Monday, 27 July 2020

Gizeh 1924 <> Cairo 1928 and after

See the end of Sura 73 in the Gizeh 1924 print (on the left)
and Cairo 1928 (on the right, slightly enlarged -- the Cairo print is a bit smaller and has much less margin).
First line  الن and ان لن
In 1952 it's back to الن

The Bairut (Paris, Amman) reprints oscillate between the two.
The original Damascus ʿUṯmān Ṭaha has   one word:
So has the first Saudi reprint:
But the next, the first done in the new printing complex, has two:



Kazan

Since 1802/3 (parts of) the Kur'an were printed in the Tartar centre of Tsarist Russia, Kazan.
  Here the first and last page of a book from the Bavarian National Library;
  the left side is page 58 of ǧuz 5 -- each ǧuz is paginated afresh

Like the 1787 Mollah Ismaʿīl ʿOsman St.Petersburg Muṣḥaf they were type printed.
I know of no studies on the orthography, the pauses, liturgical divisions and so one.
It clearly belongs to the Asian school, closest to Ottoman.
In the first 200 years there are small changes in calligraphy

and orthography: Where the original (black on white) is close to Ottoman, the modern one (black on yellow) has hamzat on alif, madda for lengthening, and alif alif for /ʾā/
Added later:
Walter Burnikel and Gerd-R. Puin published
„Gustav Flügels Vorworte, kommentiert. Ein Rückblick
auf die Geschichte des Korandrucks in Europa“ in
Markus Groß /Robert M. Kerr (Hg.):
Die Entstehung einer Weltreligion VI.
Vom umayyadischen Christentum zum abbasidischen Islam.
Berlin: Schiler & Mücke 2021, ISBN 978-3-89930-389-6
(INÂRAH Schriften zur frühen Islamgeschichte und zum Koran, Band 10), S. 64-129
with observations not only on Flügel and Redslob, but on Kazan (and Hamburg and Padua) too.

Since 2011 the rasm is very close to Gizeh 1924
‒- with the exception of dual alif (first: Kazan 1856, last line Kazan 2016)
The Tartar (both in Kazan and on the Crimea) most of the time have as title "Kalam Šarīf" (or al-Muṣḥaf aš-Ṣarīf) ‒ not "al-Qurʾān al-Karīm" (like the Arabs), nor "Q. maǧid" (like in Iran) nor "Q ḥakīm" (like in Hind).
Japanese Tartars being the exception:
here a page from a Japanese YaSīn edition:

Tuesday, 14 July 2020

Differences in maṣāḥif al-amṣār

There are many places where one can read about differences between the codices of the main (garrison) cities of the emerging Arab Muslim Empire.
— first ad-Dānī's Muqni fi rasm masahif al-amsar maa kitab al-Naqat,
— GdQ III = Die Geschichte des Korantexts von Gotthelf Berg­sträßer & Otto Pretzl
— in the internet, e.g. www.kuramer.org But tables that do not order the codices by proximity are second best.
Here kuramer's table reordered:
Here here the table I made with Kufa and Basra the other way round:
In this century, or said differently: Since Yasin Dutton's "Red Dots, Green Dots, Yellow Dots and Blue: Some Reflec­tions on the Vocalisation of Early Qur'anic Manu­scripts — Part I / ‮النقط الحمراء والخضراء والصفراء والزرقاء: تٲملات في تشكيل مخطوطات المصحف في عصر مبكر (القسم الٲول)‬" in Journal of Qur'anic Studies Vol. 1, No. 1 (1999), pp. 115-140 we pay more attention to the fact, that in Syria there were two ways of reading and two of marking "end of verse" — and according to some: two codices: Damascus and Ḥomṣ/Ḥimṣ. Cf. Intisar Rabb "Non-Canonical Readings of the Qur'an: Recognition and Authenticity (The Himsī Reading)" in Journal of Qur'anic Studies, 2006
We find an additional lām in 8:6 — for the definite article — not only in manu­scripts
Cambridge University Library: Add. 1125 (BNF Arabe 6140a belongs to the same muṣḥaf)
BL Or 2165 but it is mentioned by Abū Ḥātim Sahl b. Muḥ as-Siǧistānī and al-ʿAsqalānī.
So, Muslim scholars knew of more codices — not mentioned by ad-Dānī because
none of the seven readings canonized by Ibn Muǧāhid are based on them.
see further
[ ص: 271 ] وفي سورة الأنفال في إمام أهل الشام " ما كان للنبي "

عنوان الكتاب: تلخيص الحبير (ط. قرطبة)
المؤلف: ابن حجر العسقلاني؛ أحمد بن علي بن محمد الكناني العسقلاني، أبو الفضل، شهاب الدين، ابن حجر Šihāb ad-Dīn Abū‘l-Faḍl Aḥmad ibn Nūrad-Dīn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn Ḥaǧar al-ʿAsqalānī 773/1372—852/1449
Talḫīṣ al-Ḥabīr fī Takhrīǧ ar-Rāfiʿī al-Kabīr

Sunday, 12 July 2020

linear ‒ not for technical reasons

Thomas Milo wrote that, the letters of the King Fuʾād Edition are simpler than Ottoman handwritten ones,  because it was to difficult to print that way.
Actually the Modernists behind the KFE from the Education Ministry and the Pedagogical College an-Naṣārīya wanted easy to read simple letters. The Būlāq type case had many ligatures that they did not want to use:
ʿUṯmān Ṭaha went even further, using even fewer ligature (see at the right margin):


To underline that it was a conscious decision, here some words from the back matter:

On the left of the last to lines I juxtapose words from the back matters with the same words from the Qurʾānic text.

Sunday, 21 June 2020

IPak, an Indian Standard

While only a seventh of circulating printed maṣāḥif are ʿUṭmān Ṭaha and clones, Indian are more than half.
But they are not all the same, most follow the IPak Standard, developed in the 1870s in Lucknow, spread by Taj Ltd Company (founded 1929 in Lahore, before partition with presses in Delhi and Bombay, twice bankrupt, twice reborn), today reprinted in South Africa, the UK, the States, Bangla Desh and the Republic of India. 
The biggest sub-group are the Indo­nesian prints, falling into Bombay reprints, Ottoman reprints (called Bahriye), after 1983, after 2002, after 2018 standard prints. About thirty Muslim scholars debated for fifteen years before publishing the 1983 "Standar Indonesia," since twice revised.
There are difference within India too, unimportant diffe­rences like the shape of sukun
Here from left to right: from an old Delhi print, a modern Taj Co Ltd print, from Bombay, from Lucknow, from Madras, (second line:) from Punjab, Calcutta 1831 and 2010, and from Kerala. So besides the typical head of jīm with­out the dot, one finds circumflex (in Calcutta the rule) and (MSA and Ottoman) circle.
More important differences like the iẓhār nūn in Bombay and Kerala
and quite different one: in Kerala, both sukun and rasm are close to Ottoman maṣāḥif:
The places, where Kerala writes like the Ottomans are surrounded in blue, were not in green ‒ on the left margin, below: hamza in a Calcutta, a Bombay and a Lahore print.
From about 1950 till today printed in Tirurangadi.
Below printed 1883 in Tellicherry (now: Thalassery), same closeness to Ottoman rasm:
 

Thursday, 19 March 2020

another Bombay print (from Nederlands-Indië)

Here is another Bombay print (from Nederlands-Indië) from the collec­tion of the UvA, printed in 1882 in Bombay
Images from the UvA AllardPierson 1821 A23:


As Ali Akbar has spotted three more Bombay prints that made it to the islands in the Michael Abbott Collection of the State Library of Victoria, here a page printed in the Haidariyya:

Sunday, 15 March 2020

iẓhār nūn sign in Bombay prints

In Western India (Bombay and Kerala) it was common to indicate places where vowelless nūn was fully pronounced.

not only after tanwīn, but withIN words, too:

Ali Akbar found this in Indonesia -- the last pages are missing, but he assumes it is a West Central Indian print (i.e. from around Bombay, not from the West Indies).

right pages starts in the middle of 15:66, left page with 15:80.

Here three dots do not stand for either-or-pause وقف التجاذب /المعانقة but for iẓhār. -- I have highlighted as well: assimilation after tanwīn and end-of-aya other than Kufan and the two dots under yāʾ, when it is prounced /ī/.

