another Bombay print (from Nederlands-Indië)

Here is another Bombay print (from Nederlands-Indië) from the collec­tion of the UvA, printed in 1882 in Bombay
Images from the UvA AllardPierson 1821 A23:


As Ali Akbar has spotted three more Bombay prints that made it to the islands in the Michael Abbott Collection of the State Library of Victoria, here a page printed in the Haidariyya:

iẓhār nūn sign in Bombay prints

In Western India (Bombay and Kerala) it was common to indicate places where vowelless nūn was fully pronounced.

not only after tanwīn, but withIN words, too:

Ali Akbar found this in Indonesia -- the last pages are missing, but he assumes it is a West Central Indian print (i.e. from around Bombay, not from the West Indies).

right pages starts in the middle of 15:66, left page with 15:80.

Here three dots do not stand for either-or-pause وقف التجاذب /المعانقة but for iẓhār. -- I have highlighted as well: assimilation after tanwīn and end-of-aya other than Kufan and the two dots under yāʾ, when it is prounced /ī/.

iẓhār nūn (& iqlāb mīm)

Marijn van Putten has discovered the iẓhār nūn
both after tanwīn:

and "normal" nūn sākin:

and even one example where the extra green nūn is misplaced ‒ suggesting that the colour signs were added in a second phase:

should have been like this

I'm a bit dis­appointed that van Putten has never seen or heard of iẓ­hār nūn, al­though I have pub­lished about it. I first dis­covered it in Bom­bay reprints from Indone­sia, but later both in Indian mss. and prints.

on Flügel, Vollers ­‒ Marijn van Putten again

Please skip this post.
It is not on print editions of the qurʾān.
Just on a twitter thread by a Leiden scholar, a brilli­ant linguist.

If you think: "typo, don't be so strict!"
van der Put published it a week ago, published it a second time un­changed in "Thread reader" and there are two years 1934 and 1950. In my view there are both wrong.

Anyhow, I am too young: For me Flügel's sorry effort was only laughing­stock. I am asto­nished that Marijn van Putten devotes time to it. On Twitter he calls "Flügel's well-inten­tioned mess ... Schlimm­besse­rung ... 'cor­recting' [the Arab texts that he finds in the mss.] in his print edition.
From what he writes it is obvious, that he is not aware that Bobzin wrote that the verse num­bers are not his, but those of Hinkel­mann.

And he ignores "Die Divergenzen zwischen dem Flügel- und dem Azhar-Koran" by Arne A. Ambros in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes Vol. 78 (1988), pp. 9-21

His ignorance is helpful. Other­wise, he would not have devoted a fresh ‒ an unnecessary ‒ look at the book.

What is even stranger:
He dismisses Karl Vollers' Volkssprache und Schriftsprache im alten Arabien (1906)
although Vollers comes to conclusions that resemble his in "The Language of the Uthmanic Codex"

I thought he is a bright linguist, who stupidly writes about things he does not under­stand. After this thread I know better.

Postscriptum
After he was alerted to the mistake, he tweeted "lol" ‒ by now deleted.
I do not believe that it was a typo, I am convinced that van der Put believed in what he wrote. Why?
Because almost everything he writes about printed copies is wrong.
In his thread on niʿmat allāh ‒ unlike the con­ference held in Berlin and the twitter thread, in his by now pub­lished article he is correct: "niʿmat allāh/rabbi-ka", some of his Grace of God-places are in fact Grace of your Lord-places -- he compares early manu­scripts which the Cairo Edition al­though here ALL standards (Maghrib, Gizeh24, Turkey, India, Indo­nesia) agree completely.
In his iǧtabā-hu-thread
he speaks of "modern print editions" al­though HERE there are two different standard groups: Africa vs. Asia. ‒ Each time he gets it wrong.
Like most Arabist/linguists he has not studied modern editions: he writes about a field he largely ignores. So, I take it that he did not know a thing about the Flügel edition.

But because his article is very important, I annotate it where it talks on modern editions.
van Putten writes "Sadeghi[(& Bergmann 2010] defines the Uthmanic text type as agree­ing with the text of the 1924 Cairo Edition of the Quran" (p.272) without giving a quote or the page. ‒ I can' find it.
Several times he mentions "the Sanaa palimpsest" when he means to say "the lower text of ..."
More serious:
"the Uthmanic text type have been accurate­ly trans­mitted up until the Cairo edition." (p. 280)
There has been no accurate trans­mission from century to century, from muṣḥaf to muṣḥaf, but the Cairo edition of 1924 claims to be a recon­struction on the basis of the literature on the rasm, the ḍabṭ ...
When you have a manuscript from the 8th century and a print from the 20th, you know nothing about trans­mission; for that you have to study mss. from the centuries between.

A last point, although I know that many find it niggling, but I love correct language.
"ā is written plene" (three times) ‒ words can be written plene, sounds are written.

semantically demanding

Why do I insist that speaking of "con-sonants" makes sense only, when one speaks of "sonants" = only if there are (self-)sounders,
sounds that only sound together with sounders, together-sounders/con-sonants exist.

