India 1837

The next years saw more typographical masahif, and the first printed in the principality of Avdadh/Oudh: in Kanpur.

That's the part that interests me, the Arabic part. But the readers/buyers were most intrested in the Persian part, or let's say in the whole page:

India 1831

The first qurʾān prints were made in the Calcutta area ‒ Hugli/Hooghli and Serampore lay a bit north, are part of the metropolitan area.
In 1831 a fine Arabic muṣḥaf was printed, good type, quality paper, and unlike the earlier and most later prints without (Persian/Urdu) translation nor commentary:

after the first pages, the last two:






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Shiraz 1830

lithography British Library

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India 1829-1880

For hundreds of years German Orientalists, German Islamologists ignored South Asian and Malay Islam ‒ even the Maghrib lay outside their interest.
Many German Islamologists had never seen an Indian, Indonesian, or Moroccan muṣ­ḥaf. When they wrote about Indian prints, they relied on lists made by Chau­vin (Bobzin) or claimed to have seen books in a library that has no such books (R. Schulze, Bonn univer­sity library).
The only early Indian maṣāḥif I had seen, were copies given by the great publisher Munshi Naval Kishore to Oxford Univer­sity Library and scanned by Google ‒ in the wrong order.
Now there are hundreds of early Indian prints held by the British Libray and scanned by Gale avail­able.
So here are some of these holdings.

this is the beginning of the qurʾān taken from a 1829 print with translation and commentary by Shah ʿAbdul Qadir, a younger son of Shah Waliullah Dihlavi called Mūẓiḥ al-Qurʾān

A Calcutta print of 1256/1840 is remarably similar:

from Sahib Alam (Egypt, Qatar)

Before I will show more early prints from India, let me give the global picture.
At the time maṣā­ḥif were printed in Kazan and Persia (Tehran 1829, Shiraz 1830 Tebriz 1832) ‒ see the next post
In Istanbul there were officially prints from 1875 on;
from Cairo we have prints from that period, a bit later (1879,'81,'91, '92,'93,'94, '95,'99, 1900 and 1905)
from Faz.



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minute things in Maghribian maṣāḥif

I wanted to post about signs used in Maghrebian maṣāḥif resp. in Medina maṣāḥif of readings used in the Maġrib (Warš and Qālūn). I decided instead to provide links to two pro­posals that contain the material: one by Professor Azzeddine Lazrek: Proposal to encode some Hamza Quranic marks and one by Roozbeh Pournader and Deborah Anderson: Arabic additions for Quranic orthographies ... and a third one by Khaled Hosny and Mostafa Jbire on thin nūn

Often I disagree often with the Unicode solution (encoding the same character twice with different shapes, encoding combined letters instead of combining marks), but the basic facts in these pro­posals are informative (esp. the images). That Lazrek's English is approxi­mative does not matter.

Pournader does not give verse and num­ber (sura and aya) of his ex­amples ‒ here it is XI:41 (Hūd) and that he gives his ma­ṣā­ḥif ap­pro­xi­ma­tive names, e.g. he calls the Muṣḥaf al-Mu­ʿa­lim (المصحف المعلم) by the editor Nous-Mêmes/Ham­bal (هنبعل) the "Tunis Qaloon" although there are at least ten Tunis Qa­loons on the market.
the best estab­lished the Muṣḥaf al-Jum­hu­riyya (edited during the reign of Ben ʿAlī), which one can find on the net (with­out page numbers, because one gets two pdf-pages for one book-page or a short sura).:

What archive.org calls "Muṣḥaf al-Jum­hu­riy­ya al-Tunisī" really is the edition by Nous-mêmes.

Pournader's "Tripoli Qaloon" is equally wrong. as Muṣḥaf al-Jamahariya /مصحف الجماهيرية from هـ1399/ 1989 is one of at least three Tripoli Q. You can down­load it from archive.org or here.



‒­ 25:49 ࣋ لنحيۦ لنحي

Braille

In 1951 a UNESCO conference defined Braille for Arabic. Soon Jordan (1954), Pakistan (1963), Egypt, Kuwait, Turkey, Saudi Arabia (1997) moved toward pro­ducing Braille maṣā­ḥif. N. Suit has seen several in Cairo with the text in two lines: one for the "letters" and one above for the "dia­critics". Since I have no informa­tion about it, I'll just write about the Indone­sian Al-Qur'an Mushaf Stan­dar Braille pro­duced in 2012/3, that puts every­thing in one line, basi­caly a sequence of con­son­nant and vowel sign.
The Doubling-Sign (šadda) is put before the letter, madda ‒ if used ‒ after the vowel sign.
A foun­da­tion for the blind (Yaketunis: Yayasan Kese­jah­te­raan Tuna­ne­tra Islam) and the Mini­stry for Reli­gious Affaires (Kemenag) made two basic decisons:
‒ to be faithful to the pro­nounci­ation (not to the "ʿUṯmānic writing")
‒ to divert some­times from Braille for Arabic or Malay in Arab script (Jawi).
So first: words that have /ā/ with­out alif (ṣalāt, kitāb, hayāt, ribā, maulāhu ...) are brail­li­zed as if they were written with alif. For رحمن this is not done, because Saudi scholars claim that it is for­bid­den.
The same is true for words with /ū/ but without a leng­thening waw in the rasm, where the Wester­ners/Anda­lusian/modern Arabs add a small waw, and the Easter­ners/Asians/In­di­ans&Co use a turned ḍamma. In Braille a normal waw is en­coded e.g. لَا يَسۡتَوُۥنَ or لَا يَسۡتَوٗنَ as لَا يَسۡتَوُونَ
That was true before 2020. I think now the turned ḍamma sign für /ū/ is used.
The Braille mushaf has Braille signs for many unpro­nounced letters like alif wiqāya after final wau, accu­sa­tive alif (after an-tanwīn) and most otiose alifs and waws, but not for otiose yā's (bi’aidin 51:47, bi’ayyikumu 68:6).
Although there is a Braille code for إ
it is not used in the Braille Qur'ān: just أ for all three vowels,
becauseit is not needed ← kasra ( ِ ) is obli­gatory.
Qurʾānic madd has a Braille sign, but was not used by all publishers. Now, there is a tendency to come closer to the written/type set maṣāḥif. The original decision to follow the sound is replaced by: to follow the rasm if it does not confuse to much. Today all signs used in a printed Indonesian muṣḥaf have a Braille equivalent, even nūn qutnī. Alif madd is used (as in normal Arabic) for /ʾā/)