Sunday, 8 March 2020

iẓhār nūn (& iqlāb mīm)

Marijn van Putten has discovered the iẓhār nūn
both after tanwīn:

and "normal" nūn sākin:

and even one example where the extra green nūn is misplaced ‒ suggesting that the colour signs were added in a second phase:

should have been like this
I'm a bit dis­appointed that van Putten has never seen or heard of iẓ­hār nūn, al­though I have pub­lished about it. I first dis­covered it in Bom­bay reprints from Indone­sia, but later both in Indian mss. and prints.

Sunday, 1 March 2020

on Flügel, Vollers ­‒ Marijn van Putten again

Please skip this post.
It is not on print editions of the qurʾān.
Just on a twitter thread by a Leiden scholar, a brilli­ant linguist.

If you think: "typo, don't be so strict!"
van der Put published it a week ago, published it a second time un­changed in "Thread reader" and there are two years 1934 and 1950. In my view there are both wrong.

Anyhow, I am too young: For me Flügel's sorry effort was only laughing­stock. I am asto­nished that Marijn van Putten devotes time to it. On Twitter he calls "Flügel's well-inten­tioned mess ... Schlimm­besse­rung ... 'cor­recting' [the Arab texts that he finds in the mss.] in his print edition.
From what he writes it is obvious, that he is not aware that Bobzin wrote that the verse num­bers are not his, but those of Hinkel­mann.

And he ignores "Die Divergenzen zwischen dem Flügel- und dem Azhar-Koran" by Arne A. Ambros in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes Vol. 78 (1988), pp. 9-21

His ignorance is helpful. Other­wise, he would not have devoted a fresh ‒ an unnecessary ‒ look at the book.

What is even stranger:
He dismisses Karl Vollers' Volkssprache und Schriftsprache im alten Arabien (1906)
although Vollers comes to conclusions that resemble his in "The Language of the Uthmanic Codex"

I thought he is a bright linguist, who stupidly writes about things he does not under­stand. After this thread I know better.

Postscriptum
After he was alerted to the mistake, he tweeted "lol" ‒ by now deleted.
I do not believe that it was a typo, I am convinced that van der Put believed in what he wrote. Why?
Because almost everything he writes about printed copies is wrong.
In his thread on niʿmat allāh ‒ unlike the con­ference held in Berlin and the twitter thread, in his by now pub­lished article he is correct: "niʿmat allāh/rabbi-ka", some of his Grace of God-places are in fact Grace of your Lord-places -- he compares early manu­scripts which the Cairo Edition al­though here ALL standards (Maghrib, Gizeh24, Turkey, India, Indo­nesia) agree completely.
In his iǧtabā-hu-thread
he speaks of "modern print editions" al­though HERE there are two different standard groups: Africa vs. Asia. ‒ Each time he gets it wrong.
Like most Arabist/linguists he has not studied modern editions: he writes about a field he largely ignores. So, I take it that he did not know a thing about the Flügel edition.

But because his article is very important, I annotate it where it talks on modern editions.
van Putten writes "Sadeghi[(& Bergmann 2010] defines the Uthmanic text type as agree­ing with the text of the 1924 Cairo Edition of the Quran" (p.272) without giving a quote or the page. ‒ I can' find it.
Several times he mentions "the Sanaa palimpsest" when he means to say "the lower text of ..."
More serious:
"the Uthmanic text type have been accurate­ly trans­mitted up until the Cairo edition." (p. 280)
There has been no accurate trans­mission from century to century, from muṣḥaf to muṣḥaf, but the Cairo edition of 1924 claims to be a recon­struction on the basis of the literature on the rasm, the ḍabṭ ...
When you have a manuscript from the 8th century and a print from the 20th, you know nothing about trans­mission; for that you have to study mss. from the centuries between.

A last point, although I know that many find it niggling, but I love correct language.
is written plene" (three times) ‒ words can be written plene, sounds are written.

Merkaz Ṭab-o Našr

from a German blog coPilot made this Englsih one Iranian Qur'an Orthography: Editorial Principles and Variants The Iranian مرکز...