I am a nominalist = I think most things do no exist in themselves, by themselves.
Speakers make them.
bois, forêt, Wald, Holz, Gehölz, Hain, grove, wood, woods, forest, jungle, taiga, maquis, Mischwald, Urwald, Holz­plantage
These words do not reflect things that exist in reality independent of speech, rather: words structure reality, they make us see what is there ...
... and sometimes what isn't.
Reizklima exists only in German,
And some Germans think: If we have a word for it, it must be there.
No, not at all. We can select real (!) things in a way that they correspond to a man-made concept.
As I see it, there is no homo­sexuality. The label is used for a hundred different things, but not for an entity that existed before someone described it.
As I see it, it is mind boggling to put female-female and male-male into one box. They are opposites.
Polar desert, sand desert, stone desert are not the same. Just as desert can mean unpopulated or arid or barren, homo­sexuality sometimes stands of an inborn trait in every human, for an inclination of some, for activity (or passivity) in others, for a pre­ference or a pos­sibility (when deprived of available sex with a member of an other sex), sometimes for a life­long exclusive character trait, sometimes for something that comes and goes and co­exists with its "opposite", characteristic or accidental. Some languages differen­tiate between fucker and fucked one, find it absurd to use one word for the robber and robbed one, for prison guard and inmate, con­sider "active prison­er/homo­sexual" and "passive prisoner/homo­sexual" as mad ‒ as mad as calling the victim of a crime "(passive) criminal."
BTW, in German we have Eiswüste instead of polar desert ‒ similar, but not the same.

"Sexuality" was coined somewhat before 1800 for reproduction involving different sexual organs = organisms having different repro­ductive roles = organisms capable of reproducing sexually, was applied to plants most of the time.
Hence the concept of one- or homo-sex is nonsense, by definition sexuality occurs only between different sexes.
all Roman Catholic monasteries are homosexual.
all German national soccer teams are homosexual.
The College of Cardinals is homo-sex-ual = the cardinals are all of the same sex.
I think one should be less abstract:
The College of Cardinals is male only
or: you have to be a man to become cardinal.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture produced outside the United States of America with a predominantly non-English dialogue track. oscar.org

flights can be inter-national, trade can be, telephone talks,
but not persons, books, songs. Once a Syrian told be: this song is international.
I contradicted. A fellow Syrian asked for a translation into Arabic.
In translation "inter-national" (بين دولي) became global (عالمي).
When I hear "international" on the radio, most of the time "foreign" or "global" is meant.
Weltliteratur is not "inter­national literature." Conferences, meetings, tournaments.

radical means "from the roots"/"toward the roots," not extremist.
Apo-calypse means un-cover, open, brought into the open, re-velation, Offen-barung, كشف
Doomsday, the last day, the end of the world is es-chalon.
That the most famous book of re­velation deals of the last days, is not reason to confuse the terms.
They have nothing in common.
Recently I read "as an audience I ..." and "as a minority I ..." or "In dieser Legisatur" when "as part of the audience," "as a member of a minoriy," "in dieser Legislaturperiode" is meant. f..k you! I hate it.
So it is not that I dislike the Amsterdam professor ‒ I do not know him, and a like him as an linguist ‒, I do not suffer wrong terminology.



