Kein Standard Six, Before 1924

When you want to understand The French Revolu­tion, you should not start with Storming the Bastille, but with the economic, social and politi­cal situation in the decade before.

In order to understand the impor­tance of the King Fuʾād Edition,
we will have a look on the techni­cal side of book printing,
the science of "rasm and dabṭ",
the calligraphers writing maṣāḥif.

Let's start with debunking a statement made in the Muqad­dima which was a leaf­let put into the KFE.
In it it is stated that the govern­ment used to import foreign copies to be used in state schools, but that these often had to be distroyed because of mistakes. Around 1900 a sub­stantial num­bers had to be buried in the Nile.
I take it for a mysti­fication. Imports came from Bairut, Damas­cus or Istan­bul, all part of the Ottoman Empire, to which Egypt be­longed upto Novem­ber 1914.
I do not believe a story without exact year, numbers of copies confiscated and a list of mis­takes
‒ and who paid how much in com­pen­sa­tion to the owner of the books.

In the forty years before the KFE
several times the text of the qurʾān had been type printed in Būlāq:
both in Ottoman Style (eg. صِراط) with ḥarakāṭ
and bir-rasm al-ʿUṭmānī: as report­ed in Dānī's Muqniʿ, Ibn Naǧāḥ's Tabyīn or aš-Šāṭibī's ʿAqīla without ḥarakāt (صرط).
Local printers repro­duced Ottoman litho­gra­phies (written by Hâfız Osman (1642–1698), by Haǧǧ Ḥāfiẓ ʿUṯmān Ḫalīfa Qayiš­Zāde an-Nūrī al-Bur­durī d. 1894 or by Muṣṭafā Naẓīf Qadir­ġālī/ Kadir­ğali d. 1913 ‒ do not mix up with his fellow cal­li­grapher Mehmed Naẓīf, who died in the same year) ‒ both with taf­sīr and without.

That something is not the case,
is difficult to prove.
But I declare ‒ whatever others say: A 1833 Būlāq Muṣ­ḥaf does not exist!
Before 1873, in the Ottoman Empire it was for­bidden to print a muṣ­ḥaf.
(For an illegal one see here.)
Starting 1874 many have been printed in Istan­bul ‒ both by private and state presses.
Private printers (notably Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī) are said to have pro­duced litho­graph maṣā­ḥif in Cairo starting in the 1860s.
Because no exact years are given, and no name of the calli­graphers,
and because in the 1880s more copies of Istan­bul litho­graphs were printed in Cairo than local calli­gra­phers,
I doubt that there were many ‒ anony­mous ‒ Egyp­tian muṣḥaf writers before the 1880s.
The first Cairo litho­graph I have seen   is in the Azhar library (several copies there, one in Utah and at least one in Princeton)
In Michael W. Albin's article "Printing of the Qurʾān" in Brill's Ency­clo­pe­dia of the Quran
it is mentioned as two dif­ferent ones: one by the prin­ter Muḥammad Abū Zaid, and one [directed, edited] by Muḥammad Raḍwān [sic].
It is the 1308/1890 copy directed/edited by Abū ʿĪd Riḍ­wān ibn Muḥammad ibn Sulai­mān al-Muḫal­la­lātī ( ١٢٥٠هـ-١٣١١هـ / 1834-1893), written by ʿAbdel­ḫāliq al-Ḥaqqī Ibn al-Ḫo­ǧa/Ibn al-Ḫa­waǧa

Both in Istanbul

and Cairo
type set tafāṣīr with different spellings in the frame and at the margin were pub­lished
‒ in Būlāq the unvocalized rasm at the margin.

Both in large size for the use in Mosques,

gilded, with red as second colour for men of emi­nence,

and small for crafts­men and house­wives
litho­graphies written by the chief calli­grapher of the Otto­man Marine were pub­lished.
Founda­tions, Tombs of Holy Men were offered ex­pensive prints,
schools   sets of cheap ones.
Three of his maṣāḥif are re­pro­duced in other cities:
The one with 15 lines on 522 pages in Bairut, St. Peters­burg, Tehran, in Cairo by ten dif­ferent pub­li­shers ‒ as late as 1954 in the original Ottoman spelling by ʿAlī Yūsuf Sulai­mān 1956
sometimes by the minstery of the Interior in the 1924 spelling,
the one with 15 lines on 604 pages in Tehran and Ger­many with red as ad­di­tional colour,
in Nusan­tara in black and white (en­riched with the {Indian} sign for /ū/,
the one with 17 lines on 486 pages in Damas­cus and by Turks in Ger­many.
Sometimes with tafsīr at the margins.
Sometimes with a different ortho­gra­phy.
Until today the version written by Muḥammad Saʿd al-Ḥaddād for aš-Šamarlī ‒ in style very similar to Muṣṭafā Naẓīf and line by line iden­tical to the 522 page ver­sion is very popular ‒ a thousand times more popular than the Amiriyya prints, whose 855 page edition was never bought by normal Egyp­tians: it is no co­in­ci­dence that the only copies of the ori­ginal Giza prints sur­vive in Orienta­lists libra­ries and studies.

