KFEs

There are two editions of the King Fuʾād Edition with different qurʾānic text.
There are some differences in the pages after the qurʾānic text, dedication, basic information (taʿrīf), and confirmation (ḫātima), in the suc­cessive editions 1925 to 1951.
There are two different sizes (due to different presses).
The small editions after 1952 are basicaly reprints of the edition of 1926 with a few adap­tations to Q52.

Different text means different rasm, different spelling.
The oral text of Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim has been fixed for many centuries.
There are two basic spelling con­ventions: Western (Maghrib, Andalu­sia, Africa) and Eastern (India, Persia, Ottoman, Indon­esia) ‒ not to be confused with the difference between Warš (pre­dominent in the West) and Ḥafṣ (pre­dominent in the East, in the Muslim world in general)
The two basic rasm+spell­ing I call: Maġ and IPak ‒ basic is the spelling of long vowels, assimi­lation, silent letters ‒
the two spellings of KFEs I call G24 and Q52 ‒ these spelling inclued all features like pause signs, signs for secondary pron­ouncita­tion (like /ṣād/ as [sīn])
Unfortunately not all KFEs after 1952 follow Q52.
While all KFEs before 1952 follow G24, and all large KFE II follow Q52, the small kfe II b are mostly G24 with some im­por­tant switches to Q52 (like tanMwīM instead of taNwīN after suras 4, 5, 6, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 31, 33, 34, 35, 38, 41, 48, 54, 65, 67, 71, 72, 73, 76, 78, 84, 85, 86, 90, 100, 101, 104, 105, 106, and 110 because now reciting the basmala is assumed not the first verse of the next sura as 1924)
+ sura numbers in the Table of Suras (see below)

Although since 1952 in large editons, the main text (pp.2‒827) is different to the text of 1951 and be­fore (G24),
many experts are not aware of this, because it is the same type, the same page layout
(12 lines on 826 pages, with medallions for ǧuz, ḥizb, saǧa­da and saktha on the margin);

there are almost thousand differences: mostly pauses and changes in the title boxes, only one clear mis­take (7:137 /kalima/ was with a knotted tāʾ; since 1952 it has an open one)

Giza1924, KFE I

The Giza Qurʾān
‒ is not an Azhar Qurʾān
‒ did not trigger a wave of printings of Qurʾāns,
    because there was finally a fixed, authorized text
‒ the King Fuʾād Edition was not immediate­ly accepted by Sunnis and Shiites
‒ did not contribute signifi­cantly to the spread of the reading of Ḥafṣ, it was neither pub­lished in 1923 nor on 10 July 1924.
But it drove the abysmally bad Gustav Flügel edition out of German study rooms,
‒ had an afterword by named editors,
‒ gave its sources,
‒ took over ‒ apart from the Kufic counting,
    and the pause signs, which were based on Eastern sources
    ‒ the Maghrebi rasm (mostly/ġāliban) accord­ing to Abū Dāʾūd Ibn Naǧāḥ)
    ‒ the Maghrebi small fall back vowels for lengthening
    ‒ the Maghrebi sub­division of the thirtieths (but without eighth-ḥizb)
    ‒ the Maghrebi baseline hamzae before leading Alif (ءادم instead of اٰدم).
    ‒ the Maghrebi mis­sspelling of /allāh/ as /allah/
    ‒ the Maghrebi spelling at the end of the sura, which assumes that the next sura is recited immediately afterwards (without Basmala): tanwin is modified accordingly.
    ‒ the Maghrebi distinction between three types of tanwin (one above the other, one after the other, with mīm)
    ‒ the Maghrebi absence of nūn quṭni.
    ‒ the Maghreb non-writing of vowel abbreviations
    ‒ the Maghrebī (and Indian) attraction of the hamza sign by kasra

in G24 the hamza is below the baseline ‒ in the Ottoman Empire (include Egypt) and Iran the hamza stays above the line

















New was the differentiation of the Maghreb Sukūn into three characters:
‒ the ǧazm in the form of a ǧīm without a tail and without a dot for no vowels,
‒ the circle as sign: should always be ignored,
‒ the (ovale) zero for sign: should be ignored unless one pauses thereafter.
‒ plus the absence of any mute (unpronounced) character.
‒ word spacing,
‒ Baseline orientation and
‒ exact placement of diacritical dots and ḥarakāt.

It was also not the first "inner-Muslim Qurʾān print" (A.Neuwirth).
Neuwirth may know a lot about the Qurʾān, but she has no idea about Qurʾān prints,
since there have been many prints by Muslims since 1830, and very, very many since 1875
and Muslims were already heavily involved in the six St. Petersburg prints from 1787-98.
It was not a type print either, but - like all except Venice, Hamburg, Padua, Leipzig, St. Petersburg, Kazan, one in Tehrān, two in Hooghli, two in Calcutta and one in Kanpur - plano­graphic printing, although no longer with a stone plate, but with a metal plate.

It was also not the first to declare to adhere to "the rasm al-ʿUṯmānī“.
Two title pages from Lucknow prints of 1870 and 1877.

In 1895 appeared in Būlāq a muṣ­ḥaf in the ʿUthmani rasm, which perhaps meant "unvocalized." Kitāb Tāj at-tafāsīr li-kalām al-malik al-kabīr taʼlīf Muḥam­mad ʿUthman ibn as-Saiyid Muḥam­mad Abī Bakr ibn as-Saiyid ʻAbd­Allāh al-Mīrġanī al-Maḥǧūb al-Makkī. a-bi-hāmišihi al-Qurʼān al-Maǧīd mar­sūman bi’r-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī.
Except for the sequence IsoHamza+Alif, which was adopted from the Magh­reb in 1890 and 1924 (alif+madda didn't work because madda had already been taken for leng­thening), every­thing here is as it was in 1924.

The text of the KFA is not a recon­struc­tion, as al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād al-Mālikī had told G.Berg­sträßer: It does not exactly follow Abū Dāʾūd Sulaiman Ibn Naǧāḥ al-Andalusī (d. 496/1103) nor Abu ʿAbdallah Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ḫarrāz (d. 718/1318), but (except in about 100 places) the common Warš editions.
The adoption of many Moroccan pecu­lia­rities (see above), some of which were revised in 1952, plus the dropping of Asian characters ‒ plus the fact that the afterword is silent on both ‒ is a clear sign that al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād al-Mālikī adapted a Warš edition.
All Egyptian readers knew the read­ings Warš and Qālun. As a Malikī, al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād probably knew Warš editions even better than most.
The text, supposedly established in 1924, was not only available in the Magh­reb and in Cairo Warš prints, but also in Būlāq in the century before.

Now to the publication date.
You can find 1919, 1923, 1924 and 1926 in libraries and among scholars.
According to today's library rules, 1924 applies because that is what it says in the first print

But it is not true. It says in the work itself that its printing was on 10.7.1924. But that can only mean that the printing of the Qurʾānic text was completed on that day. The dedication to the king, the message about the com­pletion of printing, could only have been set afterwards; it and the entire epilogue were only printed after­wards, and the work - without a title page, without a prayer at the end - was only bound after­wards - pro­bably again in Būlāq, where it had already been set and assembled - and that was not until 1925, unless ten copies were bound first and then "published", which is not likely.

Because Wikipedia lists Fuʾād's royal monogram as that of his son, here is his (although completely irrelevant):
this is a Google translation of one of my German posts

the al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād rasm

The Gizeh 1924 print did not follow Abū Dāʾūd Sulaimān ibn Naǧāḥ's at-Tabyīn li-Hiǧā’ at-Tanzīl,
nor Abū ʿAmr ʿUṯmān Ibn Saʿīd ad-Dānī's al-Muqni‘ fī ma‘ri­fat marsūm Maṣā­ḥif ahl al-amṣār
or the choice/mix of the two by Muḥammad ibn Muḥam­mad al-Kharrāz.

After scrutinizing parts of the text, I guess that it mostly followed the common Maġribian rasm, i.e. only in about 150 words al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād al-Mālikī choose to write them differently.
Here is an example of a word, for which he choose the Eastern rasm, ad-Dānī's, Indian (& Indonesian), Persian.

The top line is from Hafiz ʿUṯmān the Elder (Büyük Hâfız
Osman Efendi): he has a dot­less yāʾ for /ā/.
His 200 years younger namesake HO Qayišzāde
(Kayışzade) has no letter for it,
nor has Muṣṭafā Naẓīf Qadir­ġalī (Mustafa Nazif Kadır­galı).
Modern Turkish editions strangely have a "normal" yāʾ.
computer set for the State Religious Office
hand written by Hüsyin Kutlu.
al-Muḫallalātī,
and Libyia (Qālūn) follow ad-Dānī.

The Tunisian Republic (Qālūn),
the late 19th century editions
    from Fās (Warš),

the 1931 Warš Alger edition,
the KFC ʿUT Warš edition,
all have an extra alif.
Since the KFE doesn't have it,
the ʿUṯmān Ṭaha editions do not have it either.
Nor do Indian edi­tions ‒ here the South African
print from the Waterval Islamic Institute.

Nor Indonesian.
But the Persian calli­grapher Nairizī (here from
the splendid 1965 Arya­Mehr print) has a dotless yāʾ.

For good measure,
five examples from
the Islamic Republik Iran.

As you can see in the middle of my examples, the transmission (Ḥafṣ, Warš, Qālūn) is independent of the spelling. In my German blog there is an other example (it gets bigger when you click it once -- as always in the Blogger).

Gizeh 1924 <> Cairo 1952 and after

Page 775 of the Amiriyya print (page 574 in editions that end on page 604) is remarkable because in the first line allan is sometimes written ان لن sometimes الن . There is no difference in meaning, no difference in pronounciation.
But it is important to some: they deliberately "correct" the spelling. Here now, two pages from the Amiriyya, both with الن




There are three differences on this page between the 1924 and 1952 edition, typical differences found throughout the muṣḥaf -- there are more than 800 of these -- plus four minor corrections.

To show that the changes did not stop 1952, I have copied two version distributed by the King Fahd Complex into the Amiriya-frame:
first ʿUṭmān Ṭāha 1

then ʿUṭmān Ṭāha 2

On the next pair there is no sura end, no sura title, but again one changed pause sign and on the very last word the hamza has moved from above to below the line (which is one of the four corrections mentioned in the afterwork to "the second printing").
-- the second page is not from the Amiriya but from a Bairut print, hence the page number is on top of the page and the catch word is missing.



On the last pair there is only one difference: kalimatu (line 5) is written with ta maftuḥa vs. marbuṭa.

Giza 1342/3 1924/5

The Giza print
‒ is not an Azhar Quran
‒ did not trigger a wave of Quran printings
    because there was finally a fixed, authorised text.
‒ did not immediately become the Qur'an accepted by both Sunnis and Shiites

‒ did not contribute significantly to the spread of Ḥafṣ reading;
‒ was not published in 1923 or on 10/7/1924.
But it drove the grotty Flügel edition out of German study rooms,
‒ had an epilogue by named editors (although ... see below), ;
‒ stated its sources (although ... see below),
‒ adopted ‒ except for the Kufic counting,
    and the pause signs, which were based on Eastern sources.
    ‒ the Maghrebi rasm (largely after Abū Dāʾūd Ibn Naġāḥ)
    ‒ the Maghrebi small substitute vowels for elongation
    ‒ the Maghrebian baseline hamzae before Alif at the begin­ning of the word (ءادم instead of اٰدم).
    ‒ the Maghrebic distinction into three kinds of tanwin (above each other, one after the other, with mīm)
    ‒ the Maghrebic spelling at the end of the sura, which assumes that the next sura is spoken imme­diate­ly after­wards (and with­out basmala): tanwin is modified accordingly.
    ‒ the Maghrebic absence of nūn quṭni.
    ‒ the Maghrebic non-spelling of the vowel shortening.
    ‒ the Maghrebic (wrong) spelling of ʾallāh.
    ‒ the Maghrebī (and Indian) attraction of the hamza sign by kasra

in G24 the hamza is below the baseline ‒ in the Ottoman Empire (include Egypt) and Iran the hamza stays above the line

















    ‒ noted assimilation like in the Maghreb:

In both examples the first three lines are Ottoman
    (Rušdī, Ḥasan Riḍā in ʿIrāqī state editions, Muṣṭafā Naẓīf Qairġalī Cairo 1911),
in the middle Giza 1924
bellow Maġribī Warš editions ‒ note that in the older edition the second stem (vertical stroke) of لا is lam+šadda, while in the modern Algerian one, it is the first stroke

A new feature was the differentiation of the Maghrebic sukūn into three signs:
    ‒ the ǧazm in the form of an ǧīms without a tail and without a dot for vowel-lessness,
    ‒ the circle for never to be pronounced,
    ‒ the (oval) zero for "only pronounced if paused".
(while before ‒ as in IPak‒ the absence of any sign signifies "not to be pro­nounced").
Further, word spacing,
baseline orientation and
exact placement of dots and dashes.

Nor was it the first "inner-Muslim Koran print".
Neuwirth may know a lot about the Koran, but she has no idea about Koran prints,
because since 1830 there have been many, many Koran prints by Muslims.
and Muslims were already heavily involved in the six St. Petersburg prints of 1787-98.
It was not a type print either, but ‒ like all except Venice, Hamburg, Padua, Leipzig, St.Petersburg, Kazan and the earliest Calcutta ‒ planographic printing, albeit no longer with a stone plate but a metal plate.

Nor was it the first to claim to reproduce "the rasm al-ʿUṯmānī".
Two title pages of Lucknow prints from 1870 and 1877.

In 1895, a Qur'an appeared in Būlāq in ʿuṯmānī rasm, which perhaps meant "unvocalised". Kitāb Tāj at-tafāsīr li-kalām al-malik al-kabīr taʼlīf Muḥammad ʿUṯmān ibn as-Saiyid Muḥammad Abī Bakr ibn as-Saiyid ʻAbdAllāh al-Mīrġanī al-Maḥǧūb al-Makkī. Wa-bi-hāmišihi al-Qurʼān al-Maǧīd marsūman bi'r-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī.

Except for the sequence IsoHamza+Alif, which was adopted from the Maghreb in 1890 and 1924 (alif+madda was not possible, since madda was already taken for elongation), everything here is already as it was in 1924.

Incidentally, the text of the KFA is not a reconstruction, as claimed by al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād (and believed by Bergsträßer); the text does not follow Abū Dāʾūd Sulaiman Ibn Naǧāḥ al-Andalusī (d. 496/1103) exactly, nor Abu ʿAbdallah Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ḫarrāz (d. 718/1318), but (except in about 100 places) the common Warš editions.
Also, the adoption of many Moroccan peculiarities (see above), some of which were revised in 1952, plus the dropping of Asian characters ‒ plus the fact that the epilogue is silent on both ‒ is a clear sign that al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād al-Mālikī adapted a Warš edition.
All Egyptian readers/recitors knew the Warš and Qālun readings. As a Malikī, al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād ‒ not to be confused with the scribe Muḥammad Saʿd Ibrāhīm al-Ḥaddād ‒ probably knew Warš editions even better than most.
There was the text, sup­posedly establi­shed in 1924, not only in the Maghreb and in Cairene Warš prints, but also already set in Būlāq in the century before.

Now to the date of publication.
One finds 1919, 1923, 1924 and 1926 in libraries and among scholars.
According to today's library rules, 1924 is valid, because that is what is written in the first printing.

But maybe it was a bit later. It says in the work it­self that its print­ing was com­pleted on 10.7.1924. But that can only mean that the print­ing of the Qurʾānic text was com­pleted on that day. The dedication to the king, the mes­sage about the com­pletion of the print­ing, can only have been set after­wards; it and the entire epilogue were only printed after­wards, and the work ‒ without a title page, without a prayer at the end ‒ was only bound after­wards ‒ probably again in Būlāq, where it had already been set and mounted ‒ and that was only in 1925, unless ten copies were first bound and then "published", which is not likely.
Or the first run was indeed published in 1924, and only the second run (again in Giza) was stamped:

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.