The first offset‑printed
muṣḥaf appeared in 1342/1924.
It had been initiated after Egypt’s independence from the Sublime Porte by Muḥammad Ḥifnī Bey Nāṣif (1271/1855–1337/1919), director of the Arabic Department in the Ministry of Education نظارة المعارف .
The typesetting was carried out at the
Amīriyya Press المطبعة الأميرية in Būlāq,
and the printing took place at the
Survey of Egypt مصلحة المساحة in Giza, which possessed large offset presses for map production.
We have no reliable data on the size of the original print run. What can be said is that, a century later, fewer than a hundred copies can be traced in public catalogues and library holdings — the online catalogues currently show no surviving copy in Egypt. Since a second printing was produced in Giza the following year, the initial edition was probably well under one thousand.
Here images from the copies held by Columbia and by Kiel University from the second run.
It is no accident that the IDEO, when held a conference on the 1924 print, had not a single copy by the Amīrīya, just a book made by Muḥammad ʿAbdarRaḥmān called
muṣḥaf al-muʿalim with 15 lines per page (instead of the original 12)
(if you do not have an image of a KFE in your head,
click here
Unlike the
Muḫallalātī, the King Fuʾād Edition was not intended for scholars but for students.
It contained no tafsīr,
did not mention any verse‑counting systems other than the Kūfān,
and did not mark any readings other than that of Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim — which would have required colour printing or a refined system of marginal notes using established abbreviations.
In contrast to the traditional
madrasa setting, where students memorized the text with a šaiḫ and did not actually read from the page, the new state schools expected pupils to read in the printed
muṣḥaf; to make reading as easy as possible,
fewer than 300 of the 406 sorts designed for unvowelled Arabic by Muḥammad Ǧaʿfar Bey in 1906 were used: since lām‑mīm ligatures or lām‑ḥāʾ‑hāʾ ligatures, for example, were never employed, all vowel signs could be placed
exactly above (or below) the letter.
That the text was strictly linear, with no stacked ligatures — a layout familiar from novels and newspapers — and that each page contained only twelve lines, was intended to make it accessible to a “secular” reading public.
Here why it is the
King Fuʾād Edition: page alif – i.e. the first page
after an empty page 1 and 826 pages of qurʾānic text, and an other empty page – from 1924:
page alif, although no number is shown, but it is alif because three pages later is "dal" (د).
The KFE is not "The Cairo Edition" or "CE", because there are more than hundred different Cairo editions,
more than five Warš editions are really Cairo editions, some without Cairo being mentioned (many edition for Morocco), or even Algers given as publishing Place, others like Muḥammad Alī Ṣubaiḥ proudly mention Cairo
reproduced by N. Suit,
and those by al-Ḥalabi
Cairo Warš edition
In the period between the "World Wars" several publishers published Warš
maṣāḥif. Here some by
Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī.
Some prints are difficult to read. Princeton digitalisated their copy, assuming it was artistically valuable they made it available to the public:
BTW, there are 32 empty lines above sūra title boxes and ten on the bottom of pages:
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