an English bishop becomes a German Läufer, a French fou.
hüzün, Weltschmerz and saudade are not the same.
Of multiple origins. Partly a borrowing from French. Partly a borrowing from Latin. Etymons: French sexe; Latin sexus. Etymology: Middle French, French sexe the genitals (c1200 in Old French as sex ), gender, state of being male or female (c1230, 14th cent. as a social category, 1546 with reference to plants), sexuality, physical lovemaking, eroticism (1856) and its etymon classical Latin sexus (u- stem) state of being male or female, specific qualities associated with being male or female, males or females collectively, sexual organs, of uncertain origin (perhaps compare secāre to cut (see secant adj.), though the semantic connection is unclear). Compare Old Occitan sexe (1420), Catalan sexe (1515), Spanish sexo (first half of the 15th cent.), Portuguese sexo (1572), Italian sesso (14th cent.).
Latin had also a form secus , neuter (indeclinable).
With the third sex at sense 1b compare French troisième sexe (1817 with reference to masculine women, 1847 with reference to homosexuals).
With the weak sex at Phrases 1a compare post-classical Latin sexus fragilis (c1455 in a British source), Middle French, French sexe fragile (1546), also sexe foible (1601). With the fair sex at Phrases 1a compare French beau sexe (1646). With the better sex at Phrases 1c compare post-classical Latin sexus melior (a1200 in a British source).
With the in sense 3a after Middle French, French le sexe women, the female sex collectively (1580).
A number of compounds from various semantic fields have earlier equivalents formed with sexual adj. (e.g. sexual organ at sexual adj. 3a, sexual discrimination n. at sexual adj. and n. Compounds 1, sexual offence n. at sexual adj. and n. Compounds 2).
a. Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and many other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions; (hence) the members of these categories viewed as a group; the males or females of a particular species, esp. the human race, considered collectively. Occasionally with plural verb.
a 1896 J. A. Symonds Probl. in Mod. Ethics (new ed.) vi. 78 Burton..was led to surmise a crasis of the two sexes in persons subject to sexual inversion. Thus he came to speak of ‘the third sex’.
a 1720 P. Blair Bot. Ess. iv. 237 These being very evident Proofs of a necessity of two Sexes in Plants as well as in Animals.
a 1790 W. Smellie Philos. Nat. Hist. I. 245 There is not a notion more generally adopted, than that vegetables have the distinction of sexes.
a. The distinction between male and female, esp. in humans; this distinction as a social or cultural phenomenon, and its manifestations or consequences; (in later use esp.) relations and interactions between the sexes; sexual motives, instincts, desires, etc.
a 1924 J. Riviere et al. tr. S. Freud Coll. Papers II. xviii. 230 A very considerable measure of latent or unconscious homosexuality can be detected in all normal people
Joseph Bristow: Sexuality
Dip into the Oxford English Dictionary and you will see that the first recorded use of sexuality appears in 1836. The word turns up in an edition of the collected works of eighteenth-century English poet, William Cowper (1731-1800). Cowper’s editor notes that this eminent writer built his poem’ titled 'The Lives of Plants' upon their sexuality'. The OED suggests that in this editorial commentary sexuality means the quality of being sexual or having sex’. Yet ‘having sex’ in this particular instance refers primarily to botany. This example alone plainly shows that sexuality has not always belonged to an exclusively human domain.
A slightly later usage of sexuality may also strike us as a little surprising. The OED lists its third definition of the word in a quite familiar manner, as recognition of or preoccupation with what is sexual’. Yet here, too, the example employed to support this definition presents ‘what is sexual’ in an uncommon way. The example in question comes from the authorial Preface to Yeast: A Problem (1851), a polemical Condition-of-England novel by English writer, Charles Kingsley (1819—1875): 'Paradise and hell ... as grossly material as Mahomet’s, without the honest thorough-going sexuality, which you thought made his notion logical and consistent’. This sentence may well encourage us to ask why Kingsley should associate sexuality with argumentative rationality. Rarely, if ever, in the twentieth century has sex been thought to underpin the cognitive powers of the mind. To the contrary, some theorists are convinced that sexuality opposes rea­son because it exerts a hydraulic force which threatens to rise up and subvert the logical intellect.
If these two examples from the OED have any value, then it is to confirm that the contemporary perspectives from which we view sexuality have for the most part arisen in the past century — although there are one or two exceptions to the rule. The Supplement to the OED, for example, notes that the English poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772—1834) employed — the term bisexuality as early as 1804, in Aids to Reflection, where he
To Coleridge 1804 'bisexuality' evidently means containing both sexes in one body
Only by the 1890s had sexuality and its variant prefixed forms become associated with types of sexual person and kinds of erotic attraction.
J.R.Ackerley was asked after WWI: Are you a homo or a hetero?
Like are you Shi'i or Sunni, Protestant or Catholic, Beaujolais or Bordeaux, Catlover or Doglover, Callas or Tebaldi, Mercedes or BMW, Barca or Real

stupid genius II (the Cairo edition)

van Putten, a linguist, who knows nothing about printed maṣāḥif likes to write about this subject.
He starts a blog:

The most widely accepted qurʾanic text as we know it today, ultimately stems from the 1924 print published in Cairo, colloquially known as the Cairo Edition ... This print has become the de facto standard.

accepted by whom?
Not by the Muslims, just by orientalists ‒ and 50 years later (in a new form) by Arabs (not Turks, Indians, Indonesians).
Hythem Sidky tweeted that CE (Cairo Edition) was "immensely popular".
Actually, the 1924 King Fuʾād Edition (850 big pages, thick paper) was highly unpopular, although cheap for European scholars and the middle class, most Egyptians preferred and prefer cheaper editions on 522 (or 604) pages: first those written by Muṣṭafā Naẓīf ‒ by ten different Egyptian publishers till the 1950s, among them (in the new orthography) the Ministry of Interior.

Reading or listening to Cairo-Editions-narrators one gets the impression that before 1924 there was no text of the qurʾān, just a wild collection of quranic fragments that the wise Cairo committee put for the first time into a proper book.
Utter nonsense.
Above and below we have the Ottoman (!) version written by Muṣṭafā Naẓīf on the right and the adapted version in the 1924 orthography on the left.
For good measure I will add below the Indian version. All three are the same qurʾān. According to Bergsträßer the Indian is the best. And it is the most common. Only because most Orientalists are arabocentered, they ignore the majority of Muslims -- very strange when you consider how many Indians live in England, how many Turks live in Germany, how many Maghrebians live in France, Belgium, the Netherlands & Spain.


Let's go back to the nonsense the Dutch professor writes ("colloquially known as the Cairo Edition").
When I google "Cairo edition" I just get tweeds by the professor and unrelated things, like or this
When I google مصحف القاهرة or إصدار القاهرة no trace of the 1924 edition. المصحف الشريف لطبعة مصلحة المساحة المصرية is a proper name, مصحف 12 سطر another.
1924 did not bring a new text, just space between words.


