The October-Conference on The Cairo Edition

Last weekend the conference on "the Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān, 1924" took place in a room of the AUinC.
While the Arab titel مصخف الملك فؤاد ١٩٢٤م is fine, the English title (the French one pro­minent at the beginning of the year had dis­apperead) is a testimony to utter ignorance ‒
ignorance either of logic, ignoring the func­tion of the definite article
or ignorance of the world of Cairo prints and book­shops ‒ there are thou­sands of Cairo Edi­tions of the Qurʾān a few miles east of the AUC, even fewer miles south-west of the IDEO.
(Anyhow, I find it strange that the English title is not "the 1924 King Fuʾād Edition of the Qurʾān in the Ḥafṣ trans­mission" ‒ multi­lingual con­feren­ces should have the same title in all its lanugages.)
    Sadly, I find both reasons ‒ carelessly calling an edition "the edition"
    and calling an edition "the edition" because s/he never bothered to study different editions,
    plausible.
    It is common among these young scholars to speak of "the palimp­sest"
    for the scriptio inferior of the pamlimpset or the lower text
    ‒ why should they make a difference between "a" and "the"?
    And because they are not interested in having a look into the maṣā­ḥif
    local Muslims use, they just assume that all Muslims have some­thing very
    similar to what most Orienta­lists have. Many scholars explicite­ly wrote that
    the KFE is most common in the Muslim word and for religious purposes.
    Shows that they have no idea of the real Muslim world.
    Sorry: Do not confuse the KFE with Islam on the ground(s).
    Unfortunalely Islamology is 90% theology and philology,
    only 10% social anthropology and sociology of religions.

In the "Call for Papers" (anony­mous, hence offi­cially by the IDEO, in fact by Asma Hilali) one can read about 50 times "l'édition du Cairo, le coran du Caire, ظبعة القاهرة etc.), during the conference all except the Blind African herself spoke of the Govern­ment Copy, the print of the Amī­riyya, the KFE ... ‒ unfor­tunatly the official English title is still the old one, the il­lo­gical one; the IDEO hasn't even made up its mind whether there should be a comma bet­ween "the Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān" and "1924" (cf. the image above) ‒ in both cases the year is an ac­ciden­tal property not an essen­tial one, while in "the 1924 Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān" the year would be es­sential, defining.
Here I repeat what I wrote to the guys in charge in Cairo ten times:
There are about a thousand "Cairo Edition of the Qurʾān" ‒ to put the definite article in front defies logic ‒:
at least ten editions of the Warš trans­mission, one being THE Warš Edition for decades;
here are two of the four title pages (normally bound in one volume):

Here two images from a 1929 Cairo Warš Edition ‒ without a title page, as was common at the time:

And here from two of the oldest al-Qahira pub­lishers, i.e. not from Bab al-Khalq, al-Faggala, from Bulaq or even Giza but from "behind" al-Azhar, first one from Subīḥ:

than from Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, first from 1930 for Maġribian Arabs:

others:

Apart from these 100% Cairo Editions, there are editions con­ceaved in Morocco resp. Algeria, but pro­duced in Cairo ‒ the Moroccan ones without pro­duction place, the Algerian ones with an Algerian publisher's name. (Only the third edition of the third sherifian muṣ­ḥaf was produced in Morocco.)
In the literature another one is mentioned, which I have not seen ‒ so I rest sceptical:
al-Qurʼān al-karīm : innahu li-Qurʼān karīm fī kitāb maknūn
Majmaʻ al-Buḥūth al-Islāmīyah. Lajnah Murājaʻat al-Maṣaḥif
[Cairo]: [Jāmiʻ al-Azhar], [1964]
OCLC-No: 22354261
"Aqarrat hādha al-muṣḥaf al-sharīf wa-diqqah rasmihi wa-ḍabṭihi wa-ʻaddaʼa ayātaha Lajnah Murājaʻat al-Maṣāḥif bi-Majmaʻa al-Buḥūth al-Islāmīyah bi-al-Jāmiʻ al-Azhar bi-al-Qarār ... 1964."
qāf is written with a dot above the letter, fāʼ with one below the letter, and no dot over final nūn 518 pages ; 25 cm
Of two "Cairo Edition"s before 1924 I do have image:
the one written by the same calligrapher as the 1308/1890 edition, ʿAbd al-Ḫāliq Ḥaqqi (?) Ibn al-Ḫawaǧa, produced by a famous printer around the turn of the century (-1919) behind al-Azhar: aš-Ṣaiḫ Aḥmad ʿAlī al-Melīǧī al-Kutubī:

