Turkey and Syria: Calligraphers

Both in Turkey, like Mehmet Özçay

by Muhammad (Mehmet) Abay

Hüseyin Kutlu:

and Hamit Aytaҫ

and in Syria there are great calligraphers, here al-Bārī

ʿUṯmān Ṭaha




Abū ʿUmar ʿUbaidah Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ al-Banki / ابو عمرعبيدة محمد صالح البنكي

Auf dem nächsen Bild außen Seiten aus dem Muṣḥaf al-Maktūm geschrieben von Ǧamāl al-Bustān aus Qunaitra, in der Mitte der für den Schiʿiten-Diwān von Hādī ad-Darāǧī -- außen fast in Schreibmaschinen-Stil, in der Mitte kalligraphischer als ʿUṯmān Ṭaha:

Efim A. Rezvan

I intended to para­phrase the good points and correct the bad ones in Efim A.Rezvan's "A History of Printed Edi­tions of the Qur’an" in The Oxford Handbook of QUR­’ANIC STU­DIES.
Unfortunate­ly the first part is about manu­scripts and other non-print matters.
The part about the St.Pe­ters­burg and Kazan Qurʾāns is fine ‒ but not new.
The section on prints after Kazan (pp 268-270) is all wrong, not worth a critique.

picture: https://mnaber.org/img/cache/thumbnail/pZEanzZW1ilzNgi4DQVqO0vo96q0wLpj1lIKFzY0

Best Sellers

The first best selling print was St.Petersburg-Kazan:

Next came "the Flügel" published 1834 in Leipzig by the publishing house Tauch­nitz, which pirated it in 1837 with an edition officially by Gustav Reds­lob, but basicly the Flügel without paying him: both were best­sellers but only among orienta­lists.
By that time, both in Iran and India print­ing maṣā­ḥif had began, but only after 1865 they were mass pro­duced, and afford­able.
Since they were even sold in the Ottoman empire, the ban against print­ing the scripture was lifted: So maṣāḥif written by Hafiz Osman and Muṣ­ṭafā Naẓīf Qadir­ġalī became best selling in Istanbul, Syria and Egypt.

here one of several MNQ from Tehran

The important editions by Muḫalla­lātī and al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād (HH) did not sell well ‒ the KFE at least not to Egyptians; they prefered the 522 pages written by Muṣ­ṭafā Naẓīf Qadir­ġalī ‒ now often in the reform /Andalu­sian/ HH ortho­graphy, but at least until 1967 in new editions in the original Ottoman spelling.
on the left from a 1981 MNQ Cairo edition on 522 pages, on the right the original:

a MZQ from Bairut

The top seller in Egypt was a line by line copy of the MNQ 522pager written by Muḥammad Saʿd Ibrā­hīm al-Ḥaddād famous under the name of the publisher: aš-Šamarlī.

What is mostly ignored: Šamarlī pub­lished MNQ in the new ortho­graphy even in the 1960s:

The government press, al-Amīriyya, tried to compete: in 1976 they produced a type set version with 15 lines on 525 pages. For more than a decade they made at least four differ­ent sizes: from small in flexibel plastic to Mosque size.

on the left from the pocket version 1977, on the right the normal one

the large Qaṭarī reprint 1988

Although the KFE was almost only sold to oritentalists, in the seventies many publisher "remade" it on there light tables (lay­out tables): the cut films they had made of the 12 liner and re­arranged them: either just more lines on a page as was first done around 1933 in the "muṣḥaf al-malik" al-maṭbʿa al-miṣiriyya (Muḥammad Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Laṭīf) printed in offset I assume:

die rechte Seite bekam immer einen Kustoden. Gelegentlich wurde eine Schmuckzeile ein gefügt, damit eine Sure auf einer neuen Seite anfangen kann.

Der Verleger hat zu seinem neu umbrochenen und neu gerahmten auch einen Tafsīr veröffentlicht:

Marwān Sowār, Damascus:

Dār aš-Šurūq:

or more and longer lines:

some editions with tafsir keep the original pages

other rearange the text

None of these were best sellers, but combined they spread the new spelling in spite of the KFE being extremely unpopular.