In the 1960s aš-Šamarli had pub­lished the origi­nal by MNQ in the Q52 ortho­graphy (see on the left), but from 1977 he sold al-Ḥaddād in dif­ferent sizes, hard­cover, plastic and soft;
on the right the ori­ginal in Ottoman spelling;
Here a Bairūt edition in Q52 with explana­tions of words on the margin: Here the Ottoman original published by Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalābī before MNQ had died (1913)  

The 815 page muṣḥaf by Hafiz Osman (1642-98) was printed in Cairo with one of the bigger Tafsir around, in Syria it was till about 1960 the muṣ­ḥaf
 

Here pages 2 + 3 from the Cairo print (without the commen­tary)

At least until islamist Qaṭar supplied islamist forces in Syria with arms and money thus starting a bitter "civil" war, in Aleppo "Otto­man" parts of the Qurʾān were printed:

and until 1990 in al-ʿIrāq two Ottoman maṣāḥif were printed by the state.
in the Turkish Republic only expensive fac­si­miles re­produce old manu­scripts,
"reprints" for believers are heavily edited.

In 1370/1951 the ʿIrāqi Dīwān al-ʾAuqāf had it printed under the super­vision of Naǧm­addīn al-Wāʾiz with Kufi numbers after each verse and sura title boxes written by Hāšim Muḥammad al-Ḫaṭṭāt al-Baġdādī,
1386/1966 for the ʿirāqī state by Lohse in Frank­furt/Main,
1398/1978 for the su­ʿūdī govern­ment in West Germany,
1400/1979 in Qaṭar, 1401/1981 for Ṣaddām.
In 1236 Muḥam­mad Amīn ar-Rušdī had written the original muṣḥāf. In 1278 ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz's mother offered it to the tomb of Junaid in Baghdād. Today it is kept in the library of the tomb of Abu Ḥanīfa.
Whereas in the manuscript ‒ as I guess ‒ waṣl-sign were only on alifs before sun-letters, in the ʿIrāqi print most initial alifs have one, which leads to the annomaly that some­times an alif has both "waṣl" under­neath and a waṣl-sign above.

After every tenth verse a yāʾ (in the abjad system: ten) hovers before the number (see above); what was help­ful in the ori­ginal manu­script that had only end-of-verse-markers, is kind of ridi­culous in the printed edi­tion.

Of interest as well: "bi-yāʾ wāhida" under riyyīn in 5:111, which in another Ottoman muṣḥaf is written yāʾ + šadda + turned kasra + yāʾ and in the mordern Turkish ones with one yāʾ and in Q24 with a normal yāʾ plus a high small one. Brock­ett studied in Edin­burgh an Ottoman Manu­script from 1800, in which under 41:47 bi-ʾaidin   bi-yāʾain is written. How-to-write-notes were common (in the same Ms. in 43:3 under a hamza-letter "bi-ġair alif" is written.
The Dīwān al-auqāf pub­lished ‒ with similar front and back matter ‒ re­prints by Ḥafiz ʿUṯmān and Ḥasan Riḍā. 
on the right the cover of the M.A. ar-Rušdī edition, in the middle Ḥasan Riḍā, on the left the editor. ‒ After the US-inter­vention there are two autho­rities: Dīwān al-waqf as-sunnī and ... aš-šiʿī, both pub­lished maṣā­ḥif on 604 pages: the Sunni took the text from KFC (UT1, cf Kein Standard), the Ši'i had the ʿirāqī Calli­grapher, Hādī ad-Darāǧī, write it.  
In anearlier post (and above) I retold the history of the manu­script and its prints.
Except for the back­matter and the di­vision into aḥzāb they are all the same: al-Wāʾiz's edition



Recently I learned that in 1415/1994 an Iranian reprint was made ‒ not based on the manu­script but on the ʿirāqī version.
While the ihmal-sign were deleted already in 1370/1951, forty years later other "con­fusing" stuff had to go:
‒ high yāʾ barī for every tenth verse,
‒ the differentiation between leading alif followed by a ḥarf sākin and others ‒ now ALL alifs-waṣl have a waṣl-sign (head of صـ)
‒ signs for pauses or vowels are placed nearer to "their" base letter
‒ sometimes the space between words is enlarged, a swash nūn replaced by a normal one
‒ a normal ḍamma-sign was replaced by a turned one, where it is pronouinced ū (due to rules of prosody)
‒ Mūsā gets a long-fatḥa,



Is there someone who has images of the manuscript?
on the right the first "normal" page of Muḥ. ʾAmīn ar-Rušdī's muṣḥaf, on the left: Ḥasan Riḍā:
 

Remarkable below:
‒ in lignes 3,5,6,7,9: the boundary between words is between alifs
‒ in lign 2: before (10) a small high yāʾ, which in the manucrpt was needed to signal: 10
‒ some Ihmal-signs below letter signalling: without dot  

the qurʾān ‒ a muṣḥaf

I am not too rigid, have no problem with "a copy of the qurʾān", "a printed qurʾān" or "ein Koranexemplar",
but there is a big difference between the qurʾān and a muṣḥaf.
The qurʾān is an (abstract) idea, a (performed) sound shape.
It's on the well-preserved tablet in heaven and fi ṣudūr an-nās/ in the hearts of believers.
A muṣḥaf is a concrete materialization between two covers, a codex.

This is a muṣḥaf:

These are not:

There is only one qurʾān.
One can even say, that there is only one umm al-kitāb,
from which the Hebrew Bibel, the New Testament and maybe other revealed books are imperfect transcriptions.
The point is not to confuse the perfect qurʾān and human materializations.

Catholics and Shiʿites think that fundamentalists mistake the "Authorized Version" and "muṣḥaf al-medina al-munawwara" for Verbum Dei resp. Kalām Allāh, while they believe that Verbum Dei is the Divine Logos Jesus Christ, the Acts and Words of God AND the Words and Acts of his Church ALL together.
Like Muslims thinks that God's Creation, God's Word and the Human Mind (created by God) can not be in absolute contradiction,
like Shi'ites believe that al-kitāb an-nāṭiq (Ahl al-Bait) and al-imām aṣ-ṣāmit (the Book) confirm each other, explain each other,
so Catholics think that the letters of the Bible need the Spirit to be understood, need the tradition of the Church to be translated to current conditions.
The belief in (multiple) hidden meanings behind the (apparent) truth, prevents Shi'ites and Sufis from overestimating the muṣḥaf of ʿUṯmān.


Neuwirth's

Islamic tradition, however, does distinguish between the (divinely) “authored Book,” labelled al-muṣḥaf ... and the Qur’ānic communication process, labelled al-qur’ān.
first in Oral Tradition, 25/1 (2010): 141-156, here: 143
later in Werner H. Kelber, Paula A. Sanders( eds.) Oral-Scribal Dimensions of Scripture, Piety, and Practice. Eugene, OR: Cascade 2016. pp. 170-187, here: 173?

without giving sources for the "tradition" is just nonsense.
The Divine Book is al-kitāb, not al-muṣḥaf and
Muslims do not see al-qurʾān as a "communication process".
That she sees it that way, is one thing,
to claim that "Islamic tradition" sees it with her eyes is a delusion.

Kein Standard, Five

Today I will not give you snippet for snippet,
I will just tell you:
in 2:72 Gizeh1924, Bulaq1952, the Azhar Coran of the 1970s, all had a baseline hamza,
while Moroccans have alif+hamza, Tunisians (& Tripolitanians) dagger alif + hamza.
Both al-Ḥaddād (for Šamarlī) and ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (printed in Damascus, ar-Riyaḍ, Tehran, İstanbul) followed the Amiriyya.
Today all editions of al-Ḥaddad and ʿUṯmān Ṭaha have hamza on a dagger.
Did the King Fahd Complex bring about the change?
Yes, but they did not start it.
Dar al-Faiḥāʾ in Damascus brought it up.
Now it's standard in the Arab East.
The "revolution" took almost a hundred years: from 1890 to 1980.

BTW, when Hythem Sidky tweeted that the CE was "immensely popular" and "brought about a revolution", he did not know, what he said.
Had he spoken with the people of Egypt, he would know, that they
never took to the "Cairo Edition". Had he studied the developments of
printed maṣāḥif, he'd know that it was a slow process.
And: Egypt is not the Islamic World,
Syria followed in the 1970s, Iraq even later.
Africa partly due to Saudi gifts, Malaysia by government degree.
India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey and their diasporas never.
If you read German ‒ else Brockett's Ph.D. thesis.

Kein Standard, Four

Whereas "the second print" of 1952 brought many changes,
in 73:20 "allan" changed all the time (before and after 1952):
In both the 1924 and the 1952 edition it is one word: أَلَّن
In Kein Standard I show lots of examples of Amiriyya and competitors reprints.
In this blog I have already twice shown images.
Both Indian

and Maghrebian prints

have it in two words: ان لن ‒ Warš, Dar at-Tunisīya:


Qālūn, Gaddafi's copy:


Qālūn, Tunisian State Edition:

So I dare to say, the Egyptians made a mistake:

which they corrected in 1929 (or before):

The same in 1354/1935:

But the "second print" reverted to the mistake:

While some reprints follow the Amiriyya (especially the "Communists" in Taschkent and Peking, and in Bairut and Paris as well), another Bairuti print reprinted in ʿAmman (and available in archive.org):


and Cologne (Abu'r Rida Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rassoul, Islamische Bibliothek,
both Arabic only and with German translation)

Gaddafi's Islamic Call Society restores the assimilatet nūn both the Arabic only otherwise photo-reprint ...
and the photoreprint of the Hyderabad 1938 set with Bulāq types correct the mistake

The Amiriyya sticks to their choice, but both Sa'udia (KFC)

and Iran (Center) follow the majority of Muslims:

BTW, the Iranian Center for Printing and Spreading the Qurʾān produce mainly faulty maṣāḥif:
They are the only one who write "an lan" (not al-lan); in a copy that marks silent letters red,
the nūn MUST be red (and the lām must have šadda), what­ever the Center may say.
As I have said elsewhere, once you use signs for silent letters, it is stupid (arrogant, incon­sidered) not to use them everywhere,
when you show when yāʾs are shortend to /a/, you should show when yāʾ is shortend to /i/ as well (but Gizeh24 and Saudi UT do not do it),
when you have signs for /ā/ and /ī/, why not for /ū/ (but Turkish editors do not have it).
There are editors in Damascus, Jakarta, and Tunis that mark ALL silent letters as silent, but others (Dar al-Maʿrīfa and the Iranian Center) do not.

When you show only the words, not how they are pronounced in a particular context, I can under­stand,
but to do it sometimes, I do not understand.

Kein Standard, Three

The Survey Authority Edition (King Fuʾād Edition, Amiriyya, Gizeh 1924) is
‒ not the Azhar Edition,
‒ not a Cairo Edition,
‒ not the first type printed muṣḥaf,
‒ not the first printed by Muslims,
‒ was never popular in Egypt or among Muslims in general,
‒ was not prepared by a committee,
    but made largely by one man: al-qārī al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād,
‒ was not a revolution,
but prepared thirty years before by al-Muḫallalātī
and only its grand-child, written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha, took off ‒ 65 years later,
‒ was not the first with the "ʿUṯmānic rasm",
‒ not the first with an afterword,
‒ not special because it named its sources,
because it is a lie. Nothing of what is written in the afterword
is 100% correct. Although it claims to be a reconstruction based on
Abū Dāʾūd Sulaimān Ibn Najāḥ, it turns out that it just follows the
common Maghribi maṣāḥif, mostly Ibn Najāḥ, but sometimes ad-Dānī, when they disagree
‒ except for the transmission of Ḥafṣ and the Kūfī verse numbering,
plus the pause signs developed by the main editor himself
plus the differentiation between a sign for vowellessness and two signs for unpronouncedness.

When you study the first "normal" page from
an Ottoman muṣḥaf (written by Hafis Osman Nuri)
a 1895 Būlāq print of "ar-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī"
an Algerian print from the period
the Muḫallalātī Cairo print of 1890
and the Survey Authority Edition,
you see, that the 1924 print is no revolution,
it is "just" a switch from the Ottoman to the African writing tradition.
For 398 years Egypt had been part of the Ottoman Empire.
Now it demonstrated that it was part of Africa:
Gizeh 1924 was Bandung avant la lettre.

But it was not free of mistakes, nor did it fix a text.
There were about 900 "mistakes" fixed in 1952
(over 800 different pauses + the changes that result from the [forgotten] inclusion of the basmala in continuous reading) + no more chronology of revelation ‒ in the sura title boxes ‒ because there is no consensus on the matter)
a tāʾ marbuṭa instead of a tāʾ maftuḥa, two alifs, a hamza moved from above the line to below,
two misplaced hamzat (Gizeh 1924 and Saudi UT have a free-floating hamza, India and the Maghreb have a "regular" yāʾ-hamza):


and more ... (in the next post)

seven written shapes or just two?

Some say: there are only two spellings of the qurʾān:
one on the tablet in heaven, in the ʿUṯmānic maṣāḥif and in the Medina al-Munaw­wara Edition (or similar to it)
and the other ‒ false ‒ ones.
They say: Both the oral and the graphic form are revealed.
      Muhammad instructed his scribes how to write each word.
Polemically phrased: God vouches for the Saʿūdī muṣḥaf calli­graphed by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha.

Other think: the qurʾān was revealed orally,
that God vouches only for its spoken shape,
that the written form was fixed by agreement, that it is a convention,
that there are seven ways of writing the qurʾān.
To avoid misunderstandings: Here I do not talk about the dif­ferent readings,
the different sound shapes, but about ways of writing the same reading,
the rasm and the small signs around it.

First, there is اللوح المحفوظ in heaven.
We do not know how it looks like.
(2) Then, there are the copies written at ʿUṯmān's time and sent to Baṣra, Kāfā, aš-Šām ...
Again, we do not know how they were spelt, but very old manu­scripts give us an impression what they must have looked like.   see
(3) Later Arabic orthography underwent change.
We have reports from the third century about the proper writing of the qurʾān.
Although the spelling reported definite­ly is not the same as (2), it is called "ar-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī";
the Maġrib, India (for some time) and the Arab Countries (since the 1980s) write their maṣāḥif based on it (with small variants of the rasm, dif­ferent ways of writing long vowels, different additional sign for assimila­tion and other fine points).
(4) In countries between the Maġrib and India (Iran, Irāq, Egypt, at some time the Otto­man and Safa­vid empires) the spelling came closer to the standard spel­ling of Arabic ‒ never approa­ching it, always being different from the "normal", everyday spelling.
This writing is called plene or imlāʾi إملاء .
Turkey has fixed a standard based on the Ottoman practice, Iran is experimenting.
(5) The spelling in different colours, be it to dif­feren­tiate between the "Uthmanic rasm" and the additions,

be it to show unpronounced letter, lengthened, nasalised, assimi­lated ones (and so on).

(6) Braille for the blind.
(7) The full (imlāʾī) spelling. In the 1980s, when many of the signs of the 1924 muṣḥaf or the Indian ones were not encoded yet

some signs necessary for Maġribī maṣāḥif are still awaiting inclusion in the fonts ‒
I downloaded such a text called muṣḥaf al-ḥuffāẓ to be used for pro­nouncing the text,
not to be trans­ferred into a bound volume.
I marked words spelled not according to "ar-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī" in grey.

In Egypt and in Saʿudia rulings have been published forbidden the writing of the qurʿān like any Arabic text.
They based their view on Mālik ibn ʿAnas, Aḥmad ibn Ham­bal, and the Šafiʿī al-Baihaqī.
Prominent among their critics is Grand Ayatollah Nāṣr Makārem Širāzī ناصر مکارم شیرازی‎, born 25 February 1927:
‒ the qurʾān was revealed orally,
‒ the prophet did not fix its written form,
‒ manuscript evidence shows clearly that the "ʿuṭmānic rasm" is not the ʿuṭmānic rasm.
‒ As long as we do not know the ʿuṭmānic rasm, we are free to write, as seems appropriate to us.
‒ Even if we know it one day, we are not bound by it: it is sanctioned "only" by iǧmāʾ ṣaḥāba.
‒ The ʿUṯmān Taha way of writing is not forbidden, BUT is it the best?
‒ There are otiose letters in it, missing letters, con­nected words, that are normally not connected, words written differently at different places within the muṣḥaf,
      it is dif­ficult to read = there are better ways to write it.
On the one hand, Ayatollah Makārem Širāzī points to many differences
between maṣāḥif that claim to follow the ʿuthmanic rasm,
which invalidates their claim,
on the other hand, he does not ask for a radical modern (normal) spelling,
   seems to be content with a mix of modern (simpler to read) and archaic spelling,
   aiming at proper pronunciation and at correct under­standing,
   at ease of reading and respect of tradition
   (bismillāh, raḥmān ... should be written tra­ditionally,
   although their spelling is wrong).

Makārem Širāzī is not alone in attacking "ʿUṯmān Ṭaha's way of writing the qur'ān", by which they mean to say "the Saʿūdī muṣḥaf and its copies", what Marijn van Putten calls "the Cairo edition" (if I understand him correctely, which is not certain). Ayatollahs Ǧaʿfar Sobḥānī, Javādī Amol and Ṣāfī have published similar opinions.

An edition is "one of a series of printings," "the entire number of copies of a pub­li­cation issued at one time or from a single set of type." Novels normally have a hard­cover and a soft­cover edition. Scholarly books mostly a first, a second and third revised edition, because at the same time and from the same set of type both hard­cover and (same or reduced size) softcover are printed.
van Putten writes again and again of "the Cairo edition" and claims that that is a common term for something. But he never defines what he thinks it is.
Is it the 1924 Gizeh edition, the King Fuʾād Edition, the official Egyptian edition of 1924, the 12 liner مصحف 12 سطر, the Survey Authority edition?
Or that he means all editions that roughly have the same text?
He seems not to know, that Gizeh1924 had not a single reimpression (German: Nach­druck, which is dif­ferent from "reprint");
in Egypt itself, there were only improved editions, already in 1925 there were changes (in the afterword), a completely new set of plates were used, the margins were just about a third of the 1924 edition.
The only edition that had almost the same text   is the 1955 Peking edition, but it has one leaf less and all ornamental elements (frame, signs on the margin, title boxes) are different, the headers are different, and it has a title page, which is lacking in Gizeh and Cairo.
The 30st edition or so, named "second print" differs from the 1924 edition at about 900 places.
I fear that van Putten means by "the Cairo edition" all Ḥafṣ editions written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha, although the King Fahd Complex has further changed the 1952 Amiriyya Edition (2:72, 73:20 and لا pause signs).
What he means by "edition" is not properly called "edition."
but the rasm, the dots and the set of masora of the 1952 edition ‒ ignoring small variants, and ignoring many characteristics of maṣāḥif: lines per page, pages per ǧuz, header, sura title box, margin signs, notes, catchwords and so on.
Although reading, style of writing (can be different for sura name, the basmala, the marginal notes and the text proper), rasm (& dotting), the masora often go together, they are independent of each other: the reading transmission Qālūn can have al-Ḫarrāz, Ibn Naǧāh or ad-Dānī rasm or a mix of them, can be written in Eastern Nasḫi, in Maġribī or a mix thereof, can be on 604 or 60 pages or something in between, can have the Eastern lām-alif or the Western alif-lām!
‒

the Cairo Committee ‒ ha ha ha

Some time ago I started a blog against the German Orienta­list myth of the King Fuʾād Edition as The Standard: Kein Standard. I had no idea that there are scholars out­side Germany too, who ascribe this and that to this edition.
Let me admit that the edition printed 1924 in Giza, bound and blind-stamped in Būlāq "ṭabʿat al-ḥukūma al-miṣrīya sanat 1343 hijrīya" (1924/5), with­out a title on the cover, the spine, with­out a title page, is im­por­tant, but not as im­por­tant as many think and not for the reasons given.
طبعة الحكومية المصرّية
        -- . --
    ١٣٤٣ هجرّية
                سـنة

The edition is not and never was The Standard, it has not spread Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim (BTW it is not an "Azhar Edition," and no "King Farūq edition" was published in 1936 or any­time). It was not the first that pro­claims to follow the ʿUṯmānic rasm, and it is not type printed ‒ it is type­set, off­set printed (plano­graphic prin­ting just as litho­graphy). It is not the first with a post­script (Luck­now copies from the 1870s onward and the Mu­ḫalla­lātī Cairo 1890 print have post­scripts ‒ although the latter is some­times bound as pre­face ‒ the numbers on the gatherings {malā­zim, sg.: mul­zama} show that it was to be the last section).
Whatever is written by "experts," the 1924 edition was not "im­mense­ly popular": the people of Egypt always pre­ferred other editions: in the 1920s and '30s 522 pages written by Muṣṭfā Naẓīf Qadir­ghali (still reprinted in its Otto­man gestalt in the 1950s), since 1975 (till today) the Šamar­lī (as well on 522 pages), after 1976 for a decade Muṣḥaf al-Azhar aš-Šarīf (525 pages, several sizes), since 1980 editions written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (on 604 pages). The people of Egypt never took to the 844 pages of the "revolu­tio­nary" King Fuʾād Edition (18,5 x 26 x 5 cm). The 1924 edition was never re­printed (the 1955 Peking edition has the same text for the qur'ān and the information, but adds a title page, sup­presses the de­di­cation to the king, has different headers, different frames etc).
To understand what went on, it helps to know that Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire from January 1517 to November 1914. Soon after, the govern­ment found "faults" in Ottoman maṣā­ḥif and asked the chief qārī of Egypt to pre­pare a modern Egyptian edition; a former direc­tor of the Arabic depart­ment of the Ministry of Education and two pro­fessors from the Teachers Training Center Nāṣa­rīya (located next door) were to assist him.
It is important to note that India and the Maghreb had largely kept the qurʾān ortho­graphy of the tenth century, or they had reverted to the old spelling already sometime before.
When Hythem Sidky writes in his review article:

"the [modern] ortho­gra­phic standard of clas­sical Arabic ... charac­te­rized nearly all muṣḥafs" before 1924 (Book Review of Daniel Alan Bru­baker, Cor­rec­tions in Early Qurʾānic Manus­cripts in Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 27, 2019. p. 276),

he is com­pletely wrong: There was not a single muṣ­ḥaf written like clas­si­cal Arabic and the majo­rity (in Africa, in India, in Nusan­tara, in Central Asia) wrote accord­ing to ad-Dānī or close to his Muqniʿ. Egyptian ʿulamāʾ had been aware of the old spel­ling; books of ad-Dānī (on the rasm, on the readings, on verse num­bers) were taught and studied.
On the other hand, in Persia and (to a lesser extent) in the Otto­man Empire, the spell­ing had become closer to the "normal" spelling of Arabic ‒ this process has been labelled "clas­si­fi­cation" = writ­ing as if the qurʾān had been put on vellum by Sībawaih & Co.
1924 brought no revo­lution. Already in 1890, a muṣḥaf had been printed that was pretty close to the spel­ling of 1924 ‒ actually closer to ad-Dānī (not to his pupil Ibn Naǧaḥ, preferred in the Maghrib).
Five years later a qurʾān "bir-rasm al-ʿUṯmānī" was type printed on the margin of a com­mentary.

The scholar behind the reform Abū ʿId Riḍ­wān al-Muḫalla­lātī had died the year before, but the makers of the King Fuʾād Edition pay tribute to him.
In 1930 Gotthelf Bergsträßer met Muḥammad b. ʿAlī b. Ḫalaf al-Ḥusainī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī al-Ḥaddād (and his suc­ces­sor ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Ḥasan b. Ibrāhīm al-Maṣrī aḍ-Ḍabbāʿ d.1380/ 1961). In "Die Koran­lesung in Kairo" (Der Islam XX, 1932. p. 5) he writes:

Quelle für diesen Konsonanten­text sind natürlich nicht Koran­hand­schriften, sondern die Literatur über ihn; er ist also eine Rekon­struk­tion, das Ergeb­nis einer Um­schrei­bung des üb­lichen Kon­sonan­ten­textes in die alte Ortho­graphie nach den An­gaben der Litera­tur. Benützt ist dafür ...
of course the source for the con­sonan­tal text are not manu­scripts, but the lite­ra­ture about it; hence it is a re­con­struc­tion, the result of trans­forming the [then a.s.] common con­sonan­tal text into the old ortho­graphy ac­cording to the lite­ra­ture, fore­most Maurid aẓ-Ẓamʾān by [abu ʿAbdallāh] Muḥam­mad ibn Muḥam­mad [ibn Ibrāhīm] al-Ummawī aš-Šarīšī known as al-Ḫarrāz and its com­men­tary by ... and a further com­men­tary for the marks (ḍabṭ)

I think Bergsträßer is wrong, and Sidky is wrong, when he writes that the 1924 Gizeh print relied on rasm works. Yes, its makers write in the post­face, that they did, but I am convinced, that in practice al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddad al-Mālikī just copies a Warš muṣ­ḥaf changing it to Ḥafṣ ‒ which is easy for the chief qārī, he knows the dif­feren­ces bet­ween the two readings by heart; the pause signs are his creation, the verse numbers are Kufic based on works by aš-Šāṭibī and al-Mu­ḫalla­lātī.
Marijn van Putten recently tweeted:

The Cairo Edition clearly attempted to get to the original rasm, and was suc­cess­ful to a remark­able extent, but oc­casional­ly failed to get it right, as is clear from manu­script eviden­ce. [Some­times] Rasm works (or, at least those con­sulted by the commit­tee of the Cairo edition) con­sistent­ly get it wrong in com­parison with the actual manu­script evi­dence.

As I see it, MvP makes several mis­takes: there was no committee work; of the four editors men­tioned there was only ONE ʿālim, the others had not the slightest idea about writ­ing and read­ing a muṣ­ḥaf, they just stood for the Giza print as "govern­ment/min­istry of edu­cation muṣ­ḥaf". The editor al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād did not scruti­nize qurʾān manu­scripts, either ancient nor recent. He just adapted a Warš muṣḥaf with verse numbers according to Medina II to the trans­mis­sion of Ḥafṣ with Kūfī num­bers and his own pause signs (based on the system used in the East). Al­though he writes in the after­word that the rasm is based on Ibn Najāḥ, it does not follow him all the time; I have the im­pres­sion that it is not pri­marily based on rasm works (by ad-Dānī, Ibn Najāḥ, al-Ḫar­rāz, aš-Šā­ṭibī, al-Saḫāwī or al-Murādī al-Balansī, nor the Indian al-Arkātī) but on a con­tem­porary muṣ­ḥaf.
I go further: al-Ḥaddād was not even aware of the "Ḥijāzī" manu­scripts. He didn't "get it wrong", because he did not try to do what MvP thinks he tried. He assumed that the Maġribī scholars had pre­served the ʿUṯmānic rasm.

Don't get me wrong. I am contra­dicting PvM not because he is parti­cularly stupid, but because he is especially important. Whereas most scholars are just Nöldeke IV or Spitalerin 1.6 (or try to become those), MvP prepares new paths.