Plus one printed in al-Maṭbaʻa al-ʻĀmiriyya:
InnahuLi-Qurʾān Karīm, 1318/1900:

One of the talks in the IDEO conference led from Venice and Ham­burg, Kazan and Leipzig to the first com­plete Qurʾān printed in Cairo, the Bulaq 1881/2 print ‒ both in one volume in in several (possibly both in 10 and in 30) leather­bound parts. It is well known both from the Enyclo­pedia of the Quran and from Kein Standard:

It has 13 lines per page, 603 pages in the one-volume-edition.

In 1308/1890 the most important of all Cairo editions was published ‒ it was mentioned but no copy was shown ((even the Geburtstagskind, the 1924 Gizeh print was not there)). It was not analysed or discribed in detail. Good heavens!

In 1885 an other important Cairo edition saw the light of day ‒ this one as well with "ar-rasm al-ʿuṯmānī":

Let's mention two more early "Cairo Editions":
One written by they same calli­grapher who wrote the tremend­ously import 1308/1890 edition, ʿAbd al-Ḫālliq Ḥaqqi (?) Ibn al-Ḫawaǧa, by the editor Šaiḫ Aḥmad bin ʿAlī al-Melīǧī al-Kutbī, who had a press near al-Azhar until 1919.

Innahu li-Qurʾān karīm fī kitāb maknūn lā yamassahu illā al-muṭahhirūn tanzīl min ...
Miṣr : al-Maṭbaʻah al-ʻĀmirīyah, 1318 [1900]
364 p. ; 20 cm.

Only one of the participants has made research for the con­ference. Aziz Hilal dis­covered, that he did not find any reports on the pre­para­tions for the edition, nor reports on its pub­li­cations or its re­per­cussions. It was a non-event at the time.
Ali Akbar had to report, that in Indo­nesia (+ Singa­pore, Malaysia, southern Thai­land) no copies of the KFE were sold. Nor could he locate a survving copy Azhar students or pil­grims to Mecca might have brought into the area.
Necmettin Gökkır informed the par­ticipants, that in the Turkish Republic very few experts took note of the edition. Neither the state religious autho­ri­ties nor normal Muslims were inter­ested in the KFE.
Michael Marx's “Inno­vation, Mile­stone, Stan­dard? Remarks and Reflec­tions about the Cairo 1924 Print from a Histo­ri­cal Per­spective” is wrong because there is NO Cairo 1924 Print, the copy was printed in Gizeh, and he did not explain what the ino­vation(s) was resp. were. As for the "standard" he refered to Arno Schmitt.
I could not detect for all the papers which of the topics named in the Call for Papers they dealt with. Only A.Hilali's concluding remarks belonged clearly to a tailor-made topic.
Interesting that the three languages English+French+Arabic
had turned to Egyptian+English+Arabic and that Hilal's talk consisted to 38% in imala (eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh).

