Shortened Vowels

In the qurʾān there are thousands of vowels pro­nounced short, although written as long.
The most common words are انا۠ /ʾana/ (zero above alif = mute unless pause directly after) and أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ /ulaika/ (circle above waw = always mute)
‒ according to the now common Arab Qurʾānic ortho­graphy intro­duced Giza1924.
‒ In IndoPak they have no vowel sign at all;
   in Turkey qaṣr is written beneath them
The most common rule is:
when the last sound of a word is a long vowel
and the first sound of the next word ‒ after a silent alif or direct ‒
is an unvowelled consonant (ḥarf sākin), this consonant trans­forms the syllable before to a closed one --> shortens the vowel.
‒ The ḥarf sākin can be a single letter or the first of geminized ones (a pair, double, taṣdīd).

And there are some words shortened because of rhyme,
e.g. in Surah Al-Ahzab (33) and Surah Al-Insan (76)

In these suras most verses end in /a/,
the few verses ending in ا get shortened:

[٠٣٣] الأحزاب

٠١٠إِذۡ جَآءُوكُم مِّن فَوۡقِكُمۡ وَمِنۡ أَسۡفَلَ مِنكُمۡ وَإِذۡ زَاغَتِ ٱلۡأَبۡصَٰرُ وَبَلَغَتِ ٱلۡقُلُوبُ ٱلۡحَنَاجِرَ وَتَظُنُّونَ بِٱللَّهِ ٱلظُّنُونَا۠

٠٦٦ يَوۡمَ تُقَلَّبُ وُجُوهُهُمۡ فِی ٱلنَّارِ يَقُولُونَ يَٰلَيۡتَنَآ أَطَعۡنَا ٱللَّهَ وَأَطَعۡنَا ٱلرَّسُولَا۠

٠٦٧وَقَالُوا۟ رَبَّنَآ إِنَّآ أَطَعۡنَا سَادَتَنَا وَكُبَرَآءَنَا فَأَضَلُّونَا ٱلسَّبِيلَا۠

and 76:15 وَيُطَافُ عَلَيۡهِم بِـَٔانِيَةٖ مِّن فِضَّةٖ وَأَكۡوَابٖ كَانَتۡ قَوَارِيرَا۠

‒ ­

orthography again

These last days, I posted again after a break. Orthography or more to the point: the latitude with ortho­graphy is my inter­est.

first half a line from the 15 liner (611 pages), twice Taj Ltd Com. first from the 1960s, than from this millenium, and last from the King Fahd Com­plex; Taj just deleted the hamza sign and moved the fatha on the alif, "Medina" moved the parts of one word closer together.
Now the same verse in the 13 liner (848 pages): top with a hamza sign (aka head of ʿain) and a mute alif, later without a head of ʿain and a fatha on the hamza letter (aka alif); this later version is often pirated.

BTW in 19th century maṣāḥif tabūʾa always has a hamza sign sometimes followed by alif:

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orthography (one for two)

And there is the opposite: one tooth (one letter) where two are needed.
I guess this a remnant of the early Hiǧazi pro­noun­ciation being notated in the earliest manu­scripts with few hamzat except at the beginn­ing of a word.
I show just two examples:
Mīkāl <--> Mikāʾīl because here the two tradents of ʿĀṣim diverge:

While the normal way is a "normal" yāʾ and an hover­ing hamza above (or with kasra: below) the connection.
In 26:176 in India the one yāʾ is ambi­guous:
the hamza above is a bit before,
the yāʾ-dots are a bit after the tooth.

in the top lines what is possible on computers (Unicode: hover­ing hamza)


in the middle Indian handwritten ambiguous solutions.




in the bottom line: Warš with one yāʾ

orthography (two for one)

In this blog I treat the quranic ortho­graphy ‒ not the extremely few dif­fer­ent letters and the few differen­ces in vowell­ing, doubling of letters due to the different qirāʾāt ‒ but only the different con­ventions of writing Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim.
The main points you find here

In several posts I make clear that the Arabic script has just letters, not con­sonants and vowels. Many assume that the earliest "Hiǧāzī" manu­scripts had neither diacri­tical dots nor vowel marks ‒ both "invented" later. This is not the case. About 200 years later ‒ when the text was already well estab­lished ‒ Kufic manu­scripts (on land­scape parch­ments) were pro­duced with­out dots, but the earliest (portrait) parch­ments had dia­cri­tical strokes where necess­ary. But because vowel­ling was not yet establi­shed sometimes alif, yāʾ, and wāw were used for long or short (!) vowels.

