(partial) Assimilation

Two words from 2:8 according to five orthographic standards, all Ḥafṣ, all pronounced the same.

The top one (King Fuʾād Edition) and the bottom one (Ṭabʿo Našr, Iran) look similar, but are radically different -- because the Centre for Print and Distri­bution abolished the sukūn-sign: so in the bottom the nūn has an (unwritten) sukūn and the qāf has an unwritten long /ū/

-- just has the Turkish line just above).

In the top line the nūn has no sukūn, which means in that orthography: do not pronounce as /n/, but say /mai/.

The same phenomenon (partial assimilation) is written in Hind/Hindustan/India+Pakistan+BanglaDesh (third from below) and
Standar Indone­sia (2.-4. line)
by sukūn above the nūn (which means according to that orthography: NOT silent) plus šadda above the yāʾ (hence prounced at the end of the first AND the beginning of the second word: mai ya­qūl).





In Turkey



and Iran (complete and partial) as­si­mi­la­tion is not written.

The Pope, The Cairo Edition

Among Catholics one may speak of "the pope", among "normal" people   one SHOULD say "the Roman pope", "the pope of the Occident", "the bishop of Rome", because ‒ leaving meta­phorical use aside ‒ there are two more popes: the Coptic and the Greek "bishof of Alexan­dria and all Africa" in Cairo ((the bishops of Antiochia and All the Orient are not styled as pope)). What is common know­ledge among Egyptian Christians is un­known to many people in the States or in the UK.
Unlike popes, of which there are only three at a time, there are literaly thousand Cairo editions of the qurʾān. But some young scholars write of "The Cairo Edition". Out of ignorance or stu­pi­ti­ty? Maybe they do not know the dif­ference between "a" and "the" ... When I alerted one, s/he added "collo­quially known", an other just shrugged h*r/s shoulders, a third admitted that s/he has never looked into another muṣḥaf ‒ although as Pro­fessor of Isla­mic Stu­dies s/he should have been to a mosque and/or an islamic book­shop and opened a muṣ­ḥaf used by local Muslims (and they certainly do NOT use the KFE/King Fuʾād Edition = idiot's "CE"!)
Sometimes one sees "the St. Peters­burg edition of the Qurʾān". I do not know how many editions exist ‒ certainly not just one: First we know of edi­tions in 1787, 1789, 1790, 1793, 1796 and 1798. Copies of these six edi­tions have no year on the title page or in the back­matter ...

... so one could treat them as one: the 1787-98 Mollah Ismaʿīl ʿOsman St. Petersburg edition: Because there are more, like the 1316/1898 Muṣṭafā Naẓīf Qadirġalī St. Petersburg edition

Note the title: Kalām Qadīm
which does not refer to an antique shop, to antiquarian,
but to the pre-existence of the kalāmullāh ὁ λόγος

"THE St.Petersburg" edition is illogical. Only ignorant or stupid people use that expression. (Of course some are ignorant, stupid AND amoral.))

Giza 1924 ‒ better ‒ worse

The Egyptian Goverment Edition printed in Gizeh in 1924 was the first offset printed mushaf,
It was type set (not type printed).
It used smaller subset of the Amiriyya font not because the Amiriyya laked the techni­cal pos­sibi­lity for more elaborate ligatures,
((in 1881 when they printed a muṣḥaf for the first time,
  they used 900 different sorts, in 1906 they reduced it to about 400,
  which they used in the backmatter of the 1924 muṣḥaf,   in the qurʾānic text even less))
but to make the qurʾānic text easier to read for state school educated (wo-)men.

They did not want that the words "climb" at the end of the line for lack of space,
nor that some letter are above following letters.

It is elegant how the word con­tin­ues a­bo­ve to the right of the base­line waw, but it is against the ra­tio­nal mind of the 20th cen­tury: every­thing must be right to left!








The kind of elegance you have with "bi-ḥam­di rab­bi­ka" is not valued by modern inte­lectu­als.