There are two more reasons why it is stupid to call the King Fuʾād (12 line) edition "the Cairo edition":
the minor reason is: the books were printed in Gizeh, and it is the only muṣḥaf ever printed in Gizeh proper.
the major reason Is: there are more than thousand qurʾān edition published in Cairo.
To speak of "the Cairo edition" like stupid; it is like calling van Putten "the Dutchman" or any film made in North America "the Hollywood movie," or any French novel "the Paris novel." Or like calling Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini "the Ayatollah" although there are more than 5000 in the Iranian Republic alone -- unknown to many (like it is unknown to most younger Orientalists that there are more than a thousand different Cairo editions.

stupid genius (scriptio continua)

van Putten, a linguist, who knows nothing about printed maṣāḥif likes to write about this subject.
He tweeted that maṣāḥif had scriptio continua until print came:

as "printed" is when the turning point starts to happen; as has been pointed out expertly and often by @ThomasMiloNL, printed Qurans suddenly start to have word spacing ... to form of what handwritten Naskhi Qurans look like, before the technical limitations, and assumptions of printers intro­duced spaces into the Quran

He goes on:

And this is true for most Arabic fonts today.

I fail to understand, how one can be sooo stupid. That there is a space/spacium in a font, does not force anyone to use them. Actually, in most well-made fonts there are six different spaces: from zero width, to hair width, digit width to ... Pakistani coranologist advice to use the sixth space, with gives a traditional (con­tinuous) impression, without lacking some extra space.
van Putten gets everything wrong:
the change has nothing to do with print:
just look at the Indian, Ottoman, Qajar prints.
Not because of technical limitations ‒ as van Putten and Tom Milo write again and again ‒, but because after more and more young men had been to public schools and were used to read newspapers, reformers wanted to make reading the qurʾān easier, wanted to make the holy book accessible.
Therefore, they used few staggered liga­tures: instead of having to read from top-down AND from right to left, with the vowel signs placed in the right order but not always near "their" letters, almost all letters were on the baseline, the vowel signs exactly above or below.
Aḥmed Lakhḍar-Ghazāl wants them to the left because they are spoken after the consonant.
Putting a space between words was a deliberate choice, not technical necessity.

M. van der Putt likes to criticize famous scholars:

In "Qur'ans of the Umayyads", François Déroche makes multiple references to the idea that the use of "Scriptio Continua" is typical for early Qurans and especially typical of Qurans in the old Hijazi style. ... [Déroche] seems to imply that Arabic previously had the ability to express spaces, but that these were dropped in favour of scriptio continua; perhaps to be more like the Romans. There is nothing that suggests this is the case. Arabic had scriptio continua from the start.

Actually, Déroche mentions scriptio continua twice and never says what van der Putt says he implies: that the writers of Hijazi mss. imitated Greeks or Romans. His support on the subject is Werner Diem who links the Arab writing with the Nabateans, not the Romans. I fail to see that Déroche sees writing without wider white space between words than within words (after a non-joining letter) as characteristic for Ḥijazi only. Since there are no multiples references it is not very clear. van der Putt could be right, but that is far from clear.
Unsurpassed nonsense is "the ability to express spaces."
Of course, writers of Arabic are able to put space between words, but I doubt that they express spaces by doing so.
What the Dutch professor could mean: the ability to express word boundaries by increased space ‒ something completely different.
For that it would help to point out that space is not necessary, because ‒ similar to English capital letters signaling a name, a title or the beginning of a new sentence, Arabic has final letters signaling the end of a word.
((It is a capital mistake by Unicode to have decreed that Arabic has
  only 28 letters, 22 of which have four forms, the others two.
  Actually, Arabic has 28 normal (similar to lower case) letters
  plus 22 final letters (23 count­ing tāʾ marbūṭa separate­ly):
  The writer decides whether he ends the word with a final letter
  or adds a (pronominal) suffix (or a plural ending, whatever).
  While these (normal <‒> final) are different letters,
  the difference bet­ween end or isolate, between middle or initial
  is a (graphic) consequence of the preceding letter:
  not a decision by the writer but a function of the letter on the right of it.
  The Arab Typewriter

had the different letters.
Greek, Hebrew have distinct final letters (English, German s [≠ ſ]), just as English has capital letters, but Arabic is mis-encoded.))
And Arabic has an extra word separator.
Although stupid Marijn claims again and again that the Arabic writing system has only consonants, it has only letters (ḥurūf).
Some of the letters signal a vowel or a consonant, others always consonant(s).
And alif is used as end-of-word-mark:
after waw ‒ there is no final waw ‒ alif signals: end of word;
this was helpful because both alif and waw are often the first letter of a word unit (one letter particles like wa-, fa-, ta-, ka- form a graphic unit with the following word); by putting an extra alif after (otherwise) final waw   the border between the words runs between the two alifs, as there can not be two alifs within a word.
To make this clear: every language has con-sonants, but a writing system has con-sonants, once it has sonants/vowels. Greek had letters that WERE vowel-letter, so it has con-sonants, but Arabic has just letters, letters with can stand for consonants, some letters that (can) signal: end of word (or accusative or femininity).