Once vowelling (and "hamza-ing") were common, some of the added letters were super­fluous ‒ see on the left and below.
Orthographic differen­ces concern mostly alif, yāʾ, wāw and hamza (whether it is represented in the rasm by one of these vowel letters <because in the original Hiǧāzi pro­noun­cia­tion the "vanished hamza" had pro­longated the ori­ginaly short vowels> or by the inde­pen­dent letter head of ʿain.)

In the King Fuad Edition, the Šamarlī edition, in the edi­tions written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha silent letters (that are not muted by pro­sody) are marked with a circel, when they are always silent, by an ovale, when pro­nounced when the reader stops after them ‒ for what­ever reason; silent when connected to the next word.

Here a reason why: because the pure rasm could be read in different ways. So before the "invention" of vowel signs/dots and the head of ʿAin for hamza, a vowel letter was added ‒ this by the way ‒ is a reason for adding a vowel letter for a short vowel. The personal pronoun انا (I) is an other example: you could say it has two alifs, but normally no /ā/, the first is hamza, the last helps not to confuse it with the particles ʾinna, ʾanna, ʾin ان










Here 4:83 with two words one after the other with the same rasm where it not for an "added" letter

In the next word yāʾ was "added" before kasra was common, to signal to the reader that the hamza is to be read as /ʾi/ ‒ /ʾī/ when the reader stops after it ‒ for whatever reason.

In the 1970 the Tāǧ Ltd Co added a page at the end of their editions

here as always you have to click on the image, then with the secondary mouse on it, choose "open in a new tab" and then "+"
Because the type writer is not the best:
المصاحف بجدة من زيادة الالف في كلمة "الانتم“ من الاية رقم ١٣ سورة الحشر
نحيطكم انه بالمقارنه بين طبعة هذا المصحف وطبعات المصاحف الاخرى ظهر أن زيادة الالف
تنفرد بها الطبعة المذكوره ومن الجائز ان تكون من قبيل الكلمات التي زيدت فيها الالف رسمًا لا نطقًا مثل
لااوضعو" [التوبة: 47] "او لاذبحنه" [النمل: 21] وغيرها من الكلمات التى سردها ابو عمر الداني في المقنع حيث قال

The pioneer on the matter was Brockett .... I have already posted on this matter. Allow me to added from the mentioned Muqnī

Interestingly the mufti (a decendent of ʿAbdal-Wahhāb) does not only mention an early authority (as orientalist scholars do), but adds a recent authority, the chief Reader/Recitor of Egypt al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād who had made the King Fuad Edition of 1924/5

But not only alif can be otiose. So can yāʾ.

the monster fatḥa is no vowel sign, bur signals that there is a note on that word on the margin (see above)

now from Morocco, the model for the Gizeh print of 1024/5 ‒ if I am right

in prints/mss. from the Ottoman empire and Persia there is only one yāʾ

On 51:47 با يٮد al-Arkati writes:

The first MSI (Muṣḥaf Standar Indonesia 1983) had only one tooth بايۡدٍ
the second (MSI 2002) two: بايۡٮدٍ
I have to check what the third (MSI 2016) has.

no standard, but standarization

Although there is no umma-wide standard, there are several standards (to different degrees enforced).
Since about 1980 all qurʾāns printed in Turkey ‒ except very expensive fac­simile editions ‒ are identical line by line
‒ not just word by word. Berkenar manu­scripts had normally 604 pages of text (605 when one cover page is counted), twenty pages for a ǧuz, one page for the Fatiḥa, and three extra pages for the last ǧuz because of the many title boxes.
Each ǧuz started in the first line on the right,
each page ended with a verse end resp. the verse number in the bottom left corner,
but within a ǧuz the calligrapher was free.
Not so today. Even when an edition seems to be a reprint, many (helpful) directives and (waṣl-)signs are eliminated, other directives are added, vowel signs are moved nearer to "their" letters, short and long versions of words are moved until all lines in all Turkish maṣāḥif are identical.