Here you see on the right /fī/, on the left /fĭ/, a distinction gone in 1924:

And here you see, with which vowel the alif-waṣl has to be read ‒
something not shown in the KFE.
In Morocco they always show with which vowel one has to start (here twice fatḥa), IF one starts al­though the first letter is alif-waṣl, the linking alif, with is normaly silent.
In Persia and in Turkey one shows the vowel only after a pause, like here:

Both in the second and third line an alif waṣl comes after "laziM", a necessary pause, so there is a vowel sign between the usual waṣl and the alif ‒ a reading help missing in Gizeh 1924.

nūn quṭnī نون قطني nūn ṣila نون صلة

In Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim there are about fifty places
where alif waṣl followes tanwin
linked with kasra /ini/.
Asia writes a small(quṭnī) nūn.

Here a Persian last page (with wa- at the end of line 1 it can only be from a farsi­phone enviro­ment). After the first verse there is "la": no need to stop; if one stops, the first word of verse 2 has a hamza-fatha ‒ although the word is normally written with alif-waṣla. But WHEN/IF one joins, it becomes /ʾaḥaduni-llāh/ ‒ note the hamza-fatha on /ʾaḥadun/. Muḥammad Ṣadīq al-Minšāwī recites it both ways.

al-Wāqiʿa 2 / kāḏība

In Baqara 72 I showed that "Medina" makes undocumented changes to Būlāq52.

Here I show that Qaṭar made another change to Būlāq52 ‒ again without explanations.

The Iranian Center for Printing and Distributing the Qurʾān (Ṭabʿo Našr) developed a new rasm, a new orthography and new vowelled waṣl signs. After studying the literature on writing the muṣḥaf and 26 important maṣāḥif from different regions and different riwāyāt, they publish their results and their reasons.
In Indonesian there was a commitee of ʿulema from all over the country that deliberates 1974 to 1983 and fixed a standard, a second comittee revisted the standard in 2002, and a third from 2015 to 2018.

Morocco ... Muṣḥaf al-Muḥammadī

To commemorate Hassan II's silver jubilee and later Muhammads VI's accession to the throne the Kingdom published editions in magh­re­bian style ‒ both in colour and back&white. I looked in vain for information about the printing place.
This could be the reason the reserve::

The press wasn't in the Sherifian Kingdom, but in Cairo. Al-Muǧallad al-ʿArabi (often printers make up names for special occasions) was in charge.
But the third edition was home made ‒ in a press founded in Faḍāla (named Muham­media since 1959) after WWII and bought in the 1960ies by the Minstery for Reli­gious Affairs and Pious Foundations al-Maṭbaʿ al-Faḍāla.



While under Hassan II there was only one Royal Muṣḥaf (in cheap and in expen­sive editions) ‒ written by seven Moroccan calligraphers

there are new four different ones:
‒ one hand written, similar to his father's

‒ one computer set ‒ "andalusian", i.e. with green dots for hamzat,

‒ one computer set ‒ "moroccan"

and the same in an expensive edition:

and with reduced colours:

‒ one with images of wooden tablets from madrasas‒ printed 2007 in Graz, Austria.

Taj Compagny Ltd editions

The most important publisher of maṣāḥif world wide is the Taj Com­pagny Ltd.
It was founded 1929 in Lahore. They expanded to Bombay and Delhi. After partition the main office was in Karachi, later offices in Rawal­pindi and Dhakka were added. As you can see below Pesha­war was another pub­lishing place.
They published maṣāḥif with nine, ten, eleven, twelve, 13, 16, 17 and 18 lines. 848 pages with 13 lines of qurʾānic text plus 14 pages prayers and ex­plana­tion became the South African standard. Another muṣḥaf with 13 lines has 747+4 pages, an other one has 15 lines (611 ber­kenar pages) ...
They were reprinted from Kashgar to Johannis­burg,
the one on 611 pages with 15 lines was reprinded by many pub­lishers around the world, from Delhi to Medina (starting in 1989)
... 16 lines (both with 485 pages of q.text, and with 549 of q.text plus additional ten pages), with 17 lines per page (489+4 pages), 18 lines (486+3 pages), plus many bi­lin­gual editions.
Inside Pakistan they were copied in­directe­ly: Many publishers had calli­graphers rewrite editions with exactely the same page layout, line by line copied.
Philipp Buckmayr found in article by Mofakhkhar Hussain Khan published in Bangla Desh, stating that the maṣāḥif of Taj and of FerozSons, Lahore were calligraphed by ʿAbdur-Raḥmān Kilānī (1923-1995).