no standard, but standarization

Although there is no umma-wide standard, there are several standards (to different degrees enforced).
Since about 1980 all qurʾāns printed in Turkey ‒ except very expensive fac­simile editions ‒ are identical line by line
‒ not just word by word. Berkenar manu­scripts had normally 604 pages of text (605 when one cover page is counted), twenty pages for a ǧuz, one page for the Fatiḥa, and three extra pages for the last ǧuz because of the many title boxes.
Each ǧuz started in the first line on the right,
each page ended with a verse end resp. the verse number in the bottom left corner,
but within a ǧuz the calligrapher was free.
Not so today. Even when an edition seems to be a reprint, many (helpful) directives and (waṣl-)signs are eliminated, other directives are added, vowel signs are moved nearer to "their" letters, short and long versions of words are moved until all lines in all Turkish maṣāḥif are identical.

The King Fahd Complex in Medina noticed that most Africans and non-Arab Asians do not like "their" ʿUṯmān Ṭaha edition.
Adrian Alan Brockett reports (p.27 of his PhD thesis) of a Taj copy produced after the inde­pen­dence of Bangla Desh in 1972 (Dhacca had been removed from the list were the publisher had offices), readily avail­able in London shops at the time of his research

The interesting feature is that it has a certi­ficate from the Saudi Deputy Mufti Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad Āl al-Šaiḫ, dated 19/11/1389 (28/1/1970). The reason for the certi­ficate was that a formal question had been addressed from the head of al-Maḥkama al-Kubrā in Jedda to Dār al-Iftāʾ con­cerning the copy's spelling la'aXntum (59:13) for the usual laʾantum لانتم.

The certificate is in the form of a reply:

We hereby inform you that although this [Taj] impression appears to be the only one with this extra alif, this does not bar it from being allowed to be dis­tributed. This is because the extra alif is to be taken as one of those present in the graphic form but not to be pro­nounced. Similar oc­currences are found, for instance, in la0'awḍaʿū [9:47 ولاوضعوا] and and awlaXʾaḏbaḥannahu [27:21 اولااذبحنه], which are written [according to a report from Malik cited from al-Muqniʿ of a1-Dānī] in the original way"

(nuḥīṭukum annah bil-muqārana bayn tab'at hāḏa l-muṣḥaf wa-ṭabaʿāt il-maṣā­ḥif il-uḫra ẓahar an ziyādat al-alif tan­farid bihā l-ṭabʿa al-maḏkūra wamin al-jāʾiz an takūn min qabīl il-kalimāt illatī zīdat fīhā l-alif rasman lā nuṭqan miṯl laʾawḍaʾū0, aw laʾaḏbaḥanna­hu waġai­rihā ... ʿala l-kataba il-ūlā. See al-Dānī, al-Muqni', pp.47.8ff., 100.3f., 148.14ff.; al-Muḥkam, pp.174.5f., 176.11ff.)

The complex did not commission a new muṣḥaf, but choose the 611 page ber­kenar one from Taj Com­pany Ltd and improved the placement of the straight alif when it stood before alif (or lām) instead behind.

When waw was separated from the rest of the script unit, they did not correct it.

But Bergsträßer said it was the best

No, no, no
Bergsträßer wrote: It's better than Flügel.
And he is right.
But he did not know a thing about printed maṣāḥif, had never seen a Moroccan one, nor an Indian, just a few Ottoman prints and one Persian.
On pages 11, 13 of his article in Der Islam he points out a few mistakes in the King Fuʾād edition:
two wrongly placed hamza,
too many big alifs denoting dual,
hamza on the line + alif instead of alif-hamza + long-fatḥa.
He does not mention that on all three points Indian maṣāḥif follow his ideas (or are much closer to his than the 1924 print).
The reason: he had never studied an Indian muṣḥaf.

For us the 1930 world Bergsträßer lived in, is hard to imagine.
Based in Munich   Berlin, Leiden, Paris were far away.
He made it to Istanbul and to Cairo
-- but Baghdaḍ was too far (or too British?).
Karachi, Lahore, Bombay or Delhi were outside his word.
In 2020 one would advise him to fly to London, spent a month in India Office,
but even today I observe that young scholars mistake the 20% of Islamdom between Cairo and Baghdad for the Muslim World.

no Standard

Many think that the Ḥafṣ version written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha and dis­tributed by the Saʿūdīs is the standard, because more such copies exist than others.
This is a misconception:
Turks who get one during the haǧǧ do not open it, give it away or put in a vitrine,
West Africans get a Warš copy written by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha,
Indians and most Asians (even Iranians) get a slightly improved copy of the Indo-Pakistani standard, known as the Taj Company Ltd. Standard
((the Saʿūdīs took the 611 page muṣḥaf ‒ earlier reprinted e.g. in Kašgār ‒ but paid attention that the standing fatḥa never precedes alif for /ʾā/ [not /āʾ/!]))