While the first punched books were either just جزء عم Juz ʿAmma or com­prised several volumes, now­a­days there are tabletts that create touch­able text on the fly. This allows soft­ware to test new appro­ches, e.g. to de­fine Braille code for iẓḥar, idġām, iqlāb, iḫfa' Unlike printed maṣāḥif in with coloured letters, in Braille maṣāḥif a "read­ing sign" is placed bet­ween the chang­ing and the chang­ed letter.







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the edition on 848 pages with 13 lines

The Taj Company Ltd.

produced editions with nine, ten, eleven, twelve, 13, 16, 17 and 18 lines. Those on 611 pages (15 lines) and 848 pages (13 lines) are reprinted in India, Saudi-Arabia, China, South Africa, Bangla Desh ...

I admit: I do not have a Taj print with 13 lines but since Adrian Alan Brockett had copies of it and affirms that the 1398/1978 South African edition is based on it (STUDIES IN TWO TRANS­MIS­SIONS OF THE QUR'AN 1984, p22, 26, passim) I assume that he is right.
Water­val Islamic Institute (Johannisburg) made a second print in 1400/1980, a third in 1405/1985, a fourth in 1409/1989, a fifth in 1413/1993, a sixth in 1417/1996, a seventh in 1420/1999, a eighth in 1423/2003, a ninth in 1428/2007, a tenth in 1432/2011, an eleventh 1435/2014, a twelfth in 1437/2015, plus two more before they had one set in a font with the ʿUthman Ṭaha handwriting.

There is an edition cir­cula­ting in South Africa that is line identical to this Taj edition: written by (ʿAbdul-)Ḫalīq (al-)Asadī without Yāʾ Barī and the cut off tails of خ ح ج ع غ typi­cal for the Lahorī style. Unlike the Taj/Water­val Islamic Institute edition it has catch­words.
Nurul-Huda (South Africa) even uploaded a pdf of that mushaf to which it added the title page of Water­val Islamic Insti­tute.
Since 2022 there is a Water­val Islamic Institute edition that is page identi­cal but ‒ for­tunate­ly ‒ not line iden­tical: when­ever a line ended with "و/and" that letter was moved to the next line where it belongs according to the rules of Arabic ‒ once even to the next page.
This new edition is not an offset repro­duc­tion of a hand­written muṣ­ḥaf, but set on a computer ‒ and printed in India

on the left: Taj/WII. in the middle the new WII, on the right part of Ḫalīq Asadī

Nurul-Huda has made a font set muṣḥaf on 848 pages (the South African "norm") but it is not line iden­tical: when ever possible verses end in the last left cor­ner of the page. So, one of the SA publi­sher has made a print with a font that looks like ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (with moved waws) and an other pdfs in an "Paki­stani-like" font with slightly diffe­rent pages.

Unfortunaley Nurul-Huda places the long fatḥa after the upright hamza, not after it, as it does for lām: (/lā/ but /āʾ/).

Whereas South African do not understand that initial "alif" is a hamza, and that its vowel sign must sit above, below or after (never before), Indo­nesi­ans (and the King Fahd Complex) know it.

In the columns on the right (Pak Company/Dar us-Salam and King Fahd Complex) and the two on the left (from Indo­nesia) the vowel sign for /ā/, the up-right fatḥa, is always behind the hamza, the big alif. But in South Africa (the columns in the middle) often /āʾ/ is written for /ʾā/.
Here an other example of wrongly placed standing/turnded/long fatha

ʾauliyā'uhumu










not
ʾauliāy'uhumu




different, but with­out fault in the 16 liner by Dar­as-Salam, Uṯmān Ṭaja (Giza1924) and Indo­nesian:

While outside of Pakistan ‒ e.g. India and South Africa ‒ publisher just steal the Taj Ltd. muṣḥaf, in Pakistan itself other pub­lishers (like Pak Company, Qudrat­ullah, Gaba) have calli­graphers make line iden­ti­cal copies, so there are at least ten 13liners on paper and on the web, in black and white and with colours for tajwīd.

There is a luxury 848pp. edition by Tāj Kampanī Ltd. Lahore

I downloaded it from here

now the comparison between this edition without the frame with the original that was reprinted in South Africa: