Thread by @PhDniX

While translating al-Dānī's taysīr, I ran into a very funny name for Sūrat al-ʾIsrāʾ. While the name it has today in the Cairo Quran is rare in the past, Sūrat banī ʾIsrāʾīl being much more common, the name that Pretzl produced, سجن is one I had never heard of...

So I check Kandil's 2009 article which lists all the different names for the Sūrahs as mentioned in Medieval sources. There was no سجن there, but there was an obvious other candidate! subḥāna.

Hypothesizing that the scribe wrote this Sūrah name defectively سبحن rather than سبحان this can easily be explained, in Naskh script the distinction between the two is rather subtle.

I started looking in some of the manuscripts I have access to to confirm my suspicion.

Indeed, most manuscripts unambiguously have subḥān. And some of the manuscripts even have the hypothesized defective spelling. And funnily enough, the manuscript held in the Paris library (img 4) seems to actually have سجن! (slip of the pen, misreading on the scribe's part?)

Pretzl did not use the Paris Library manuscript, in fact I don't think he used a single one of the manuscripts that I have found digitizations for, but certainly a misreading of the very similar letters or one of these slips of the pen must have led him to this reading.

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