Maybe that the Saʿūdī copy according to the Egyptian govern­ment print of 1952 is the most printed, it is definitely not the most bought.
Muslims buy many more copies of the Indo-Pak version.
For a simple reason: there are five times as many Muslims hailing from the Indian sub­continent, from Indonesia and parts of Central Asia under Indian influence than Muslims from Egypt and the Arab Middle East.
But isn't the Egyptian text better?
First it is the Maghrebian rasm, with Maghrebian tanwīn signs,
with Maghrebian sukūn on (some) unpronounced letters and Indian ǧazm on un­vowelled letters,
with Egyptian ǧuz-/ḥizb-divisions, with a stream­lined Indian system of pause signs.
Second,
and more important:
The new "Arab" and the older "Indian" standard are of equal quality.
The Turkish is not as good because it notes /ā/ and /ī/ but not /ū/ when there is no ḥarf al-madd in the rasm and it ignores assimila­tion.
The Libyan Muṣḥaf ad-Dānī (originaly Muṣḥaf al-Jamāhiriyya) is better because its rasm follows ONE authority and not a (undeclared!!!!) mix.

To make a good muṣḥaf, isn't easy because
the text, the sense, the words and the gramma­tical structure have to be right,
the sound, the pronunciation, at-taǧwīd have to be right
but pronunciation changes slightly depending on where one pauses,
so the little signs around the rasm have to take different pauses into account,
and they must indicate the grammatical structure even at places
where the case endings are never pronounced.
Turkish and Iranian standards are not as good as Arab and Indian,
because they do ignore assimilation.
But the Egyptian/Saʿūdī standard is better than the Indian, is it not?
It is not.
Let's look at tanwīn:
Tanwīn is a short vowel /a,i,u/ plus a unvowelled nūn (fatḥa/kasra/ḍamma + nūn sākin)
So the pronunciation rule for tanwīn is the rule for nūn sākin:
("dan" is Malay for "and", "contoh" for "example")
Depending on the following letter EIGHT things happen to unvowelled nūn:
1.) fully pronounced, iẓhār إظهار before the letter h, ḥ, ḫ, ʾ, ʿ, ġ
8.) pronounced as mīm iqlāb يقلاب
4.) idġām kāmil bi-la-ġunna before rāʾ and lām:
the nūn is completely assimilated to the following letter, resulting in /rr/ resp. /ll/
3.) idġām kāmil bi-ġunna complete assimi­lation with nasaliza­tion before nūn and mīm
2.) idġām nāqiṣ bi-ġunna incomplete assimi­lation with nasali­zation before the glides yāʾ and wau
5.) iḫfāʾ suġra small reduction, not full articu­lated before k, q
6.) iḫfāʾ wusṭa medium reduction, reduced articu­lated before z, ḍ, ẓ, ḏ, ṯ, ṣ, s, š, ǧ, f
7.) iḫfāʾ kubra big reduction, weakly articu­lated before d, t, ṭ

In India, Indonesia, Turkey, Iran there is only one tanwīn sign for each of the three short vowels,
which is fine: the next letter makes clear, how the nūn has to be pro­nounced.
In Bombay (and other places in India and earlier in Indonesia) a small nūn is added after the tanwīn to stress iẓhār.
In Arabia there are not EIGHT different tanwīn signs, but three,
which does not really help: One still has to look to the next letter.
AND: For iqlāb there is no tanwīn sign encoded in the Unicode,
which leads to utter confusion:
In the digital data stream of the qurʾān tanwīn iqlāb is not encoded as tan­wīn. but as simple vowel sign!
So which is better?
Which should serve as Standard?

There are many sites in the web devoted to Islamic manu­scripts,
but only one devoted to both manuscripts and prints, Ali Akbar's Indonesian/Malay archipelago blog.
He gave me images from Indonesian "Bombay prints", always page 3, verses 5,6 of al-baqara:


The third spot I highlighted is an iqlāb mīm, common in all maṣāḥif, the first two iẓhār nūn, very rare ‒ why?

keinStandard XXII taǧwīd editions

A first impression: the beginning of al-Baqara from a Turkish online edition on the right
the same from a typical Indian edition on the left (plus one line from page 3 tucked in below the Turkish page),
three lines from the pioneer of taǧwīd editions; Dār al-Maʿrifa, Damascus
and at the bottom a line from Nous-mêmes-Édition (Tunis),
on the right a line each from two Indonesian
und Dar ar-Riyāḍa, Damascus.

Then the original edition by Dar al-Maʿrifa, then their clear edition with space between words, then the Dār ar-Riyāḍa, Damascus edition with arrows above.





finally from France, quite different:


Now in detail:


At first look: just different colours.
Really different systems.
Maybe some differences correlate with language.
Turks and Indians colour both "assimilating" letters the same way.
For them the letters assimilate each other.
Arabs colour the assimilated (passive) letter as silent.
Actually they to not see the assimilator as active, as annihilating the assimilated letter,
but the now-silent letter as having taken refuge under the assimilator,
as having become similar to it.
The important point is: the two letters function differently (hence different colour),
whereas Turks and Indians stress they having become similar.
I have to admit: I see it the Arab way: the first letter has (kind of) disappeared,
the second is doubled.


