The Manazil and Moorish popular Islam

Historically, the Arabic-language printing is complicated by the fact that it's a cursive-only script, which requires a larger range of letters because there needs to be initial, medial, final, and isolated versions of almost all. IRL, this was only made harder by the fact that in the Ottoman Empire the printing presses were run by Christians (and often Catholic foreigners rather than the domestic Greeks), who adopted as their standard typeface a script of Arabic that Muslims generally didn't use.

(This Catholic influence, incidentally, was also part of the crisis that gave rise to the Uniate church; the early Ottoman printing industry was Jesuit, and for a solid century after the fall of Constantinople the autonomous churches under it had basically no printed literature at a time when their Catholic neighbors had tons of it. The Russians responded, at least in part, by transferring the seat of the church from Kiev to Muscovy, and eventually pressuring the Ecumenical Patriarch to grant them autocephaly; the same events gave rise, in lands under the Polish-Lithuanian orbit, to the church transferring its loyalties from the Patriarch to the Pope in the interest of securing equal status with their Roman hegemons.)

The biggest issue was that the publication of the Qur'an was frowned on very, very hard. In Western Europe, the publication of the Bible (even outside the vernacular) was enormously financially successful in early modernity, which basically doomed the age of manuscript and the assumptions of manuscript culture.
But what's true of the Ottoman Empire (or whatever the Turks are in Andalusada, because the Ottomans are not foreordained) isn't necessarily true of the Moors, who after all develop their own civilization by the time they start establishing trans-Atlantic colonies.

So how does the printed Qur'an work? I have some tentative thoughts.

The obligatory legal loophole

By the time the printing press reaches Spain, the Moorish world (by then under the reign of the Five Families) is going to be going on its own civilizational path, spinning progressively outside the orbit of what we consider to be "the Muslim world" as it's shaped by a totally different set of experiences and influences.

That doesn't mean they're going to be any more okay with publishing the Qur'an than the Turks were IRL. There's a big scribal industry that stands to lose a lot by this transfer, and there's a lot of adjustments that were required to transition from manuscript to print: typeface, for one - which may involve resurrecting or creating a new, Maghrebi-specific, way of writing the Arabic language.

But this much is foreordained: the Five Families eventually conclude that there's no law against publishing parts of the Qur'an as long as it isn't complete. Once that concession is made, the rest of it falls into place.

The Manazil as the golden mean of printing

The Qur'an comes in 114 suras, composed of varying number of ayas each, but there's no preordained way to divide it further than that. IRL, the Muslim world today tends to focus on the juz', each 1/30th of the whole (part of the idea being that by reciting a juz' a night you can recite the entire Qur'an over the course of a single Ramadan.)

There is, however, a somewhat larger format: the manzil, partitioned into sevenths, designed for reciting over the course of a single week. In the Moorish world, the Manazil are seized on as the perfect format for publishing the Qur'an, for a bunch of reasons:

• The manazil are long enough to break neatly between suras. By contrast, the ajza' don't; while juz' Amma' may neatly contain suras 78-114, for instance, al-Baqara would stretch across three volumes. From a presentation standpoint, manazil simply look tidier.
• Because the manazil are longer, there are fewer of them that need to be published, establishing an economy of scale. (Ajza' are smaller, which lends itself to smaller book sizes in the interest of saving on paper and, more importantly, binding materials; that allows for a great deal of diversity in how they're laid out, though. Manazil, again, simply look tidier.)
• There are seven manazil and thirty ajza'. In an age when a lot of larger works, especially multi-volume works, were by subscription, a seven-volume work is simply more likely to be published without incident than a 30-volume one. (The lower individual costs of volumes would allow more people to subscribe; but it'd also require them to subscribe over a much longer time to allow for setup and takedown of the plates, which is a recipe for canceled subscriptions, price volatility and such - especially given that the bottom falls out from the gold standard during the Five Families era.)

There is, doubtless, some fascinating stories about how the Manazil won out as the standard printed format of the Qur'an, and the publishing wars that lead to it; but that's for another day and another post.

The impact of the Manazil

Christianity is pretty much unique amongst the world religions for its willingness to translate its scripture, and its assumption that translations can be as valid as the original; it's as remarkable for a Christian to speak any of the classical languages of Scripture as it is for a Muslim to not speak any Qur'anic Arabic (even if the Muslim in question may be reciting and not know enough grammar to form a sentence on their own.) The Islamic world may have huge controversies over religious scholarship, but it has no parallel to the violence that's erupted over, for instance, the Luther Bible or the 1611 KJV.

Part of what sets the Moorish world apart from their Turkish-dominated counterparts out east is that, in a way, the Manazil becomes a format of the Qur'an distinct from the Qur'an itself. Unique in all the umma, it becomes the KJV, if not in fact then certainly in popular consciousness.

• The Manazil, first and foremost, messes up the manuscript market. The price of the Qur'an spikes, simply because the only way that scribes can stay in business against the Manazil is to produce the one thing that the printers can't: all 114 suras between a single pair of covers. (One notable advantage of the Qur'an al-Karim is that it's significantly more portable.)
• The published Manazil splits the Muslim world over ahruf. IRL, the world standard harf is the Hafs recension of 'Asim; by contrast, the Manazil will become the Moorish standard, and it uses whatever the publishers decide to use. Given the geographic distribution of the qira'at, I'm going to guess that it's one or another recension of the Nafi' harf (probably Qalun, although I could be wrong) - and with a much wider distribution, the Nafi' is the reading that acquires the trans-Atlantic empire, where entire generations of Muslims will grow up unexposed to any other.
• Related to the above, the Manazil also skews Western European ideas of Islam a bit, because it's the version they're going to turn to first. While they're more familiar with Islam than they would be IRL, it's a very specific subset of Islam that they're familiar with, which will make the (perfectly normal) diversity of the Muslim world even more staggering to your average globetrotting Firanj. (This helps the othering of the rest of the Islamic world.)
• The Manazil establishes a class-linked style of tafsir in the Moorish world. The wealthy and institutional, who are able to afford manuscripts, will continue to emphasize the oneness and unity of the Qur'an, as the Muslim world always has. The readership of the Manazil, by contrast, will develop something different: a sense of not only its disunity, but its heptality. Seven-volume format lends itself to certain obvious topics of study - like "What's the theme of the suras in this manzil, as compared to the other six?" - that aren't part of popular consciousness in the umma IRL.
• This sense of Qur'anic heptality will, once it becomes entrenched, become a distinctive of the Maghrib against the Sharq. The sort of thing that the Sheikh ul-Islam in Konstantiniyye can takfir and condemn as the most harmful sort of bid'a, and that dissident intellectuals may seize on in the quest to pull the more languishing parts of the umma back up to glory again.

At this point, dear reader, I have nothing more to say about the one, heptal, and perfect Qur'an. I hope it's enough. (This blog post is finished, subhan'Allah.)