India 1868

This Arabic only muṣḥaf was the cheapest printed so far: 1 1/2 Rs. the price of 30 ser of split lentils or 24 ser of milk according to Ulrike Stark, The Empire of books. p.68f.
1 ser = 870 gr = 28 oz

India 1879

Again with the translation by Shah ‘Abd al-Wahhāb Rafi ad-Din ad-Dihlawī (1749‒1818) completed in 1776:

India 1867

a smaller format, published in Lucknow:

India 1866

1866 brings us two excellent specimen, one with two translations plus tafsīr,

one without translation ‒ just explanations on the margins; its design connects between Culcutta 1838 and the later Naval Kishore Press (NKP) maṣāḥif.

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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India 1840

In 1840 a lithography, a muṣḥaf with a translation was published in Lucknow with the title سب تعريف واسطى الله كي ثابت هي كه پالنی والا عالمونكا
759 pages

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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