From Karbala:

Kein Standard Six, Before 1924

When you want to understand The French Revolu­tion, you should not start with Storming the Bastille, but with the economic, social and politi­cal situation in the decade before.

In order to understand the impor­tance of the King Fuʾād Edition,
we will have a look on the techni­cal side of book printing,
the science of "rasm and dabṭ",
the calligraphers writing maṣāḥif.

Let's start with debunking a statement made in the Muqad­dima which was a leaf­let put into the KFE.
In it it is stated that the govern­ment used to import foreign copies to be used in state schools, but that these often had to be distroyed because of mistakes. Around 1900 a sub­stantial num­bers had to be buried in the Nile.
I take it for a mysti­fication. Imports came from Bairut, Damas­cus or Istan­bul, all part of the Ottoman Empire, to which Egypt be­longed upto Novem­ber 1914.
I do not believe a story without exact year, numbers of copies confiscated and a list of mis­takes
‒ and who paid how much in com­pen­sa­tion to the owner of the books.

In the forty years before the KFE
several times the text of the qurʾān had been type printed in Būlāq:
both in Ottoman Style (eg. صِراط) with ḥarakāṭ
and bir-rasm al-ʿUṭmānī: as report­ed in Dānī's Muqniʿ, Ibn Naǧāḥ's Tabyīn or aš-Šāṭibī's ʿAqīla without ḥarakāt (صرط).
Local printers repro­duced Ottoman litho­gra­phies (written by Hâfız Osman (1642–1698), by Haǧǧ Ḥāfiẓ ʿUṯmān Ḫalīfa Qayiš­Zāde an-Nūrī al-Bur­durī d. 1894 or by Muṣṭafā Naẓīf Qadir­ġālī/ Kadir­ğali d. 1913 ‒ do not mix up with his fellow cal­li­grapher Mehmed Naẓīf, who died in the same year) ‒ both with taf­sīr and without.

That something is not the case,
is difficult to prove.
But I declare ‒ whatever others say: A 1833 Būlāq Muṣ­ḥaf does not exist!
Before 1873, in the Ottoman Empire it was for­bidden to print a muṣ­ḥaf.
(For an illegal one see here.)
Starting 1874 many have been printed in Istan­bul ‒ both by private and state presses.
Private printers (notably Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī) are said to have pro­duced litho­graph maṣā­ḥif in Cairo starting in the 1860s.
Because no exact years are given, and no name of the calli­graphers,
and because in the 1880s more copies of Istan­bul litho­graphs were printed in Cairo than local calli­gra­phers,
I doubt that there were many ‒ anony­mous ‒ Egyp­tian muṣḥaf writers before the 1880s.
The first Cairo litho­graph I have seen   is in the Azhar library (several copies there, one in Utah and at least one in Princeton)
In Michael W. Albin's article "Printing of the Qurʾān" in Brill's Ency­clo­pe­dia of the Quran
it is mentioned as two dif­ferent ones: one by the prin­ter Muḥammad Abū Zaid, and one [directed, edited] by Muḥammad Raḍwān [sic].
It is the 1308/1890 copy directed/edited by Abū ʿĪd Riḍ­wān ibn Muḥammad ibn Sulai­mān al-Muḫal­la­lātī ( ١٢٥٠هـ-١٣١١هـ / 1834-1893), written by ʿAbdel­ḫāliq al-Ḥaqqī Ibn al-Ḫo­ǧa/Ibn al-Ḫa­waǧa

Both in Istanbul

and Cairo
type set tafāṣīr with different spellings in the frame and at the margin were pub­lished
‒ in Būlāq the unvocalized rasm at the margin.

Both in large size for the use in Mosques,

gilded, with red as second colour for men of emi­nence,

and small for crafts­men and house­wives
litho­graphies written by the chief calli­grapher of the Otto­man Marine were pub­lished.
Founda­tions, Tombs of Holy Men were offered ex­pensive prints,
schools   sets of cheap ones.
Three of his maṣāḥif are re­pro­duced in other cities:
The one with 15 lines on 522 pages in Bairut, St. Peters­burg, Tehran, in Cairo by ten dif­ferent pub­li­shers ‒ as late as 1954 in the original Ottoman spelling by ʿAlī Yūsuf Sulai­mān 1956
sometimes by the minstery of the Interior in the 1924 spelling,
the one with 15 lines on 604 pages in Tehran and Ger­many with red as ad­di­tional colour,
in Nusan­tara in black and white (en­riched with the {Indian} sign for /ū/,
the one with 17 lines on 486 pages in Damas­cus and by Turks in Ger­many.
Sometimes with tafsīr at the margins.
Sometimes with a different ortho­gra­phy.
Until today the version written by Muḥammad Saʿd al-Ḥaddād for aš-Šamarlī ‒ in style very similar to Muṣṭafā Naẓīf and line by line iden­tical to the 522 page ver­sion is very popular ‒ a thousand times more popular than the Amiriyya prints, whose 855 page edition was never bought by normal Egyp­tians: it is no co­in­ci­dence that the only copies of the ori­ginal Giza prints sur­vive in Orienta­lists libra­ries and studies.

