From Presence to Representation - Ritual ontology and the five-century gap between the Gutenberg Bible and the printed Qur'an

Nearly five centuries separate the Gutenberg Bible (c. 1455) from the first Muslim-sanctioned printed Qur'an — the Cairo standard edition of 1924, produced by the Amiri Press under King Fuad I's patronage and al-Azhar's scholarly supervision. The gap cannot be explained by technological deficiency: non-Muslim presses operated in the Ottoman empire from the late fifteenth century, and İbrahim Müteferrika printed secular works in Arabic type from 1729 with the Qur'an excluded. Drawing on Edward Muir's account of the early modern shift from embodied ritual enactment to symbolic representation, this paper argues that the gap reflects a fundamental divergence in what may be termed ritual ontology — the underlying assumptions about the relationship between the sacred and its material instantiation. In Latin Christendom, the Reformation's doctrine of sola scriptura completed a conceptual separation of divine content from material substrate, rendering mechanical reproduction of scripture theologically tolerable. In Islamic tradition, by contrast, the Qur'an's status as God's uncreated, literal speech in Arabic imbued the calligraphic act itself with devotional efficacy, such that mechanical printing severed an embodied link between scribe and scripture. The divergence is traced through the history of print, Ottoman resistance to Qur'anic printing, and the secularising rationalisation of religious authority that ultimately enabled the 1924 Cairo edition. Corollary: print is a dependent variable of the presence-to-representation shift, not an independent driver of modernity. The full paper follows as a later version of this record.