seems rather high. In some instances, traditions from al-Zuhrī are further ascribed to ʿUrwa ibn al-Zubayr, and while it is not inconceivable that certain reports about Muhammad took their origin from ʿUrwa’s teaching, this possibility has not been successfully demonstrated and remains highly speculative. It is doubtful that al-Zuhrī himself wrote either a history of early Islam or a biography of its prophet,14 but several of his students in addition to Ibn Isḥāq composed biographies of Muhammad on the basis of traditions related from al-Zuhrī, the most important of these disciples being Mūsā b. ʿUqba (d. 758) and Maʿmar b. Rāshid (d. 770). Often by correlating traditions independently ascribed to al-Zuhrī in these and other sources with similar reports from Ibn Isḥāq’s Maghāzī, it is possible to establish a measure of probability that al-Zuhrī may in fact have taught some of these traditions to his students.
Unfortunately, however, like Ibn Isḥāq’s lost biography, neither Mūsā’s or Maʿmar’s Maghāzī survives, and we must rely primarily on the evidence of later writers for indirect knowledge of their contents, including especially al-Wāqidī (d. 823) and his disciple Ibn Saʿd (d. 845), as well as al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) and al-Balādhurī (d. 892). The only exception is perhaps a brief fragment purporting to transmit extracts from Mūsā’s Maghāzī, which relates nineteen short and disconnected traditions concerning the life of Muhammad. Nevertheless, the authenticity of this document has been disputed, and given the paucity of its contents, the bulk of Mūsā’s early biography must otherwise be derived indirectly from much later sources.15 Despite the lack of a similar artifact, the prospects of recovering traditions from Maʿmar’s Maghāzī are in fact much better than for Mūsā’s lost work. Al-Wāqidī’s Maghāzī from the close of the second Islamic century forms a particularly important witness to Maʿmar’s biography, which seems to have served as one of its primary sources. Although al-Wāqidī’s collection is somewhat marred by his occasionally irregular use of isnāds, as well as by the very strong possibility that he has made extensive—and often unacknowledged—use of Ibn Isḥāq’s Maghāzī, al-Wāqidī’s Maghāzī transmits considerable material from Maʿmar, at a chronological distance roughly equivalent to Ibn Hishām’s separation from Ibn Isḥāq.16 Unlike many earlier maghāzīs, however, al-Wāqidī’s work is true to its title, taking focus on the campaigns of Muhammad during the period from his flight to Medina until his death, an event mentioned only briefly in passing.17
Al-Wāqidī is reported to have written several other works on Muhammad’s life, including a collection on the Death of the Prophet (Kitāb wafāt al-nabī), but none of these writings is extant.18 Presumably, many of the traditions from these lost works survive in the biography of Muhammad prepared by al-Wāqidī’s student Ibn Saʿd. In the modern edition of the latter’s Ṭabaqāt, the first two volumes comprise an extensive collection of traditions regarding the life of Muhammad, which seems to have been prepared by Ibn Saʿd himself (as opposed to his students). Although Ibn Saʿd has drawn from a number of authorities in compiling this biography, a large number of its traditions are given on al-Wāqidī’s (and Maʿmar’s) authority, many of which were likely taken from al-Wāqidī’s now lost sīra works. Ibn Saʿd’s collection is thus of particular importance since, as Horovitz notes, he is “the earliest author, after Ibn Isḥāq, from which a complete biography of the Prophet has come down to us.”19 In contrast to Ibn Isḥāq, however, Ibn Saʿd devoted considerable attention to the end of Muhammad’s life, allotting roughly the last quarter of his biography to traditions concerning his death and burial. Here al-Wāqidī again figures prominently, and while his work on the Death of the Prophet was almost certainly a major source, Ibn Saʿd “has very greatly amplified” al-Wāqidī’s earlier collection.20 Thus, beyond its significance as a likely witness to al-Wāqidī’s lost work on Muhammad’s death, this final section of Ibn Saʿd’s biography of Islam’s prophet preserves the most extensive early Islamic collection of traditions about the end of Muhammad’s life, first assembled nearly two centuries after the events themselves.
Despite the enormous value of both al-Wāqidī’s and Ibn Saʿd’s biographical works, the more recently published Muṣannaf of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Sanʿānī (d. 827), a collection of ḥadīth addressing a number of topics, presents a much more promising source for recovering some semblance of Maʿmar’s lost Maghāzī. While this text includes a wealth of biographical traditions ascribed to Maʿmar, its attribution to ʿAbd al-Razzāq remains somewhat controversial, and there are significant unresolved issues regarding its authenticity. Most of this Muṣannaf is known only as transmitted by a somewhat later writer, Isḥāq al-Dabarī (d. 898), who in many respects can be seen as its potential author and furthermore seems to have been much too young to receive its contents directly from ʿAbd al-Razzāq, as alleged.21 Nevertheless, Harald Motzki has recently argued that the published edition of ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s Muṣannaf is in some sense “authentic” and can be relied upon as a source of traditions deriving from ʿAbd al-Razzāq in one form or another. Motzki willingly concedes that both Wansbrough and Calder are correct in noting considerable problems concerning the authorship of much early Islamic literature, acknowledging that “if the work [the Muṣannaf] is considered as a book with a definitely fixed text composed by ʿAbd al-Razzāq, the question must be answered in the negative.” But Motzki argues that it was ʿAbd al-Razzāq who “spread the traditions” now compiled in the Muṣannaf, and in this more limited sense his authorship can be largely accepted.22 Thus with some care it may be possible to recover early traditions from this collection, including perhaps many that were originally derived from Maʿmar’s lost biography of Muhammad.
In its modern edition, the fifth volume of this Muṣannaf includes a sizable collection of traditions about Muhammad’s maghāzī, here used in its broader sense to encompass the full span of Muhammad’s life.23 The overwhelming majority of these biographical traditions are ascribed to Maʿmar, suggesting that this section of the Muṣannaf may very well preserve a selection of traditions drawn from Maʿmar’s Maghāzī. Although ʿAbd al-Razzāq is said to have studied with Maʿmar himself, in light of their considerable difference in age, one wonders if perhaps ʿAbd al-Razzāq has instead relied on a written version of Maʿmar’s biography or some other intermediate source. ʿAbd al-Razzāq is reported to have died roughly fifty-seven years after Maʿmar, and if he studied with Maʿmar for seven or eight years as alleged by the later tradition, Maʿmar must have lived to at least eighty years old, instructing ʿAbd al-Razzāq just prior to his death while in his late seventies: although clearly not impossible, this detail certainly invites some question regarding the nature of ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s relationship with Maʿmar.24 Nevertheless, the prospect that the maghāzī section of the Muṣannaf transmits at least some material from Maʿmar’s now lost work seems likely, particularly in those instances where other early sources can confirm this attribution.25 Moreover, in contrast to al-Wāqidī’s Maghāzī, ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s Muṣannaf includes a short section of traditions related to Muhammad’s death, a collection that adds an important and roughly contemporary supplement to Ibn Isḥāq’s early assemblage of death and funeral traditions.26 In making use of this source, however, it will be essential to bear in mind Motzki’s caution that Ibn Hishām’s Sīra must not be used “as if it were Ibn Isḥāq’s original text,” a warning that applies all the more so to ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s unequaled witness to traditions from Maʿmar’s early biography.27
Two additional early muṣannaf collections, the Muṣannaf of Ibn Abī Shayba (d. 849) and the Ṣaḥīḥ of al-Bukhārī (d. 870), include sections on the maghāzī, and while al-Bukhārī adheres to the more narrow meaning of this term, focusing largely on Muhammad’s campaigns, both authors relate traditions about the end of his life. Like many other sources, these ḥadīth collections often convey traditions not otherwise attested in early Islamic literature, yet given the relatively late origins of all the surviving biographical compilations,
