Thread by @PhDniX

In 1934 Gustav Leberecht Flügel published a print Qurʾān edition which from that point onwards until well into the 1950s became the go-to print edition used by western scholars of the Quran.

So how does this European Quran related to Qurans from the Muslim world? Thread:

One question we may ask: What reading tradition does it represent? At the time it was printed the same reading traditions that were dominant today were probably already dominant: Ḥafṣ ʿan ʿĀṣim in the Ottoman empire and Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ in the Maghreb.

Based on general principles it looks like Ḥafṣ. The representation of the hamzah is conservative; the way the pronouns work does not follow the principles of Warš.

However, if we look at the specific variants of the Flügel Quran we see something very strange.

I've taken a list of readings that are unique to Ḥafṣ, if the Flügel Quran is a representation of Ḥafṣ, we would expect it to have all of these; if it is another canonical reading, we would expect to have none of these.

So let's have a look:

Q3:57 Ḥafṣ yuwaffī-him; R: nuwaffī-him; Flügel = Ḥafṣ
Q3:83 Ḥ yurǧaʿūna; R: turǧaʿūna/yarǧiʿūna; F = Ḥ
Q3:157 Ḥ yaǧmaʿūna; R: taǧmaʿūna; F = Ḥ
Q5:107 Ḥ istaḥaqqa; R: ustuḥiqqa; F= Ḥ

Q7:105 Ḥ maʿiya R: maʿī; F = Ḥ
Q7:117 Ḥ talqafu R: talaqqafu; F = Ḥ
Q7:164 Ḥ maʿḏiratan R: maʿḏiratun; F= Ḥ
Q18:18 Ḥ mūhinu kaydi R: muwahhinun kayda; F= Ḥ

Q10:23 Ḥ matāʿa R: matāʿu; F= Ḥ
Q10:45 Ḥ yaḥšuru-hum; R naḥšuru-hum; F= Ḥ
Q11:40 Ḥ kullin; R kulli; F= Ḥ
Q12:5 Ḥ yā-bunayya; R yā-bunayyi; F= H

The list of agreements with Ḥafṣ goes on, so the manuscript seems to reflect a the Ḥafṣ reading.

But then many other unique readings to Ḥafṣ are *not* adhered to:
Q4:152 Ḥ yuʾtī-him; R: nuʾtī-him; F= nuʾtī-him
Q11:41 Ḥ maǧrē-hā; R: muǧrā/ē-hā; F = maǧrā-hā
Q18:63 Ḥ ʾansānī-hu; R: ʾansā/ē-nī-hi; F = ʾansānī-hi
Q112:4 Ḥ kufuwan; R: kuf(u)ʾan; F =kufuʾan

Most variants that don't align with Ḥafṣ seem to be cases where Ḥafṣ has an isolated reading in only one place that pertains to phonetic differences. Flügel appears to have "corrected" these, but Q4:152 shows that he even opted for non-Ḥafṣ semantically different forms.

As a result, the Flügel Quran ended up with a reading that falls outside of the 10 canonical readings, and would not be considered acceptable for public recitation! But for a century years it was the standard reference work for European academics.

Another issue many who work with older academic sources will know, is that the Flügel verse count is... rather bizarre. He marks the verse at the start of a verse rather than at the end, breaking with Muslim tradition, but he seems to have not have known where the divisions were.

This is rather mysterious. He lists the total number of verses at the beginning of Sūrahs, and those align with the Kufan verse count, but where the verse divisions actually fall do not at all.
Compare for example the opening of Q5 between the Flügel and Cairo Quran.

Flügel does often break at places where Qurans traditionally have (optional) pauses that don't count as verse breaks. One gets the impression that the copy he was working from did not mark these separately, or he did not understand the difference.

The Flügel Quran is as a result a uniquely European object. The forms does not adhere to any traditional reading tradition or verse count; both features that are meticulously recorded and strictly adhered to in Muslims literary sources.

This confused "qirāʾat Flügel" also explains why Karl Vollers in 1906 in his book "Volkssprache und Schriftsprache im alten Arabien" thought that all the readings reported in the sources were 'non-standard' (for which he was heavily criticized by Nöldeke):

He noticed that no reading reported aligned with the one Quran he had ready access to the Flügel Quran. He wasn't wrong that the language of the Quran had been corrected to Classical Standards. But it wasn't the Arab grammarians but a German orientalist that "corrected" Ḥafṣ.

I hope that the ERC project EuQu (European Qur'an) will be able to shed light in the future into questions how the Flügel Quran, and other European versions of the text came to get their form.
euqu.eu
@JohnVTolan @jan_loop

Someone pointed out a really silly typo at the beginning of this thread. The Flügel Quran is fro? *18*34. Hope you weren't too confused!