100 years ago

The King Fuʾād Edition of the Ḥafṣ transmission of the Qurʾān is soon cele­brating its 100^th anniversary ‒ that's what the Domini­can Insti­tute in Cairo (IDEO) says.
Actually Orientalists are doing it, the edition has nothing to do with the cele­bration.
It is not even there. The two Cairo insti­tutions with func­tioning online catalogs ‒ IDEO and AUC ‒ do not have a copy. And the two insti­tutions that might have one ‒ al-Azhar and the National Library (Dar al-Kutub) ‒ have no online catalogue for the time being.
Fortuately, both the Prussian and the Bavarian Staats­biblothek have a copy of the original print of 1342/1924 (the Bavarian Academy of Sciences has another copy).
The French Biblo­thèque National (BnF) claimed to have five copies printed in 1919.
When I wrote them that this was im­possible, they dis­covered that three of their catalog entries refered to the same physi­cal object and stream­lined it to this:

Originaly they wrote that it was printed in Al-Qāhiraẗ : al-Maṭbaʿaẗ al-Amīriyyaẗ, 1919 القاهرة : المطبعة الأميريّة, 1919 But in their copy one can read

المطبعة العربية ١١ شارع اللبودية درب الجماميز Šārʿ Darb al-Ǧamāmīz con­nect­ing Bab al-Ḫalq (in the north-east) and es-Sayeda Zainab (in the south-west) ‒ in the 1930s and '40s its southern part was named separetly as Šārʿ al-Labūdīya ‒
definetly not in Būlāq, were the Govern­ment Press was located for 150 years before it was trans­fered to Imbaba in 1972.
I don't know why the 1961 edition of the KFE was not printed in Būlāq, but it seems to the case. My first idea, that the edition was not made by a government subsiduary, but a private enterprise, is unlikely because the 1961 has not a continuous pagination (1-855), but three deparat one (2-827, ا ب غ د ه و , (1) ...(4)) When one reads IN the FRIST (and post '52) print(s)

that the print was ac­complished by 7. Ḏul­ḥigga 1342 (= 10.7.1924), this can not be the date of the pub­lication. It can only be the day when printing of the qurʾānic text was finished. After that this note had to be set, the plates had to be made, the gathe­ring(s) with this note and the infor­ma­tion that follow it in the book had to be printed, all had to be made into a book block and had to be bound (con­nected with the case).
By the time the book was published it was 1343/1925. The cover of the first edition was stamped ṭabʿat al-ḥukūma al-Miṣrīya sanat 1343 hiǧriyya.

Bibligraphicaly speaking, the date given on page [ص] can be used, but in real life, the book was pub­lished only in the following year.
The Hounds of God and their handmaid did not know a thing about the King Fuʾād Edition, they even used a picture from the 1952 edition to illustrate the 1924 one.
Okay, not everybody knows the 1924 Gizeh print has never been reprinted, that the next edition was made in Būlāq on newly aquired machines with newly made plates in a different formate and with changes in the back matter, that the third edition had a word spelled differently,
but almost every­body not ignorant of all things qur'anic knows, that the 1952 edition is a new edition ‒ dif­ferent at 900 places.
Normally it is best to con­centrate on the editions itselfs, to scan them for dif­feren­ces, to read their back­matter carefuly, but there are two texts on the 1924 edition worth studying:
Gotthelf Bergsträßer's "Koran­lesung in Kairo" in Der Islam 20,1, (1932) pp. 1-42
and Abd al-Fattāḥ (ibn ʿAbd al-Ġanī) al-Qāḍī's Tārīḫ al-Muṣ­ḥaf aš-Šarīf (esp. pp. 59-66 in the 1952 edition by Maktabat al-Jundī).
Abd al-Fattāḥ al-Qāḍī writes of three editions:
al-Muḫallalātī's of 1308/1890
al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād's of 1342/1924
aḍ-Ḍabbāġ's of 1371/1952 on which he participated as one of the editors.

