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of Arabic printing to several European
centers, both Catholic and Protestant,
with Leiden especially noteworthy.
Christian religious works predominated
– these to go Christian congregations
and missionaries in the Middle East –
but books of Arabic philology, history,
and geography appeared as well, to
satisfy the interest of European
Orientalists.
Helmut Bobzin devotes a
chapter to the printing of the Quran in
Arabic over the centuries. Here, too, the
story begins in Europe for printing in
Arabic was prohibited in Ottoman lands
by the opening of the sixteenth century,
out of concern for the accuracy and
beauty of the sacred text of the Quran.
The validity of this worry was borne out
by the error-ridden edition produced in
Venice in 1537/38, possibly with the
vain hope of selling them in Istanbul.
The 17 th century saw Arabic editions of
some Suras, published in Amsterdam
and Leiden, and then in the 1690s the
entire Quran was printed in two
editions, one at Hamburg, one at Padua.
They were prepared for learned
European Christians: the editor of the
Hamburg edition insisted in his preface
that Christian theologians must read the
Quran in the original; the editor of the
Padua edition included Latin
translations and a refutation. Neither
edition followed the distinctive spelling
of the Quran.
It was not until the late 18 th
century that a printed Quran was
produced for Muslim readers. Empress
Catherine the Great, having acquired
some Turkish territories in the Russo-
Turkish war, had a "Tatar and Arabic
typographic establishment" set up in St.
Petersburg to print decrees and school
books for her Muslim subjects. With
type designed by a Muslim and the
editorial work of Muslim scholars, a
Quran was published in 1786-87, with
text variants or readings in the margins.
Reprinted several times in Kazan, the
Saint Petersburg Quran was, says
Bobzin, a "bridge to the earliest Qurans
http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/
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printed in the Islamic Orient." Though
presses with movable type existed in
Dar al-Islam in the 18 th century, these
first Qurans, appearing in Teheran,
Shiraz, Tabriz, possibly Istanbul, and
three cities in India in the years 1828-34,
were all produced by lithography, a
process invented in 1798. This was true
of most if not all of the Qurans
published subsequently in Islamic lands,
for it allowed the reproduction of scribal
handwriting and other manuscript
features of the sacred book. Thus, the
edition published in Istanbul in 1871-72
drew upon the calligraphy of a
celebrated 17 th-century figure. The next
major step forward was the "Azhar
Quran" of 1924, sponsored by King
Fuad of Egypt and the result of
seventeen years of work by Islamic
scholars. Indicating the consonantal
spelling of the days of the Caliph
`Uthman and including everything
needed for the correct recitation, the
Azhar Quran provided an authoritative
text to which the many subsequent
editions in Islamic lands could refer.
Whatever the variation in size, format,
and ornamentation of these modern
editions, Bobzin notes, they are always
"based on a calligraphically designed text
which is reproduced either by
lithography or by photomechanical
processes." The printed book has the
appeal of the manuscript.
Roper and Glass then give a
valuable overview of books and
newspapers in the Arabic language
printed in the Arabic world through the
opening decades of the twentieth
century. The earliest examples are
religious works from Christian presses: a
Psalter printed in a Maronite Christian
monastery in Lebanon in 1610, and
several examples from Byzantine
Orthodox and Greek Catholic
communities in Ottoman Syria and
Lebanon in the eighteenth century.
Meanwhile in 1727 in Istanbul, a license
to print non-religious works was granted
by the sultan to Ibrahim Müteferriqa, a
convert to Islam of Hungarian origin.