Although tremendious­ly influencial, they had no com­meri­cal success. Twice they went bankrupt. In 1980 and in 2004 "Taj Compagny Ltd" was refounded.

Besides systemic differences to the "African" way (long vowel signs, nūn quṭnī, no leading hamza sign but alif as hamza für /ʾā, ʾī, ʾū/, ḥizb = quarter juz <not half>) there are a couple of silent alifs in the "Asian" tradition (but even by one publisher not consistent, but all allowed):
For 5:29 and 7:103 I added early examples from Lucknow prints.

zwei Nachträge:
Philipp Bruckmayr verweist auf Mofakhkhar Hussain Khan (The Holy Qurʾān in South Asia: A Bio-Bibliographic Study of Translations of the Holy Qurʾān in 23 South Asian Languages, Dhaka, Bibi Akhtar Prakãšanî, 2001), dem zufolge Kilānī den 15Zeiler (und wohl auch andere) geschrieben habe. Da Khan nicht in Lahore wohnt, sondern in Ostbengalen, gebe ich das indirekt wieder. Ob es tatsächlich so ist, weuiß ich nicht.
Hier eine Schmuckausgabe:

these days:

­

al-Baqara 72

Many think that all King Fuʾād Editions are the same.
Idiots say: The Cairo Edition is The Cairo Edition.
Many think that the King Fahd Complex ("Madina") has only one Ḥafṣ edition by ʿUṯmān Ṭaha.
On the top right Gizeh24, left Būlāq52:
four different (new) pause signs, only two that stayed the same.
And look at the zai in ʿazīz (3:5 last line): the alternative (swash) form.
On the left, beneath Būlāq52 an early Damaszene ʿUṯmān Ṭaha (UT0):
all pause signs ‒ and the swash zai ‒ the same as 1952.
On the right below Gizeh24 UT1: changed by the King Fahd Complex.
Alternative/swash form is gone, pauses are different (all لا are gone).
In the third line UT2, the form ʿUṯmān Ṭaha wrote in this (Gregorian) century in Madina.

Nowhere the KFC has explained why and how they differ from Būlāq52.
For more changes between Madina editions of ʿUṯmān Ṭaha

the al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād rasm

The Gizeh 1924 print did not follow Abū Dāʾūd Sulaimān ibn Naǧāḥ's at-Tabyīn li-Hiǧā’ at-Tanzīl,
nor Abū ʿAmr ʿUṯmān Ibn Saʿīd ad-Dānī's al-Muqni‘ fī ma‘ri­fat marsūm Maṣā­ḥif ahl al-amṣār
or the choice/mix of the two by Muḥammad ibn Muḥam­mad al-Kharrāz.

After scrutinizing parts of the text, I guess that it mostly followed the common Maġribian rasm, i.e. only in about 150 words al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād al-Mālikī choose to write them differently.
Here is an example of a word, for which he choose the Eastern rasm, ad-Dānī's, Indian (& Indonesian), Persian.

The top line is from Hafiz ʿUṯmān the Elder (Büyük Hâfız
Osman Efendi): he has a dot­less yāʾ for /ā/.
His 200 years younger namesake HO Qayišzāde
(Kayışzade) has no letter for it,
nor has Muṣṭafā Naẓīf Qadir­ġalī (Mustafa Nazif Kadır­galı).
Modern Turkish editions strangely have a "normal" yāʾ.
computer set for the State Religious Office
hand written by Hüsyin Kutlu.
al-Muḫallalātī,
and Libyia (Qālūn) follow ad-Dānī.

The Tunisian Republic (Qālūn),
the late 19th century editions
    from Fās (Warš),

the 1931 Warš Alger edition,
the KFC ʿUT Warš edition,
all have an extra alif.
Since the KFE doesn't have it,
the ʿUṯmān Ṭaha editions do not have it either.
Nor do Indian edi­tions ‒ here the South African
print from the Waterval Islamic Institute.

Nor Indonesian.
But the Persian calli­grapher Nairizī (here from
the splendid 1965 Arya­Mehr print) has a dotless yāʾ.

For good measure,
five examples from
the Islamic Republik Iran.

As you can see in the middle of my examples, the transmission (Ḥafṣ, Warš, Qālūn) is independent of the spelling. In my German blog there is an other example (it gets bigger when you click it once -- as always in the Blogger).