In the 1960s aš-Šamarli had pub­lished the origi­nal by MNQ in the Q52 ortho­graphy (see on the left), but from 1977 he sold al-Ḥaddād in dif­ferent sizes, hard­cover, plastic and soft;
on the right the ori­ginal in Ottoman spelling;
Here a Bairūt edition in Q52 with explana­tions of words on the margin: Here the Ottoman original published by Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalābī before MNQ had died (1913)  

The 815 page muṣḥaf by Hafiz Osman (1642-98) was printed in Cairo with one of the bigger Tafsir around, in Syria it was till about 1960 the muṣ­ḥaf
 

Here pages 2 + 3 from the Cairo print (without the commen­tary)

At least until islamist Qaṭar supplied islamist forces in Syria with arms and money thus starting a bitter "civil" war, in Aleppo "Otto­man" parts of the Qurʾān were printed:

and until 1990 in al-ʿIrāq two Ottoman maṣāḥif were printed by the state.
in the Turkish Republic only expensive fac­si­miles re­produce old manu­scripts,
"reprints" for believers are heavily edited.

In 1370/1951 the ʿIrāqi Dīwān al-ʾAuqāf had it printed under the super­vision of Naǧm­addīn al-Wāʾiz with Kufi numbers after each verse and sura title boxes written by Hāšim Muḥammad al-Ḫaṭṭāt al-Baġdādī,
1386/1966 for the ʿirāqī state by Lohse in Frank­furt/Main,
1398/1978 for the su­ʿūdī govern­ment in West Germany,
1400/1979 in Qaṭar, 1401/1981 for Ṣaddām.
In 1236 Muḥam­mad Amīn ar-Rušdī had written the original muṣḥāf. In 1278 ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz's mother offered it to the tomb of Junaid in Baghdād. Today it is kept in the library of the tomb of Abu Ḥanīfa.
Whereas in the manuscript ‒ as I guess ‒ waṣl-sign were only on alifs before sun-letters, in the ʿIrāqi print most initial alifs have one, which leads to the annomaly that some­times an alif has both "waṣl" under­neath and a waṣl-sign above.

After every tenth verse a yāʾ (in the abjad system: ten) hovers before the number (see above); what was help­ful in the ori­ginal manu­script that had only end-of-verse-markers, is kind of ridi­culous in the printed edi­tion.

Of interest as well: "bi-yāʾ wāhida" under riyyīn in 5:111, which in another Ottoman muṣḥaf is written yāʾ + šadda + turned kasra + yāʾ and in the mordern Turkish ones with one yāʾ and in Q24 with a normal yāʾ plus a high small one. Brock­ett studied in Edin­burgh an Ottoman Manu­script from 1800, in which under 41:47 bi-ʾaidin   bi-yāʾain is written. How-to-write-notes were common (in the same Ms. in 43:3 under a hamza-letter "bi-ġair alif" is written.
The Dīwān al-auqāf pub­lished ‒ with similar front and back matter ‒ re­prints by Ḥafiz ʿUṯmān and Ḥasan Riḍā. 
on the right the cover of the M.A. ar-Rušdī edition, in the middle Ḥasan Riḍā, on the left the editor. ‒ After the US-inter­vention there are two autho­rities: Dīwān al-waqf as-sunnī and ... aš-šiʿī, both pub­lished maṣā­ḥif on 604 pages: the Sunni took the text from KFC (UT1, cf Kein Standard), the Ši'i had the ʿirāqī Calli­grapher, Hādī ad-Darāǧī, write it.  
In anearlier post (and above) I retold the history of the manu­script and its prints.
Except for the back­matter and the di­vision into aḥzāb they are all the same: al-Wāʾiz's edition



Recently I learned that in 1415/1994 an Iranian reprint was made ‒ not based on the manu­script but on the ʿirāqī version.
While the ihmal-sign were deleted already in 1370/1951, forty years later other "con­fusing" stuff had to go:
‒ high yāʾ barī for every tenth verse,
‒ the differentiation between leading alif followed by a ḥarf sākin and others ‒ now ALL alifs-waṣl have a waṣl-sign (head of صـ)
‒ signs for pauses or vowels are placed nearer to "their" base letter
‒ sometimes the space between words is enlarged, a swash nūn replaced by a normal one
‒ a normal ḍamma-sign was replaced by a turned one, where it is pronouinced ū (due to rules of prosody)
‒ Mūsā gets a long-fatḥa,



Is there someone who has images of the manuscript?
on the right the first "normal" page of Muḥ. ʾAmīn ar-Rušdī's muṣḥaf, on the left: Ḥasan Riḍā:
 

Remarkable below:
‒ in lignes 3,5,6,7,9: the boundary between words is between alifs
‒ in lign 2: before (10) a small high yāʾ, which in the manucrpt was needed to signal: 10
‒ some Ihmal-signs below letter signalling: without dot