Flügel_edition
Flügel edition
19th-century Quranic edition
The Flügel edition is an edition of the Quran produced by the German orientalist Gustav Leberecht Flügel (1802–1870), first published in 1834 by the publishing house Tauchnitz in Leipzig.[1] In 1842, Flügel also published a concordance to go along with his edition. More broadly, Flügel's efforts can be understood in the context of the rapid rise of the field of philology in the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany, which began in biblical studies before also expanding into the realm of Quranic studies.[2]
Although it was almost immediately recognized as inadequate primarily due to its splitting of verses and lack of consistently following any single one of the variant readings, the daunting task of producing another edition of the Quran from the thousands of available manuscripts and the lack of an alternative led to it being the standard edition used by Western researchers.[3][4] For the time being, this allowed for consistency in the use of a reliable text and in textual citation according to the verse numbering used by Flügel.[5] This remained the case until the publication of the Cairo edition of the Quran in 1924, which gradually superseded the use of the Flügel edition among researchers and also became the most widely used edition by contemporary Muslims.