The King Fahd Complex in Medina noticed that most Africans and non-Arab Asians do not like "their" ʿUṯmān Ṭaha edition.
Adrian Alan Brockett reports (p.27 of his PhD thesis) of a Taj copy produced after the inde­pen­dence of Bangla Desh in 1972 (Dhacca had been removed from the list were the publisher had offices), readily avail­able in London shops at the time of his research

The interesting feature is that it has a certi­ficate from the Saudi Deputy Mufti Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad Āl al-Šaiḫ, dated 19/11/1389 (28/1/1970). The reason for the certi­ficate was that a formal question had been addressed from the head of al-Maḥkama al-Kubrā in Jedda to Dār al-Iftāʾ con­cerning the copy's spelling la'aXntum (59:13) for the usual laʾantum لانتم.

The certificate is in the form of a reply:

We hereby inform you that although this [Taj] impression appears to be the only one with this extra alif, this does not bar it from being allowed to be dis­tributed. This is because the extra alif is to be taken as one of those present in the graphic form but not to be pro­nounced. Similar oc­currences are found, for instance, in la0'awḍaʿū [9:47 ولاوضعوا] and and awlaXʾaḏbaḥannahu [27:21 اولااذبحنه], which are written [according to a report from Malik cited from al-Muqniʿ of a1-Dānī] in the original way"

(nuḥīṭukum annah bil-muqārana bayn tab'at hāḏa l-muṣḥaf wa-ṭabaʿāt il-maṣā­ḥif il-uḫra ẓahar an ziyādat al-alif tan­farid bihā l-ṭabʿa al-maḏkūra wamin al-jāʾiz an takūn min qabīl il-kalimāt illatī zīdat fīhā l-alif rasman lā nuṭqan miṯl laʾawḍaʾū0, aw laʾaḏbaḥanna­hu waġai­rihā ... ʿala l-kataba il-ūlā. See al-Dānī, al-Muqni', pp.47.8ff., 100.3f., 148.14ff.; al-Muḥkam, pp.174.5f., 176.11ff.)

The complex did not commission a new muṣḥaf, but choose the 611 page ber­kenar one from Taj Com­pany Ltd and improved the placement of the straight alif when it stood before alif (or lām) instead behind.

When waw was separated from the rest of the script unit, they did not correct it.

Kein Standard Two (How did they make Gizeh 1924?)

Angelika Neuwirth, an expert on the genesis of the Qur’an before 623,
knows nothing about the history of printed maṣāḥif,
but she writes about it:

the mushaf, i.e. the text put onto sheets, bound between two covers, was trans­mitted through the centuries, genera­tion by generation ... to end up in the last century, in 1925, in the form of a printed text
A. Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010. p. 190

I fail to understand, what Neuwirth wants to say.
Does she ignore that the Qur’an was printed in 1537, in 1694, in 1698, in 1787 for the first time by Muslims in St. Peters­burg, in 1834 in Leipzig, in the 1830s ten diffe­rent prints in Persia and India?
Does she ignore that from 1875 each year thousands were printed in Istan­bul and India?
What does she mean by "end up in the form of a printed text"?
What does she want to say by "trans­mitted genera­tion by genera­tion"?
Okay, before sound could be recorded, the oral text had to be taught from teacher to pupil:
it was indeed transmitted through the ages.
But was that necessary for the muṣḥaf?
Was it not possible to read (and copy) a muṣḥaf written by a person dead at the time of reading the manu­script?
It was not common to give an isnād of scribes who each have learned the art of writing a muṣḥaf from an older scribe/ ḫaṭṭāṭ.
When we believe the main editor of the King Fuʾād Edition it was a re­con­struction,
based on the oral text and Andalusian books from the 11th and 14th century on the ortho­graphy of the qurʾān.
I believe it was an adaptation of a printed copy of the trans­mission Warš to the normal Egyp­tian reading of Ḥafṣ.
For sure, it was not the last in a chain of trans­mitted maṣāḥif, from Egyp­tian scribe to pupil (through the gene­rations).

