣ trans­mission" ‒ multi­lingual con­feren­ces should have the same title in all its lanugages.)
    Sadly, I find both reasons ‒ carelessly calling an edition "the edition"
    and calling an edition "the edition" because s/he never bothered to study different editions,
    plausible.
    It is common among these young scholars to speak of "the palimp­sest"
    for the scriptio inferior of the pamlimpset or the lower text
    ‒ why should they make a difference between "a" and "the"?
    And because they are not interested in having a look into the maṣā­ḥif
    local Muslims use, they just assume that all Muslims have some­thing very
    similar to what most Orienta­lists have. Many scholars explicite­ly wrote that
    the KFE is most common in the Muslim word and for religious purposes.
    Shows that they have no idea of the real Muslim world.
    Sorry: Do not confuse the KFE with Islam on the ground(s).
    Unfortunalely Islamology is 90% theology and philology,
    only 10% social anthropology and sociology of religions.

In the "Call for Papers" (anony­mous, hence offi­cially by the IDEO, in fact by Asma Hilali) one can read about 50 times "l'édition du Cairo, le coran du Caire, ظبعة القاهرة etc.), during the conference all except the Blind African herself spoke of the Govern­ment Copy, the print of the Amī­riyya, the KFE ... ‒ unfor­tunatly the official English title is still the old one, the il­lo­gical one; the IDEO hasn't even made up its mind whether there should be a comma bet­ween "the Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān" and "1924" (cf. the image above) ‒ in both cases the year is an ac­ciden­tal property not an essen­tial one, while in "the 1924 Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān" the year would be es­sential, defining.
Here I repeat what I wrote to the guys in charge in Cairo ten times:
There are about a thousand "Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān" ‒ to put the definite article in front defies logic ‒:
at least ten editions of the Warš trans­mission, one being THE Warš Edition for decades;
here are two of the four title pages (normally bound in one volume):

Here two images from a 1929 Cairo Warš Edition ‒ without a title page, as was common at the time:

And here from two of the oldest al-Qahira pub­lishers, i.e. not from Bab al-Khalq, al-Faggala, from Bulaq or even Giza but from "behind" al-Azhar, first one from Subīḥ:

than from Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, first from 1930 for Maġribian Arabs:

others:

Apart from these 100% Cairo Editions, there are editions con­ceaved in Morocco resp. Algeria, but pro­duced in Cairo ‒ the Moroccan ones without pro­duction place, the Algerian ones with an Algerian publisher's name. (Only the third edition of the third sherifian muṣ­ḥaf was produced in Morocco.)
In the literature another one is mentioned, which I have not seen ‒ so I rest sceptical:
al-Qurʼān al-karīm : innahu li-Qurʼān karīm fī kitāb maknūn
Majmaʻ al-Buḥūth al-Islāmīyah. Lajnah Murājaʻat al-Maṣaḥif
[Cairo]: [Jāmiʻ al-Azhar], [1964]
OCLC-No: 22354261
"Aqarrat hādha al-muṣḥaf al-sharīf wa-diqqah rasmihi wa-ḍabṭihi wa-ʻaddaʼa ayātaha Lajnah Murājaʻat al-Maṣāḥif bi-Majmaʻa al-Buḥūth al-Islāmīyah bi-al-Jāmiʻ al-Azhar bi-al-Qarār ... 1964."
qāf is written with a dot above the letter, fāʼ with one below the letter, and no dot over final nūn 518 pages ; 25 cm
Of two "Cairo Edition"s before 1924 I do have image:
the one written by the same calligrapher as the 1308/1890 edition, ʿAbd al-Ḫāliq Ḥaqqi (?) Ibn al-Ḫawaǧa, produced by a famous printer around the turn of the century (-1919) behind al-Azhar: aš-Ṣaiḫ Aḥmad ʿAlī al-Melīǧī al-Kutubī:

Plus one printed in al-Maṭbaʻa al-ʻĀmiriyya:
InnahuLi-Qurʾān Karīm, 1318/1900:

One of the talks in the IDEO conference led from Venice and Ham­burg, Kazan and Leipzig to the first com­plete Qurʾān printed in Cairo, the Bulaq 1881/2 print ‒ both in one volume in in several (possibly both in 10 and in 30) leather­bound parts. It is well known both from the Enyclo­pedia of the Quran and from Kein Standard:

It has 13 lines per page, 603 pages in the one-volume-edition.

In 1308/1890 the most important of all Cairo editions was published ‒ it was mentioned but no copy was shown ((even the Geburtstagskind, the 1924 Gizeh print was not there)). It was not analysed or discribed in detail. Good heavens!

In 1885 an other important Cairo edition saw the light of day ‒ this one as well with "ar-rasm al-ʿuṯmānī":

Let's mention two more early "Cairo Editions":
One written by they same calli­grapher who wrote the tremend­ously import 1308/1890 edition, ʿAbd al-Ḫālliq Ḥaqqi (?) Ibn al-Ḫawaǧa, by the editor Šaiḫ Aḥmad bin ʿAlī al-Melīǧī al-Kutbī, who had a press near al-Azhar until 1919.

Innahu li-Qurʾān karīm fī kitāb maknūn lā yamassahu illā al-muṭahhirūn tanzīl min ...
Miṣr : al-Maṭbaʻah al-ʻĀmirīyah, 1318 [1900]
364 p. ; 20 cm.

Only one of the participants has made research for the con­ference. Aziz Hilal dis­covered, that he did not find any reports on the pre­para­tions for the edition, nor reports on its pub­li­cations or its re­per­cussions. It was a non-event at the time.
Ali Akbar had to report, that in Indo­nesia (+ Singa­pore, Malaysia, southern Thai­land) no copies of the KFE were sold. Nor could he locate a survving copy Azhar students or pil­grims to Mecca might have brought into the area.
Necmettin Gökkır informed the par­ticipants, that in the Turkish Republic very few experts took note of the edition. Neither the state religious autho­ri­ties nor normal Muslims were inter­ested in the KFE.
Michael Marx's “Inno­vation, Mile­stone, Stan­dard? Remarks and Reflec­tions about the Cairo 1924 Print from a Histo­ri­cal Per­spective” is wrong because there is NO Cairo 1924 Print, the copy was printed in Gizeh, and he did not explain what the ino­vation(s) was resp. were. As for the "standard" he refered to Arno Schmitt.
I could not detect for all the papers which of the topics named in the Call for Papers they dealt with. Only A.Hilali's concluding remarks belonged clearly to a tailor-made topic.
Interesting that the three languages English+French+Arabic
had turned to Egyptian+English+Arabic and that Hilal's talk consisted to 38% in imala (eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh).