2026 Kazan muṣḥaf

A new Kazan muṣḥaf is in print. (May 2026)

It was written by Artur V. Pisa­renko, but there is no complete manu­script, no hand­written muṣ­ḥaf on paper.
Modern as Russian Tatars are, they approached the project digitally rather than through a traditional handwritten manu­script: Pisa­ren­ko did not write all 77 430 words of the qurʾān, but only over 14 900 different word­forms (or some more because of long nūn or kāf). What he wrote, was trans­formed into vector graphics, which he fine-tuned and assembled into the final pages (often by cutting and pasting).
The original are files, not a hand­written book.



















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India 1800 Long vowels

Gabriel Said Reynolds and others say that all Qur'anic texts are identical: letter for letter.

the various editions of the Qur'an printed today (with only extra-ordinary ex­cep­tions) are identi­cal, word for word, letter for letter.
"Introduction to The Qur'an in its Historical Context, Abingdon: Routledge 2008, p.1.

Nonsense! There are probably a thousand different ways of writing or typesetting Qurans.
That does not mean that the prints say different things. They don't. They are similar enough -> mean the same. The differences that the exact same text allows in inter­pretation are certainly 100 times more signi­ficant than all the differences between different prints. Many dif­ferences are purely orthographic (such as folx­heršaft and Volks­herrschaft, night and nite, le roi and le rwa), others change the sense of a word, even a sentence, but do not really change the passage.
I am not at all concerned with contra­dictions in the Qur'an, with differences in content between one and another, I am only concerned with dif­ferences in ortho­graphy (that is, the spelling rules and particular cases).
Nor am I concerned with the differences between the seven/ten ca­noni­cal readers, the four­teen/ twenty trans­mitters, the hun­dreds of tra­dents. These primarily con­cern the phone­tic struct­ure (sometimes a "min" or "wa", an alif or a con­sonant doubling more or less); the variants only say whether a vowel is lengthen­ed five­fold or threefold, whether the basmala is repeated between two suras or a takbir is spoken before a particular one. I am not concerned with all this.
I am interested in the differences between Otto­man and Moroc­can, Persian and Indian maṣāḥif ‒ and how the official Egyptian Qurʾān of 1924 differs from those before it. Because there is a lot of nonsense circu­lating about this.
Qurans differ in a hundred ways. I will not present this systema­tically. For example, reading (qi­ra­ʾa), ductus, lines per page, whether verses may be spread over two pages, whether 30th must begin on a new page, whether rukuʿat are dis­played in the text and on the mar­gin, whether each verse is followed by a num­ber, whether alter­native count­ing systems are in­dicated, and whether pages have cus­to­di­ans/catch words on the bottom of each (second) page, whether there are one, three, four, five, six ... or six­teen pause signs. All this can occur, but will not be syste­ma­ti­cally dis­cussed.
I focus attention on two points:
the spelling of words, the Quranic vocabulary, so to speak ‒ al­though (un­like Le Dictionaire de l'Academie, Meriam-Webster, Duden) the same word is not to be written the same way in all places;
the rules of how vowel length, shorten­ing and diph­tongs are notated, like assimi­lation of con­sonants, and how hamza at the start of words is written. I am par­ticular­ly inter­ested in prints.

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There are two main spellings/set of rules: African (Maghrebi, Anda­lusian, Arabic) and Asian (Indo-Pakistani, Indo­nesi­an, Persian, Ottoman): Africans always need two signs for long vowels: a vowel sign and a match­ing elong­ating vowel letter; if the latter is not in the rasm, it is added in small (or a non-match­ing one is made suit­able by a Changing-Alif).

this two signs modell cor­responds to the view of the gram­ma­ti­ci­ans that there a haraka, lengthened by a ḥarf al-madd, while (follow­ing) Asian mo­dell may reflect the Sankrit model of matras