Back to the copies at our disposale: IDEO has one from 1354/1935
the first edition can be found in Berlin, Munich (BsB and in the Academy of Sciences), Bonn, Kiel, Basel, Zürich (UZH), Nijme­gen, Leiden
the 1344/1925 edition in Münster, Berlin (FUB), Kiel
1346/1927/8 in Leiden, Tübingen, Freiburg
1347/1928/9 in Würzburg, Munich, Erlangen-N, Bayreuth, Hamburg, Halle, Berlin (HU), Greifs­wald, Bamberg, Gießen, Kiel, Wien, Kopenhagen, Provo UT (BYU),
1936 Beirut (USJ)
many have a copy of the NEW King Fuʾād Edition of 1952
Berlin has two from 1952, one from before the revolu­tion mentioning King Fuʾād on page [alif], one with the page and its empty verso thrown out

Jena, Erfurt, Göttingen, Hamburg, Bamberg, Erlangen-N, Marburg, Eichstätt, Bonn, Mannheim, Munich (BSB & LMU) Stuttgart, Tübingen, Leiden, Freiburg, Stockholm, VicAlbert, Aix-Marseille, Madrid, Edinburgh U, Oxford, Binghamton NY, Allegheny PA, Columbus (OSU)

The second edition (1344) was reprinted by Maṭbaʿa al-ʿarabiyya in the 1930s, by the Chinese Muslim Society in Bakīn 1955 (without the page mention­ing the king and with chinized graphics and probably by Mak­ta­bat al-Šarq al-Islā­miyya wa-Maṭbaʻa­tuhā in 1357/1938 ‒ I say "probably" because it could be a repro­duction of the third or even later edition.
In 1938 the Nizam of Hyderabad had the text set with sorts he had bought from Būlāq, it was printed in two volumes along Pickthall's English translation in two volumes and reprinted by Gaddafi's Islamic Call Society ‒ plus a French version alongside D.Masson's translation.

The 1952 edition, aḍ-Ḍabbāġ's edition, was reprinted a lot:
1379/1960 in Taš­kent/Ṭaš­qend
in Bairut/Damas­cus often mostly with an added ن in 73:20 (one of these was reprinted in ʿAmmān and made it into the web archive There were reproduction on less than 827 pages: the 1952 edition was photo­graphed 1:1, the film was cut and re­arranged on a light table. Instead of 12 lines per page, we get 14 or 15 longer lines,

1983 in Qaṭar and in Germany. The German edition was made to­gether with the Islamic Text Society (ITS), Cambridge.
Since its ISBN is a German one, I guess, the pub­lishing place is Stutt­gart, not Cam­bridge or London.

There were three editions: big and medium size leather bound, and a big one in cloth. The qurʾānic text is a reprint of the 1952 al-Amīriyya edition, the back matter was fresh­ly set (not as neat as the original ‒ a pity!
As a rule, 827 page editions without title page are by the Govern­ment Press,
those with a title page are by private or non-Egyptian pub­lishers ‒
the From­mann-Holz­boog/ITS is the only non-Amīriy­ya one with­out title page, no titel on the cover, nor the spine.

The text of 1952 was published by the Government Press after 1976 for about ten years freshly set on 525 pages in several formats: with plastic cover, cartboard, leather, small, medium and large ‒ quite a success for a decade ‒ the last reprint was 1988 in Qaṭar.
And then came ʿUṯmān Ṭaha on 604 pages ‒ first with 100% the same text, later with different spelling at 2:72 and 73:20 and (most ? all ?) lāʾ pauses gone.

Asmāʾ Ḥilālī

Asmāʾ Ḥilālī:

Despite the proliferation of scholarly editions of old Qurʾānic manu­scripts
over the last twenty years,
the popularity of the Cairo edition of the Qurʾān has never been challenged.

What can this mean?
What is the connection between scholarly editions of qurʾānic fragments and
the ‒ supposed! ‒ popularity of the King Fuʾād Edition of the qurʾān,
called by her "the Cairo edition,"
which on its own shows that she is weak on logic.
Since there are more than a thousand Cairo editions of the qurʾān,
to call a particular one "THE Cairo edition" (TCE)
betrays madness ‒ unless one assumes that she ignores
the function of the definite article.

