he often takes what is said/written at face value.
E.g. he believes that already in 1912 the government wanted an new mushaf, that "the committee" started to work long before 1919.
Asma Hilal writes in her introduction/"Liminaire" to the journal the opposite, that King Fu'ad initiated the book in 1924
So he has to assume that the project got "forgotten"(oublié) and later revived (évoqué à nouveau),
As I see it, he overlooks three important points:
that Egypt declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire at the end of 1914 (after 300 years),
that the KFE was not a newly deviced written version as the Muḫallalati, but that the initiators wanted a non-Ottoman version (in a different spelling and not in high-court-nasḫ),
that the main objective of (modernists in the Ministry of Education like) Hifni Bey was an easily readable version:
baseline,
clear (positional) link between vowel sign and base letter,
space between words,
space between lines
I assume that the date of 12/13. January 1919 when the members of the commitee, the proof reader of the press and the Shaikh al-azhar signed is fictious, it is a couple of days before Hifni Bey died.
Aziz Hilal is better than his fellows because he puts the emergence of the muṣḥaf into a historical context
‒ the power struggle between king/the palace, parliament/the bourgeoisie (and azhar/the ʿulemaʾ) and
‒ the caliphal aspirations after the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate on 3.3.1924,
forgetting Egypt's having left the Ottoman Empire after the start of WWI
His most original discovery is, that the only discussion of the KFE is by a German, by Gotthelf Bergsträßer,
that Egyptian, Turkish, Arab, Indian, Indonesian and Persian ʿulemaʾ, politicans and intellectuals ignore it, or ‒ at least ‒ were silent and mute about it.
As important examples he cites
‒ the Diary/Journal by Muḥammad al-Aḥmadī al-Ẓawāhirī, Šaiḫ al-Azhar 1929‒1935
‒ al-Azhar by ʿUṯmān Tawfīq and ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Yūnus, 1946
‒ al-Muslimūn wa-l-Aqbāṭ fī iṭār al-ǧamāʿa al-waṭaniyya, by Ṭāriq al-Bišrī, 1981, 899pp.
None mentions the KFE at all.
Ali Akbar and Necmettin Gökkır informed the conference that in the Malay world nobody, in Turkey just some experts took note of the event in Egypt.
Omar Hamdan's article is almost useless.
His conlusion ‒ that the KFE does not closely follow the old mss, but either ad-Dānī/Abu Daʾud or a modern print (maybe the Muḫallalātī), was obvious before he started looking at it.
If he had compared the KFE with both the Muqniʿ and the Tanzīl, and with an Indian print, a Maġribī print and the Muḫallalātī (plus an Ottoman print) instead of only with mss., the paper would have been useful.
I assume that it would have shown that it follows most closely the Maġrib (indirctly Abu Daʾud Sulaimān Ibn Naǧāḥ).
some quotes from Azīz Hial's article:
Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl al-Ǧīzāwī (1874-1927), en poste entre 1917 et 1927
Signalons que son nom est mystérieusement remplacé par « ṣāḥib al-faḍīla, šayḫ ǧāmiʿ al-Azhar ». ‒ In the first small edition there is a seal: Muḥammad ʿAbu'l-faḍl
Dès 1912, le gouvernement égyptien comptait éditer un muṣḥaf qui dépasse en qualité et en précision celui de Riḍwān al-Muḫallalātī. no source given
La postface à la première édition date du 10 rabīʿ al-ṯānī 1337 (13 janvier 1919)
Pourquoi ne pas se contenter de reprendre le muṣḥaf de Riḍwān al-Muḫallalātī et le corriger ?
si la postface de ce muṣḥaf porte la date du 13 janvier 1919, pourquoi attendre le 10 juillet 1924 pour le publier ?
C’est dans ce contexte que le muṣḥaf, oublié depuis 1919, est à nouveau évoqué, afin de fournir un supplément de légitimité à la candidature du roi Fuʿād.