Neuwirth has never seen the King Fuad Edition.
Consistently she cites it wrongly.
The book has no title on the cover, no title page; the first page is empty,
the first page with something on it, has the Fatiḥa.
In the afterword, it refers to itself as "al-muṣḥaf aš-šarīf,"
in the dedication to King Fuʾād it calls itself "al-muṣḥaf al-karīm".
Because it has no title, according to the German library rules,
the given/ assumed/ generic title is in brackets: "[qurʾān]",
but Neuwirth gives two different one in the notes:
„Al-Qur‘ân al-Karîm, Kairo 1925“ (Der Koran als Text der Spät­antike, p. 30)
and „Qur‘ân karîm 1344/1925“ (Der Koran als Text der Spät­antike,. p. 273).
Neuwirth has never read the information/ تعريف at the back of the King Fuʾād Edition,
nor read and understood the article Gott­helf Berg­sträßer wrote about it.
Otherwise, she would know that the editors claim to have re­con­struc­ted the muṣḥaf from scratch.
The chief editor is not a scribe, but the chief reader/ qāri of Egypt: he knows the qurʾān by heart ‒ in seven to twenty trans­missions.
In the تعريف he states that he has tran­scribed the oral text according to a didactic poem based on two medieval books on the basic letters for writing the qurʾān,
on a Maghrebian book on vowelling but with Eastern vowel signs and other books ...
I interrupt, because I do not believe, what is written in the تعريف
I am convinced that the editor took a Warš muṣḥaf and adopted it to Ḥafṣ.
For the vowelling, he did not have to replace Maghre­bian signs by Eastern signs because the system developed by Al-Ḫālil ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī was current in the West because printing colour dots was too complicated/ expensive at the time.
The "information" further informs us that verse numbering and litur­gical divisions are according to a recent Egyptian scholar, Abū ʿĪd Riḍwān ibn Muḥammad ibn Sulaimān al-Muḫalla­lātī, again not informing us that they adopted the Moroccan system in which a ḥizb is half a ǧuz ‒ not a quarter as before, as in Turkey, Persia, India, Nusantara.
There are many more things, in which Egyptian maṣāḥif used to be like Ottoman, Persian, Indian and Indone­sian maṣāḥif,
in which from now on they are like Moroccan ones ‒ with­out giving an authority to whom the King Fuʾād Edition is said to adhere.
—> The KFE just follows Maghrebian maṣā­ḥif, a switch of tra­dition, the opposite of what Neu­wirth wrote, the opposite of what Berg­strä­ßer believed.
The KFE has three different forms of tanwīn, and three dif­ferent forms of sukūn ‒ to be precise: the Moroccan sukūn for "un­pro­nounced" (circle or oval) and the Indian sign for "un­vowelled" (clearly the first letter of ǧazm without the dot not "ḫa with­out the dot" as they write).
Egyptian prints used to have signs for long vowels, now they have the Maghre­bian system, in which a vowel sign AND a vowel letter (ḥarf al-madd) is needed (hence a small letter is added when­ever neces­sary).
When a word starts with /ʾā/ they used to write the letter hamza (i.e. an alif) + a turned fatḥa,
now they copy the Maghrebian practice:
seatless hamza-sign+fatḥa followed by a lengthe­ning alif.
This does not change the rasm, it is not mentioned in the scholarly litera­ture cited.
Vowelless nūn not followed by h,ḥ,ḫ,ʾ,ʿ,ġ used to have a sukūn (as in Osm, Soltani, IPak), now they have nothing because they are not pro­nounced (clearly as them­selves - not iẓhār) because they are (partly) assimilated or reduced.
compare the beginning of al-Baqara from Bombay vs. Medina (aka IPak vs. Q52):

There used to be two (or three) different madd signs, now there is just one.

In all these things the King Fuʾād Edition clearly copies Maġribi Warṣ muṣāḥif ‒ unlike pauses, numbering, rasm, dotting they are not described in books ON the matter, al-Ḥaddad could only copy them from maṣā­ḥif. Strangely neither Berg­sträßer, nor anyone else noticed that.
And there is more: no more sign for Baṣrī numbers, no more small nūns, when tan­wīn before alif is spoken as a/u/i-ni (called "ṣila nūn" or on the sub­continent "quṭnī nūn"/tiny nūn).
To summarize:
Except for the transmission of Ḥafṣ, the Kufī numbering, and a new pause system (based on Saǧāwandī), and the letter font of the Amiriyya (by Muḥammad Ǧʿafar Bey)
this is Maghribian.
That the rasm was not ad-Dānī, not al-Ḫarrāz was clear. When people found out that it was only 95% Ibn Naǧāḥ, the editors in Medina and in Tunis added "mostly" (ġāliban / fĭ l-ġālib) to the informa­tion at the end of the book. Since it is 99% Maghribian, I guess al-Ḥaddād just adopted an existing muṣḥaf ‒ the "reconstruction" is a myth.

The other great German qurʾān expert, Hartmut Bob­zin, gives the right year, he writes:

the publication of the so-called "Azhar Koran" on 10 July 1924 (7.Dhū l-hiǧǧa 1342 in the Islamic calendar)
FROM VENICE TO CAIRO: ON THE HISTORY OF ARABIC EDI­TIONS OF THE KORAN (16th ‒ early 20th century), in Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution A cross-cultural encounter. West­hofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima 2002. p.171

which is not correct either: on that day the printing was finished,
before the book could be published it had to be bound.
One can be a good translator of the qurʾān, without knowing a thing about publishing,
but maybe it is not a good idea to write about publish­ing without knowing a thing about it.
And the King Fuʾād Edition is not the Azhar-Koran, nor known as such.
It was produced by the Govern­ment Press under the direction of the Chief Qārī of Egypt, assisted by men from the Education Ministry and the Pedago­gical College on Qaṣr al-ʿAinī.
In the end, the chief of al-Azhar and the chief copy editor of the Govern­ment Press vouched for correct­ness.
Only 1977 to 1987, an "Azhar Koran" was printed ‒ in five different sizes, different bindings and get-ups (with two reprints in Qaṭar, the last one in 1988)



Everything Bobzin writes is completly wrong

Der "Azhar-Koran" löste eine wahre Flut gedruck­ter Koran­ausgaben in allen isla­mi­schen Ländern aus, da man sich nun für den Koran­text auf eine aner­kannte Auto­rität stützen konnte.
The "Azhar Koran" prompted a veritable flood of printed editions of the Koran through­out the Islamic world, as there was now a recognized authority on which the Koran text could be based. ibidem

 

If there was a wave of prints after 1924 ‒ unsubstantiated by Bobzin ‒ it was to due to offset printing, has nothing to do with the KFE. The only print caused by it, the Kabul print of 1934, is "unknown" by the experts.

Die Entscheidung der Kairiner Gelehrten für den Text nach der Les­art "Hafs 'an 'Asim" ver­schaffte ihr nunmehr gegen­über allen anderen Les­arten einen ent­schei­denden Vor­teil.
there was a pronounced tendency to understand the "Azhar Koran" as virt­ually a "textus recep­tus", in other words as the only binding Koran text. The decision by the scholars in Cairo in favour of the text in the "Hafs 'an 'Asim" version secured it a decisive advan­tage over all other versions. ibidem

That Ḥafṣ experienced an upsurge due to the KFE is nonsense. Only in the Sudan it gained a bit ‒ but only because it is closer to the Arabic taught in state schools (which had more pupils now).

Allen "modernen" Koranaus­gaben bleibt eine Gemein­sam­keit ..., daß für die Her­stellung des Satzes keine be­weg­lichen Lettern ver­wendet werden, son­dern stets ein kalli­graphisch ge­stalteter Text zu­grunde liegt, der ent­weder litho­gra­phisch oder photo­mecha­nisch ver­viel­fältigt wird.
all the "modern" editions of the Koran still have one thing in common ... above all in the fact that no movable type is used to set the pages, which are, instead, always based on a
calli­graphi­cally designed text which is reproduced either by litho­graphy or by photo­mecha­nical pro­cesses.

Untrue: KFE'24, Kabul'34, Hyderabad'38 and the Muṣḥaf Azhar aš-Šarīf are type set.

Im Hinblick auf den Text folgte [Flügel] nicht einer einzigen Les­art, son­dern bot einen Misch­text (wie das übri­gens in den meisten Hand­schriften der Fall ist).
As regards the text itself he did not adhere to a single reading, but instead provided a mixed text (as was the case in most manu­scripts). p.169

Again, Bobzin states a fact ("most manu­script editions are a mix of readings") without proving it. It would be inter­esting to get informa­tion about one or two, not to mention "most" manuscripts mixing readings!

In the meantime, young brilliant scholars have surpassed Neuwirth and Bobzin in writing nonsense. Although there are more than a thousand editions printed in Cairo, they call the first (and for over fifty years: the only) Gizeh print "the Cairo Edition (CE)". It is as calling Notre-Dame de Paris "the Paris Novel (PN)."





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