It's like:

Despite the proliferation of sub­urban gardens
the popula­rity of the Amazonas forest has not declined.

or

Despite the popularity of Mara­dona and Rinaldo
the greatness of Maria Callas is unchallenged.

The use of TCE instead of the many good (or less good) names for
the Gizeh print,
the 1924 Amīriyya edition,
the 1924 King Fuʾād edition,
the Amīri edition = here s.o. did not see that Amīriy­ya is short for al-maṭbaʿa
  al-amīriyya, thought that it refered to King Fuʾād ‒>
  corrected it to amīrī, because the King is not a Queen
the 1924 muṣḥaf al-mesāḥa
the Government print, der amtliche ägyptische ...
the 12 liner (مصحف ١٢ سطر) of 1924
shows that Asma Hilali did not know a thing about the Egyptian Govern­ment
Edition of 1924/5 at the time of writing the "Call for proposals".
TCE is a recent coinage by non-English speakers.
The Gizeh print is the ONLY muṣḥaf ever printed in Gizeh proper.
Only the 827plus page editions ‒ without titel page, but more than twenty pages AFTER the qurʾānic text ‒ by the Amīriyya (1924-1975) have 12 lines,
but they are not all the same: the 1952 edition is quite different from the 1924 one:
(and the second and third edition have a few changes NOT included in the 1952 edition)
about 900 differences between 1924/5 and 1952!

During the conference Asma Hilali was the only one who spoke of "muṣḥaf al-Qāhira" (Omar Hamdan spoke of al-Qāhira-print, most spoke of "muṣḥaf al-malik Fuʾād") ignoring that the Amīriyya never refers to al-Qāhira, but to Miṣr, Būlāq, and Gizā.
Before 1920 all private publishers were situated south-west of al-Azhar, late comers were situated in al-Faggāla St.

(partial) Assimilation

Two words from 2:8 according to five orthographic standards, all Ḥafṣ, all pronounced the same.

The top one (King Fuʾād Edition) and the bottom one (Ṭabʿo Našr, Iran) look similar, but are radically different -- because the Centre for Print and Distri­bution abolished the sukūn-sign: so in the bottom the nūn has an (unwritten) sukūn and the qāf has an unwritten long /ū/

-- just has the Turkish line just above).

In the top line the nūn has no sukūn, which means in that orthography: do not pronounce as /n/, but say /mai/.

The same phenomenon (partial assimilation) is written in Hind/Hindustan/India+Pakistan+BanglaDesh (third from below) and
Standar Indone­sia (2.-4. line)
by sukūn above the nūn (which means according to that orthography: NOT silent) plus šadda above the yāʾ (hence prounced at the end of the first AND the beginning of the second word: mai ya­qūl).





In Turkey



and Iran (complete and partial) as­si­mi­la­tion is not written.

The Pope, The Cairo Edition

Among Catholics one may speak of "the pope", among "normal" people   one SHOULD say "the Roman pope", "the pope of the Occident", "the bishop of Rome", because ‒ leaving meta­phorical use aside ‒ there are two more popes: the Coptic and the Greek "bishof of Alexan­dria and all Africa" in Cairo ((the bishops of Antiochia and All the Orient are not styled as pope)). What is common know­ledge among Egyptian Christians is un­known to many people in the States or in the UK.
Unlike popes, of which there are only three at a time, there are literaly thousand Cairo editions of the qurʾān. But some young scholars write of "The Cairo Edition". Out of ignorance or stu­pi­ti­ty? Maybe they do not know the dif­ference between "a" and "the" ... When I alerted one, s/he added "collo­quially known", an other just shrugged h*r/s shoulders, a third admitted that s/he has never looked into another muṣḥaf ‒ although as Pro­fessor of Isla­mic Stu­dies s/he should have been to a mosque and/or an islamic book­shop and opened a muṣ­ḥaf used by local Muslims (and they certainly do NOT use the KFE/King Fuʾād Edition = idiot's "CE"!)
Sometimes one sees "the St. Peters­burg edition of the Qurʾān". I do not know how many editions exist ‒ certainly not just one: First we know of edi­tions in 1787, 1789, 1790, 1793, 1796 and 1798. Copies of these six edi­tions have no year on the title page or in the back­matter ...