I disagree on most things. For me the date 13.1.1919 is fictious, it two week before Ḥifnī Bey's death. Ii is made to jonour him. And the date in al-Ḥaddāds seal is twi years later! Aziz Hilal assumes that the makes of the government muṣḥaf took a douzend years, I think, it took the one man who prepared the text (i.e. the written form ‒ the oral form being fixed for centuries) just a few weeks.
A major flaw in the author’s argument is the assumption that the 1924 royal muṣḥaf served—or was intended to serve—as “un instrument au service de la candidature du roi Fuʾād au califat”. The text asserts that “ce geste réhausserait le prestige du roi”, yet simultaneously concedes that the edition “est passée inaperçue” and that contemporary political events “l’ont reléguée au second plan”.
This creates a practical contradiction. A propagandistic instrument cannot have a legitimizing effect if no propaganda is actually carried out. There is no evidence that the edition was publicized, invoked, or even mentioned by any of the religious or political actors of the time. No Azhar scholar refers to it, no newspaper discusses it, and no caliphate congress cites it or distributes it. If the muṣḥaf was meant to strengthen Fuʾād’s candidacy, it is striking that none of the proponents of that candidacy ever used it.
The paper by Asma Hilali can be reduced to one sentence:
While in the 19th century, the Flügel edition served many Orientalists as text of reference,
now the text of the KFE, the Madina Mushaf (Ḥafṣ by the KFComplex) and the simplified text of tanzil.net serve as reference.
Here I have to congratulate. Three years ago, in the inviation to (her) conference, she had written
... l’édition du Coran du Caire ... est d’une importance capitale dans la société musulmane moderne et contemporaine ... L’édition du Caire met à disposition des musulmans ... une version du texte coranique qui deviendra progressivement la référence religieuse, liturgique ... la plus populaire dans le monde islamique. ... la popularité du Coran du Caire n’a jamais été remise en cause. ... un événement religieux s’adressant aux musulmans ... Ainsi, l’avènement du Coran du Caire a une portée qui dépasse la sphère de la croyance et qui prend sa place dans l’histoire de la civilisation islamique : histoire des institutions, histoire matérielle, histoire de la pensée religieuse et des études islamiques.All this bla-bla is gone. Al-ḥamdu-llāh
So one can't say that A.H. has learned NOTHING in the four years that she prepared the conference and journal nummer.
But although she thanks Alba Fedeli, Antoinette Ferrand and Dennis Halft for commenting and correcting her text,
she still gets most things about the KFE wrong,
and she lies: She writes that Ali Akbar had said that the KFE has no singular place, is just one among maṣāḥif from Singapore, Bombay, Lucknow and Istanbul.
During the conference Ali Akbar had said: There is no trace what so ever of the KFE. Maybe, students in Cairo or Mekka pilmgrims have brought a copy, but we do not know!
There are unbelievable statements by A.H.:
Although the KFE is important, because it is the first type set offset print of the qurʾān,
A.H. writes in the introduction of the journal that the KFE was both edited and calligraphed by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Rifāʿī,
who had nothing to do with it. It was edited by al-Ḥusainī al-Ḥaddād. It was set with about 300 of the 406 Arabic sorts designed by Muḥammad Ǧaʿfar Bey (m. 1916) ‒ stacked ligatures, and mīm without white in the middle
were used in the afterwords, but not in the qurʾānic text because Ḥifnī Bey Nāṣif wanted it to be clear = easily readable.
Is it that A.H. is stupid or is this the consequence of the fact that she has never held a copy in her hands, that the IDEO did not acquire one of the many copies on the market?
That she calls putting a number after each verse « versification » (instead of « numérotation » ) suggests the former.
She claims that there was a special Ǧamāl ʿAbd al-Nāṣir edition, which I doubt because she does not give the date of publication, and a King Fārūq Edition, which is definetly wrong.
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