Asians have three short vowel signs and three long vowel signs (plus Sukūn/Ǧazm). But ac­cord­ing to today's IPak rules, for ū and ī, one uses the short vowel signs IF the match­ing vowel letter follows (which gets a ǧazm). With long ā, Per­sians and Otto­mans/Turks always used the long vowel sign; Indi­ans today use it only if no alif follows (i.e. wau, [dot­less] yāʾ or no vowel at all); if an alif follows, the con­sonant before it only gets a Fatḥa. In the case of long-ī, Persians and Otto­mans always used the Lang-ī sign (regard­less of whether it is followed by yāʾ or not); In­dians to­day pro­ceed simil­arly to ā: if it is not fol­lo­wed by a yāʾ, the long-ī sign is used: be­fore yāʾ, how­ever, there is (only) Kasra and the yāʾ gets a ǧazm. (Ac­cord­ing to IPak, sign-less letters are silent!).
For long ū, Ottomans put "madd" under a wau; for the elon­gated per­sonal pro­noun -hū the elon­ga­tion remains un­notat­ed. Indians and Indo­nesians use the long ū sign but the short u sign before waw, while before 1800, Indians al­ways used the long-ū-sign, follow­ing wau re­mained with­out any sign was thus silent (to be ignored when read­ing) ‒ if it is second part of the diph­tong au, it got and gets a Ǧazm, thus is to be spoken. Always the long ī sign. Always the long-ā-sign. In other words:

In 1800, there were two systems of noting long vowels: the Magh­re­b­ian, which always included two parts, a vowel sign (fatḥa, kasra, ḍamma, imāla-point) and a leng­then­ing vowel (belonging to the rasm or a small com­ple­ment). And an Indian system based en­tire­ly on long vowel signs, in which the vowel letters pre­sent in the rasm were com­pletely ig­nored. The Magh­rebi system is used to­day in Africa and Arabia. The Indian system is used in weakened forms in Turkey, Persia, India and Indo­ne­sia. In India and Indone­sia, IPak applies, where long ā con­tinues to be used before (dotless) yāʾ, but before alif it has been re­placed by fatḥa (like in the African system) Before ī-yāʾ / ū-waw stand kasra / ḍamma; above the vowel let­ter stands ǧazm ‒ other­wise they had no influence on pro­noun­cia­tion. The old Indian system only applies where no vowel letter follows. How widespread this clear Indian system was, I do not know. I came across several manu­scripts using it, but no print.

The Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim King Fuʾād 1924 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.

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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 1925 small (Būlāq) edition even more clearly than the first, large one (Giza 1924) ‒ makes every­thing clear: The fair copy 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 Monotype sorts/metal types (copied from the 1906 Būlāq sorts) but did not "lift" kasra, resulting in less clear lines (and more space for each line).
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. Types/sorts leave small inden­ta­tions on the paper: they 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.

2^nd example: wa-ma­lā­ʾi­ka­tihī Whereas the 1924 print (below) and the UT edition (middle) use a sub­stitute alif‑madda hover­ing in front of the yāʾ‑tooth — an added long‑vowel that leaves the tooth free to carry a ham­za di­rect­ly beneath it, yield­ing a hamza‑yāʾ (/ʾ/, not /ī/ or /ā/) — the Qatar muṣ­ḥaf (top) puts a change alif‑madda direct­ly above the tooth, there­by turn­ing that tooth into a long‑vowel alif, and sets the hamza hover below after it. Sound and rasm re­main the same, but the ortho­gra­phy is dif­ferent — not admissible for those who do not to­lerate any ap­proximation in the Qurʾān.
Whereas the 1924 print (below) and UT (in the middle) have a sub­sti­tu­te alif-with-mad­da hover­ing BE­FORE the tooth above the base­line, in Muṣ­ḥaf Qaṭar (above) there is a hamza-kasra ho­ver­ing AFTER 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 Amīriyya 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 Amīriyya (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".












letters from the KFE and from UT1 (below);

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.