But MvP's "The Cairo Edition" (and Sidky's "CE") is stupidity pure:
There are more than a thousand Cairo editions, but the King Fuʾād / Survey Authority Edition is a Giza edition, not Cairo.
Marijn van Putten and Hythem Sidky are not stupid, they are just like the people of Tiznit, who call Duc Anh Vu, the only Vietnamese in town, "Chinese", they do not know from which city he is, they do not need to know, "Asia some­thing" is good enough for them. Experts in early qur­anic frag­ments do not have to visit the hun­dreds of book­shops in Cairo, Karachi or Jakarta ‒ but still    it would be nice if they stopped calling Duc Anh Vu "Chinese" (or the King Fuʾād Edition "CE") ‒ he/it is not.

Came across a quote by Martha C. Nussbaum, an excellent philosopher and essayist, referring to Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini as "the Ayatollah," because she does not know that there are more than 5000 Ayatollahs in Iran. It seems that some do not know that there are more than a thousand Cairo editions ‒ or they just don't care.

Neuwirth's Nonsense: Qur'ān vs. Muṣḥaf

Once you are a diva, commoners don't prevent
you any more from writing nonsense.
Be it that they don't dare to,
be it that they think: When the goddess says so, it must be so.

The Qur’ān in its emergent phase is not a pre-meditated, fixed com­pilation, a reified literary arte­fact, but a still-mobile text re­flecting an oral theo­logi­cal-philo­sophi­cal debate bet­ween diverse inter­locutors of various late antique de­nomina­tions.
Angelika Neuwirth, "Two Faces of the Qurʾan" in Kelber, Sanders (eds.): Oral-Scribal Dimensions ... Eugene, OR: Cascade 2016. p.172

So far: no problem.
But a truism for "its emergent phase".

Islamic tradition, however, does distinguish between the (divinely) “authored Book,” labelled al-muṣḥaf ... and the Qur’ānic com­munication process, labelled al-qur’ān.
first in Oral Tradition, 25/1 (2010): 141-156, here: 143
later in Werner H. Kelber, Paula A. Sanders( eds.) Oral-Scribal Dimensions of Scripture, Piety, and Practice. Eugene, OR: Cascade 2016. pp. 170-187, here: 173?

No footnote. No sources given.
For the "Islamic tradition" it should be easy to give lots of sources,
but does the Islamic tradition really see al-qurʾān as a com­muni­cation?
Do Muslims really call the Divine Book al-muṣḥaf?

No and No.
Utter Nonsense! True Neuwirth.

Yes, Muslims make distinctions:
al-kitāb ‒ al-qurʾān ‒ al-muṣḥaf
But al-qurʾān is not a process.
It can be recitation (the core meaning of the word).
It can be the same as al-Kitāb, the divinely authored Book in heaven.
al-muṣḥaf is the rather mundane materia­lisation, not on a tablet in heaven,
but between two covers on earth ‒ be it written by hand, be it printed.
Before reading Neuwirth ‒ and after reading her ‒ I thought that they call the divine book al-kitāb.

If my credentials are too weak, you might rather believe Yasin Dutton:

we need to distinguish between kitāb, qurʾān and muṣḥaf, which we can see as three aspects of the same thing. Kitāb, we would say, is the divine­ly-pre­served ‘original’, which, as God’s speech (kalām) and there­fore one of the divine attri­butes, is, strictly speaking, inde­finable in human terms. In a sense it belongs to a different realm: it is ‘that book’ (dhālika l-kitāb; Q. 2. 2) rather than ‘this Qurʾān’ (hādhā al-qurʾān; e.g. Q. 6. 19, 10. 37, etc). It is, as the Qurʾān says, a book that has been sent down in the form of a qurʾān in the Arabic language (kitābun fuṣṣilat āyātuhu qurʾānan ʿara­biy­yan [‘a book whose āyas (‘signs’, ‘verses’) have been demar­cated (or ‘clarified’) in the form of an Arabic Qurʾān’] Q. 41. 3) so that it can be under­stood by people. One could say that it is from the out-of-time and comes into the in-time on the heart, and then the tongue, of the Messenger: ‘The Trust­worthy Spirit brought it down onto your heart for you to be one of the warners, in a clear Arabic tongue’ (Q. 26. 193–5). But in doing so it takes on some of the characteristics of ordinary human speech: it is in their language ...
we could say that the kitāb of Allah gets expressed as qurʾān on the tongue of the Messenger, and then as ṣuḥuf and maṣāḥif by the pens of the Muslims—and all are aspects of one and the same thing. Wa-l-lāhua aʿlamu bi-l-ṣawāb.

"ORALITY, LITERACY AND THE 'SEVEN AḤRUF' ḤADĪTH" in Journal of Islamic Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1 (January 2012). pp38ff.