... so one could treat them as one: the 1787-98 Mollah Ismaʿīl ʿOsman St. Petersburg edition: Because there are more, like the 1316/1898 Muṣṭafā Naẓīf Qadirġalī St. Petersburg edition

Note the title: Kalām Qadīm
which does not refer to an antique shop, to antiquarian,
but to the pre-existence of the kalāmullāh ὁ λόγος

"THE St.Petersburg" edition is illogical. Only ignorant or stupid people use that expression. (Of course some are ignorant, stupid AND amoral.))

Giza 1924 ‒ better ‒ worse

The Egyptian Goverment Edition printed in Gizeh in 1924 was the first offset printed mushaf,
It was type set (not type printed).
It used smaller subset of the Amiriyya font not because the Amiriyya laked the techni­cal pos­sibi­lity for more elaborate ligatures,
((in 1881 when they printed a muṣḥaf for the first time,
  they used 900 different sorts, in 1906 they reduced it to about 400,
  which they used in the backmatter of the 1924 muṣḥaf,   in the qurʾānic text even less))
but to make the qurʾānic text easier to read for state school educated (wo-)men.

They did not want that the words "climb" at the end of the line for lack of space,
nor that some letter are above following letters.

It is elegant how the word con­tin­ues a­bo­ve to the right of the base­line waw, but it is against the ra­tio­nal mind of the 20th cen­tury: every­thing must be right to left!








The kind of elegance you have with "bi-ḥam­di rab­bi­ka" is not valued by modern inte­lectu­als.

Here you see on the right /fī/, on the left /fĭ/, a distinction gone in 1924:

And here you see, with which vowel the alif-waṣl has to be read ‒
something not shown in the KFE.
In Morocco they always show with which vowel one has to start (here twice fatḥa), IF one starts al­though the first letter is alif-waṣl, the linking alif, with is normaly silent.
In Persia and in Turkey one shows the vowel only after a pause, like here:

Both in the second and third line an alif waṣl comes after "laziM", a necessary pause, so there is a vowel sign between the usual waṣl and the alif ‒ a reading help missing in Gizeh 1924.

nūn quṭnī نون قطني nūn ṣila نون صلة

In Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim there are about fifty places
where alif waṣl followes tanwin
linked with kasra /ini/.
Asia writes a small(quṭnī) nūn.

Here a Persian last page (with wa- at the end of line 1 it can only be from a farsi­phone enviro­ment). After the first verse there is "la": no need to stop; if one stops, the first word of verse 2 has a hamza-fatha ‒ although the word is normally written with alif-waṣla. But WHEN/IF one joins, it becomes /ʾaḥaduni-llāh/ ‒ note the hamza-fatha on /ʾaḥadun/. Muḥammad Ṣadīq al-Minšāwī recites it both ways.

al-Wāqiʿa 2 / kāḏība

In Baqara 72 I showed that "Medina" makes undocumented changes to Būlāq52.

Here I show that Qaṭar made another change to Būlāq52 ‒ again without explanations.

The Iranian Center for Printing and Distributing the Qurʾān (Ṭabʿo Našr) developed a new rasm, a new orthography and new vowelled waṣl signs. After studying the literature on writing the muṣḥaf and 26 important maṣāḥif from different regions and different riwāyāt, they publish their results and their reasons.
In Indonesian there was a commitee of ʿulema from all over the country that deliberates 1974 to 1983 and fixed a standard, a second comittee revisted the standard in 2002, and a third from 2015 to 2018.