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Document Details :

Title: Instructions for Islamic Prayer from the Second Century AH/Eighth Century CE
Author(s): MALCZYCKI, W. Matt
Journal: Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists
Volume: 49    Date: 2012   
Pages: 41-54
DOI: 10.2143/BASP.49.0.3206597

Abstract :
P.Utah Ar. inv. 205 is an undated papyrus that contains instructions for Islamic prayer. Comparison of the script with published papyri indicates a second-century AH/eighth-century CE date. The text does not fit neatly into the standard Arabic papyrological categories of documentary and literary. Comparisons with fully-developed literary texts such as in Abbott, Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri 1-3, the Ibn Wahb papyrus (ed. David-Weill, 1939-1948), PSR inv. 23 (ed. Khoury, 1972), and PSR inv. 50-53 (ed. Khoury, 1986) are not as useful as comparisons with documents such as P.Qurra and Hinds and Sakkout, 'A Letter from the Governor of Egypt', because P.Utah Ar. inv. 205 is 'pre-literary'. The text itself – instructions for prayer – is a rare surviving example of the types of non-Qur'ānic religious texts that were in circulation before the great theological and legal debates of the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries led to the canonization of many bodies of Islamic literature. There are rumors that similar fragments exist in private collections and at the Egyptian National Library (Dār al-Kutub) in Cairo, but no one has published any of them.

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