[QURAN / KAZAN IMPRINT] Kalâm-i Sharîf. Muhammadjan Bashriga Ihya Sharîfjan b. Minhaj Al-Din Al-Karim

THE GLORIOUS QUR'AN, Dombrajski Printing House, Qazan & St. Petersburg, 1895.

Contemporary non-aesthetic cloth bdg. Wear and cracked on hinges, dusty stains on boards, fading and stains on some pages, overall a good copy. 4to. (27 x 19 cm). Title in Kazan-Tatar language, text in Arabic. 423, [1] p.

Exceedingly rare early quarto-sized Qur'an printed in Kazan, with "haraka" in usual typography peculiar to the Qazan imprints.

Marginal texts addressing variant readings (qirâ'ât), verse divisions, commentary on the text, and rare elucidation in Tatar and Arabic, concludes chapter (sûrah) headings alongside page numbers of their respective openings, as well as the table of errata.

"The Russian Emperor Paul gave permission for the printing in Qazan city of secular books in Tatar, in Arabic script, but the realization of this called for tireless efforts on the part of enlightened Tatars, with the support of the scholars of Qazan State University, whose publishing house relied financially on the income from Tatar editions. First Qur'an was printed in 1803 in Qazan in Tatar printing houses. In the year of the opening of the Qazan Public Library (1865), various presses in Qazan city printed 34 Tatar books. In the second half of the nineteenth century, 3.300 books were published in a total of 26,864,000 copies. In some years, as many as two million copies of Tatar books were printed. These were not only works of a religious-theological and folklore character, but also dictionaries, manuals for self-tuition, and grammar books of Tatar. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Kazan city was one of the most important centers of publishing in the world. The works of Tatar authors which were published in Qazan city in Arabic, Turkish and Farsi were distributed widely in Central Asia and could be found in India, Chinese Turkistan, Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, and the Near East." (Source: About Kazan online).

Three copies of "Kalam-i Sharif" printed in Qazan can be traced, however, this edition is not in WorldCat.