Now in the Arab world and Malay­sia ʿUṯmān Ṭaha versions dominate.
In India and Bangla Desh reprints of Tāj Comp. Ltd versions can be found every­where, while in Pakistan there is fierce competion.
In South Africa Taj's 848 pages 13liner dominates, al­though the latest version of WII (Waterval Islamic Insti­tute) is set in a UT like font.
­

one change made

while 2:264 was a mistake made inadvertent­ly in Cairo

on 56:2 Qaṭar made a conscious change

Because 55:2 is written without alif in Al-Mushaf Al-Sharif Attributed to Uthman Bin Affan in the Topkapı Palace published by Tayyar Altıkulaç (İSAM) who adviced the Qaṭāris they followed the old manuscript.

mistake corrected

A mistake made in Cairo in 1924 got corrected in Madina.
The typesetter in Būlāq made a mistake in 2:264.
ʿUṯmān Ṭaha copied it faith­fully.
It was first corrected in the UT pc set version of the State of Kuwait, printed in Khartum,
later in UT3 of the King Fahd Complex.
The hamza should not sit on the tooth.

UT1 UT2 UT3

UT1 was without the mistakes (corrected in PhotoShop), plus the dagger under hanza in 2:72, without the small sīn in 88:22, and with the taʾrīf ʿUṯmān Ṭaha had copied for them.
from the 1414 print

In 1420 they insert half a sentence

Instead of claiming to follow always Abū Daʾūd as al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād had done, they said: we follow him most of the time, some­times his teacher ad-Dānī, and sometimes "other experts." So, after having scrutinize the text and found out that the claim (always Abū Daʾūd Sulaimān Ibn Naǧāḥ) was wrong, they did not adapt the text to Abū Daʾūd's Muḫtaṣar at-Tabyīn li-Haǧāʾ at-Tan­zīl, but changed the taʿrīf.

One of the changes between UT1 and UT2 occurs in 2:72.
While UT0 has just a hamza, UT1 has a dagger under the hamza, UT2 an alif-hamza.
(top: UT0, last two UT2, in between 1404 to 1417: no change: UT1 is stable).


After the King Fahd Complex had printed millions of UT1 they invited ʿUṯmān Ṭaha to Madina to write for them a Warsh muṣḥaf, then an improved Ḥafṣ ‒ and later Qālūn, an other Warsh (this tome on 604 pages), ad-Dūrī and Šuʿba.
The new script is a bit more cursive, bigger (i.e. there is less empty space between lines) and has less letter variants. On the image below middle-hāʾ has three forms on the left, only one on the right, rāʾ (and zai) have two forms on the left, one on the right, tāʾ can have the two dots verticaly on the left, not on the right, and the two forms of final mīm are equally dis­tributed on the left, while on the right the short stroke to the left predominates.
On the page bellow, the page layout differs (with two more verses on the left), but, if I am not mis­taken, that occurs only in the last ǧuz: all in all minor changes.

The change from UT2 to UT3 brought:
headlines (sura titel boxes) never come at the bottom of a page,
rather as the head of the next;
end-of-aya-numbers never come at the beginning of a line
rather at the end of the line before;
taʿrīf and Index of Suras are bigger, take more pages.

And there is a dif­ference that is con­nected to one of MY observa­tions that is missed by most "ex­perts".
I say: Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Ḫalaf al-Ḥusainī al-Mālikī aṣ-Ṣaʿīdī al-Ḥaddād (1282/1865‒1357/ 22.1.1939) adopted many Anda­lusian/Maġ­ribī/Western things without mention­ing it in the post­script, which makes me think that he copied a Moroccon muṣḥaf.
One of the points: Ottoman Egypt, Persia, India and Nusantara have one kind of tanwīn (one an, one un, one in), but indepen­dant Egypt has three just as Morocco, but there is a problem. Ottomans did not know how sequential fathatan is written.
When one com­pares the Warš muṣḥaf and the early Ḥafṣ maṣā­ḥif by UT the sequential fathatan are different.









Because UT is not only a good scribe but also a good ob­server:
he noticed that the second fatha (the left one) is above the first in Morroco, but below in the KFE ‒ I assume that the type setter just used kasratans lifted up.

A couple of years ago Madina noticed the mis­take and asked UT to correct it, which is done in UT3:

Once alerted to this: the old fathatan (light blue background) looks wrong, the two fathas do not follow the natural way of writing from right to left.
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