e.Conidi II

Emanuela Conidi just informed me that Geoffrey Roper was her source.
Maybe I am too strict, but this book should be burned as a act of faith.
THE BOOK. A GLOBAL HIS­TORY is less than useless <-- it has no notes, no proper (i.e. checkable) sources
The two pages on "printing the Qurʾān" (548-50) shine with inac­curan­cies:

in the 1830s ... the distri­bution of copies was suc­cess­fully blocked [in Egypt] by the reli­gious authori­ties

maybe, but without sources: useless

in the 1850s, some were distri­buted, but only after each indivi­dual copy had been read by a Qur’anic scholar and checked for errors, at great expense.

Does Roper really think that Muslims (because they are Muslims?) are so stupid that they do not under­stand, that they do not have to check "each individual copy" because they are identical????

the Ottoman calligrapher and court chamberlain Osman Zeki Bey (d. 1888) started printing Qur’āns reproduc­ing the hand­writing of the famous 17th-century calli­gra­pher Hafız Osman

According to my sources Osman Zeki Bey died 1890, and he did print maṣāḥif by the 19th century Hafiz Osman, not by the earlier namesake. And more important: the first re­produc­tion of a muṣḥaf was one penned by Şeker­zade Mehmed Efendi (d. 1166/1753) not by any of the Osmans, whose maṣāḥif were often repro­duced later.

(i.e. the form of the text as it appears in the early MSS without voca­liza­tion and dia­critics)

wrong again:
there is not a single very early MSS without voacalization and diacritics

The lead was taken by scholars at Al-Azhar mosque-univer­sity ... After seventeen years of preparatory work, their edition was published in 1924, under the auspices of King Fu’ād of Egypt. It was printed ortho­graphi­cally

the lead was taken by directors in the Ministry of Education,
they and people from the Govern­ment Press decided on the form,
the text given to the type setters had been written by the chief recitor of Egypt;
that the text was not just a copy of the most popular muṣḥaf of the time, the 522-page-muṣḥaf written by Muṣṭafā Naẓīf,
was due to the work done by Šaiḫ Muḫallalātī and the decision of al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād to largely follow the Magh­rebian model.
‒­

al-Muḫallalātī

Many think that the 1924 print was the first with the ʿUṯmānic rasm.
That's not correct.
Already for a long time India had producecd maṣāḥif with the defective rasm.
So had Morocco.
And in 1308/1890 in Egypt a muṣḥaf with the ʿUṯmānic rasm according to ad-Dānī was printed.

Kūfī verse numbering

It is not wise to repeat hearsay.
But sometimes we do it never­the­less.
Somewhere I had read that in India the Kufī numbering system
has five more verses than the Egyptian Kufī system ‒
with­out moving any end of verse (there­fore both being Kufī),
just by splitting five long verses.
Adrian Alan Brockett wrote that in the 20th cen­tury the dif­feren­ces have been reduced
‒ with­out giving chapter and verse.

But here are four places where India used to differ from Arabia:
4:173,       6:73,               36:34+5 were
4:173+4 , 6:73+4 resp. 36:34.

In Encyclopedia of Islam II A.T.Welch writes that in India 18:18 was split in two. I can not confirm this. He further writes that Pickthall has this split verse ‒ correct ‒, and that it was only changed in 1976 ‒ it was changed in 1938.

BTW, the Ottomans did not have here an addi­tional end of verse:

added later:
2:246 and 41:45 can be different in India from Gizeh24 (Brockett p.29)
BHO had both Kufī and Baṣrī, known 100% like "modern" Kufī.
HOQz, MNQ, (HaRi and ar-Rušdi) had exactly the same Kufī numbers as we have today ‒ like Muṣḥaf al-Muḫal­la­lātī and KFE.
al-Muḫal­la­lātī is even one of the four authorities giving in Hyderabad38: