Psalms in Islam

Zabur (Arabic: ٱلزَّبُورِ, romanized: az-zabūr) is, according to Islam, the holy book of David, one of the holy books revealed by Allah before the Quran, alongside others such as the Tawrāh (Torah) and the Injīl (Gospel). Muslim tradition maintains that the Zabur mentioned in the Quran is the Psalms of Dawud (David in Islam).

The Christian monks and ascetics of pre-Islamic Arabia may be associated in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry with texts called mazmour, which in other contexts may refer to palm leaf documents. This has been interpreted by some as referring to psalters.

Among many Christians in the Middle East and in South Asia, the word mazmour (Hindustani مزمور (Nastaʿlīq), ज़बूर (Devanagari)) is used for the Psalms of David in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew term is mizmor מזמור.

The Arabic word zabūr means "book", "inscription", or "writing." In early sources it may refer to Ancient South Arabian writing on palm leaves.

Much of Western scholarship sees the word zabūr in the sense "psalter" as being a conflation of Arabic zabūr, "writing", with the Hebrew word for "psalm", mizmōr (Hebrew: מִזְמוֹר) or its Aramaic equivalent mazmūrā (Syriac: ܡܙܡܘܪܐ).

An alternate, less accepted origin for the title zabūr in this sense is that it is a corruption of the Hebrew zimrah (Hebrew: זִמְרָה) meaning "song, music" or sippūr (Hebrew: סִפּוּר), meaning "story."

In the Qur'an, the Zabur is mentioned by name three times. The Qur'an itself says nothing about the Zabur specifically, except that it was revealed to Dawud and that in the Zabur is written "My servants the righteous, shall inherit the earth".

Indeed, We have revealed to you, [O Muhammad], as We revealed to Noah and the prophets after him. And we revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, the Descendants, Jesus, Job, Jonah, Aaron, and Solomon, and to David We gave the book [of Psalms].