In 2018 Ursula Hammed, a scholar of Arabic papyrology, discovered in the Austrian National Library two broken leaves of papyrus containing an anthology of meditations on the imminence of death and judgment, including what is by far the earliest known copy of psalms 7–13 of the Islamic ‘Psalms of David’ (Zabūr Dāwūd) (AP 1854 a–b, viewable at http://data.onb.ac.at/rec/RZ00018026). Since I had already published on the Islamic Zabūr Dāwūd, she invited me to publish the papyrus with her. We met in Vienna to study the two heavily damaged leaves, and concluded that they originally formed part of a small codex that was assembled as follows:

Our study, edition, and English translation of the papyrus has now been published:

Ursula Hammed and David Vishanoff. “Arabic Literary Papyri and Islamic Renunciant Piety: Zabūr and Hadith in Vienna Papyrus AP 1854 a–b.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 35 no. 2 (2025): 309–347.

The article was published Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and is freely available on the JRAS web site and as a pdf here. Since the published Arabic is small, sometimes unclear, and impossible to cut and paste from, a Word file of the prepublication Accepted Version is available here.

We wish to thank the director, Prof. Bernhard Palme, and his staff at the Department of Papyri at the Austrian National Library in Vienna for their generous hospitality during our study of the papyrus in August 2018. David Vishanoff’s work on this article was funded in part by an NEH Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and an ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societiesl any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations in this article do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the American Council of Learned Societies.

Several translated selections from the Islamic Zabur that are of special interest for Christian-Muslim relations, and that are also available in the affordable Bloomsbury Reader in Christian-Muslim Relations, are now also included in the monumental new three-volume anthology Christian–Muslim Relations: Primary Sources, edited by David Thomas and available from Bloomsbury. My contribution is:

“Islamic Psalms of David.” In Christian–Muslim Relations: Primary Sources, Volume 1, 600–1500, ed. David Thomas, et al., 33–36. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.

It includes the following excerpts:

• A rewriting of the Biblical Psalm 2 that alludes to a Qur’anic verse and seeks to preempt the Christian view that Psalm 2 asserts Jesus’s divine sonship.
• A prediction of Muhammad and of the corruption of the Bible.
• Another psalm that predicts Muhammad, alludes to the Qur’an’s echo of Psalm 37:29, criticizes Christian worship, and tells a story involving a dragon.
• An assertion that Muslims do better than Christians at fulfilling Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.