Re: Mushaf Al-Haramain

[Mete Kural <metekural at yahoo dot com>]

OK so most probably Al-Shamarly printing house is a relatively new printing house. The government sponsored Bulaq printing house was founded in 1822 and was the first major printing house in the Arab world. They also printed the famous 1924 edition of the Qur'an which is also sometimes called King Fu'ad edition. So I think then Al-Shamarly copied from the 1924 Bulaq printing. When you look at the QuranComplex printing it is identical to the 1924 Bulaq printing. I suspect the same is true for Al-Shamarly printing. Then most likely the 1924 printing is the "mother" of all the thread of masahif that are identical to it including QuranComplex and Al-Shamarly. Well, of course this would be true if the Al-Shamarly printing is also identical to the QuranComplex printing. Is the Al-Shamarly printing identical to the QuranComplex printing "as far as rasm is concerned"?

Here's some background on Bulaq copied from IDC Publishers website (http://www.idcpublishers.com/?id=345):

The Bulaq press
 A government printing press was set up in Bulaq in 1822 to print manuals for the military, an official journal for the administration and textbooks for the new schools. This press produced books of a remarkably high quality. Besides technical and official publications, it printed many classics of Arabic literature for the first time. For example, the first complete edition of Arabian Nights was published in Bulaq in 1835. These editions are well known to scholars and can be found in the main libraries of the world. The technical manuals and scientific textbooks, however, are much harder to find. The books in this collection bear stickers showing that they were exhibited at the Great Universal Exhibition of 1851, for which the Crystal Palace was erected in London. Many of these books were left behind at the end of the Exhibition and eventually found their way to the SOAS Library. 

Remarkably high quality
The Bulaq press was the first printing house in the Arab world, apart from some Syrian monasteries that printed a handful of religious books in the first half of the eighteenth century, and the short-lived press taken to Egypt by Napoleon's forces. Its productions are of a remarkably high quality and the technical works have some fine drawings and plans. These rare titles will be of great interest to scholars of Arabic printing and book production. The titles concerned with military matters - nearly all of which are in Ottoman Turkish - will be of great interest to scholars specializing in Egyptian and Ottoman military history. 

Arabic renaissance
The technical and scientific works are mostly in Arabic. Great care was taken by the editors of the Bulaq productions in translating new concepts into Arabic for the first time. This was partly because of the esteem in which Arabic was held by Muslims as the language of the Koran, and partly because of the venerable tradition of grammatical study and the heritage of classical translations from Greek and Aramaic. This led to a concern with the purity of Arabic style, which was jealously watched over by the scholars of the world's oldest university, Al-Azhar in Cairo. The development of Arabic in its nineteenth-century renaissance is currently the subject of a great deal of scholarly interest. In his article 'Arabiyya in the second edition of The Encyclopaedia of Islam Hans Wehr wrote "even the works of early translators in Egypt already contain, side by side with numerous foreign words taken over indiscriminately, pure Arabic neologisms to express Western concepts." This collection makes widely available some excellent primary material to test this assertion. 

Thanks,
Mete

----- Original Message ----
From: Mohammed Yousif <mhdyousif at gmx dot net>
To: General Arabization Discussion <general at arabeyes dot org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 10:41:53 AM
Subject: Re: Mushaf Al-Haramain

On Tuesday 03 January 2006 20:29, Mete Kural wrote:
> Basically, I'm trying to understand whether the Al-Shamarly printing house
> actually printed the Qur'an before the - also Egyptian - Bulaq printing
> house printed the Qur'an. Bulaq printed the Qur'an in 1924, which the
> QuranComplex edition pretty much is identical with. Did Al-Shamarly print a
> Qur'an before 1924? As far as I know, the 1924 printing by Bulaq was the
> result of a substantial project sponsored by King Fu'ad to correct rasm
> errors that crept into Qur'an masahif during the Ottoman era and before to
> the original masahif rasm. As far as I observe they did not go all the way
> to correct all rasm errors and I don't know why they removed many alefs
> (and replaced them with small alef) but still left certain other alefs
> intact, even though they also do not exist in the oldest masahif. Anyways,
> I was just curious whether they copied some things from a previous printing
> by the Al-Shamarly printing house and that's why I asked whether
> Al-Shamarly printed  the Qur'an before 1924 or not? If so, can you send me
> some more scans from this first printing made by Al-Shamarly so that I can
> compare it with the Bulaq printing?
>

hmm, this is interesting.
I really don't know if Al-Shamarly did print the Qur'an before 1924 or not but
I highly doubt that. I don't think this house is that old (not sure though).
My copy from Al-Shamarly is "comparatively" new (dated to 1979 I think).
It was drawn by the popular calligrapher Mohammed Saad Ibrahim (Haddad). He
did that before Othman Taha (another popular calligrapher) drew the too
popular Madinah Mushaf that is printed now by the Qur'an Complex.



-- 
Mohammed Yousif
Egypt

"قال قائل منهم إني كان لي قرين. يقول أءنك لمن المصدقين. أءذا متنا وكنا تراباً 
وعظاماً أءنا لمدينون. قال هل أنتم مطلعون. فاطلع فرءاه في سواء الجحيم. قال
تالله إن كدت لتردين. ولولا نعمة ربي لكنت من المحضرين"  (من القرءان الكريم)

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