Vienna AP 1854a-b

This may be a good time to catch up on David Vishanoff, who delivered a fine lecture at IQSA 2018. He is editing the Islamic Psalter, of 100 "suwar". Yes, there is one. Not the Sajjâdiyât of the Shî'a nor various Umayya bin Abî'l-Salt quotes. But also not a translation of the actual Hebrew beyond "Sura 1" being our Psalm 1.

Vishanoff and one Ursula Hammed are now looking at Vienna AP 1854a-b. This contains bits of suwar 4, 5, 7 and all suwar 8-13 before switching topic. Vishanoff and Hammed can draw no daylight between these and the rest of the corpus which the former is editing, as far as composition. So they're a witness to the whole. The specific redaction looks like Florence 267 - oftclaimed for the Sufis, against other MSS. The other texts in the Vienna MS are preoccupied with death and some hope for forgiveness, in advance of the afterlife.

The paper argues that this psalter dates early in the Zuhd and Israiliyat movements. Ibn Mubarak and Ibn Hanbal did a lot of zuhd; Wahb bin Munabbih (as the paper notes) is credited with Israiliyat. As to how early: the paper assumes sura 38 exists. That's where David muses upon his own "status gratiae". Also assumed is Islamic tradition although this paper isn't scoping the full argument.