biographical details are widely known, few laypersons recognize that none come to us from the Qurʾan. Even if the scripture at times references such events implicitly, it never narrates them. Notwithstanding its inestimable value, the Qurʾan offers little material that might allow the modern historian to reconstruct the life of its Messenger, even in its most basic outlines. Moreover, though Muḥammad, as God’s Messenger, delivered the Qurʾan to his early followers and thence humanity, Muslims did not regard the Qurʾan as a record of the Prophet’s own words or actions—rather, the Qurʾan was solely God’s Word, and with the death of His Messenger, the canon of the scripture closed. For detailed narratives of the lives of Muḥammad and his Companions we are wholly dependent on a later tradition external to the Qurʾan.
Despite its limited utility in reconstructing the biography of Muḥammad, the sacred corpus known as the Qurʾan (Ar. al-qurʾān; lit., the “recitation” or “reading”) is still very likely to be our earliest and most authentic testimony to Muḥammad’s teachings and the beliefs of his earliest followers. The scripture was organized and arranged into a codex (Ar. muṣḥaf), not within the lifetime of Muḥammad but under his third successor, or caliph (Ar. khalīfa), ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (r. 23–35/644–56). ʿUthmān’s codex was subsequently refined and reworked under the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān between 84/703 and 85/704.10 A parallel, albeit much slower and more fraught, process was undertaken by early Muslims to preserve the prophet’s words and deeds, which led to the formation of the second sacred corpus of Islam, known collectively as hadith (Ar. al-ḥadīth; lit., “sayings”), which is distinct from the Qurʾan and is often referred to as “traditions.” Unlike the Qurʾan, which Muslims codified in a matter of decades, the hadith canon took centuries to form.11
The Expeditions belongs to a subgenre of the hadith known as the maghāzī traditions, which narrates specific events from the life of the Prophet Muḥammad and his Companions and whose collection and compilation into a discrete genre of prophetic biography preceded the canonization of hadith considerably.12 The Arabic word maghāzī does not connote “biography” in the modern sense. It is the plural of maghzāh, which literally means “a place where a raid/expedition (ghazwah) was made.” The English title I have adopted, The Expeditions, is serviceable as translations go, but may lead an English-speaking audience to ask why these traditions are ostensibly gathered under the rubric of Muḥammad’s military campaigns rather than, say, “biography” as such.
As is often the case with translations, the English “expeditions” does not quite do justice to the fullest sense of the Arabic maghāzī, for much of what this book contains has little to do with accounts of military expeditions or the glories of martial feats, although there are plenty of those.13 The word maghāzī invokes the discrete locations of key battles and raids conducted by the Prophet and his followers, yet it also invokes a more metaphorical meaning that is not restricted to targets of rapine or scenes of battle and skirmishes. Maghāzī are also sites of sacred memory; the sum of all events worthy of recounting. A maghzāh, therefore, is also a place where any memorable event transpired and, by extension, the maghāzī genre distills all the events and stories of sacred history that left their mark on the collective memory of Muḥammad’s community of believers.
The origins of this particular collection of maghāzī traditions (for there were many books with the title Kitāb al-Maghāzī)14 begins with a tale of serendipity. As the story goes, Maʿmar ibn Rāshid was a Persian slave from Basra who traveled the lands of Islam trading wares for his Arab masters from the Azd tribe. While traveling through Syria trading and selling, Maʿmar sought out the rich and powerful court of the Marwānids. Seeking this court out required boldness: the Marwānids were the caliphal dynasty that reigned supreme over the Umayyad empire throughout the first half of the second/eighth century. When Maʿmar arrived at the court, it was his good fortune to find the royal family busy making preparations for a grand wedding banquet, and thus eager to buy his wares for the festivities. Though Maʿmar was a mere slave, the noble family treated him generously and spent lavishly on his goods. Somewhat boldly, Maʿmar interjected to pursue a more uncommon sort of remuneration: “I am but a slave,” he protested. “Whatever you grant me will merely become my masters’ possession. Rather, please speak to this man on my behalf that he might teach me the Prophet’s traditions.”15 That “man” of whom Maʿmar spoke was, by most accounts, the greatest Muslim scholar of his generation: Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742). Indeed, al-Zuhrī’s stories about Muḥammad and his earliest followers comprise the bulk of the material Maʿmar preserves in this volume.
It is somewhat fitting that this book should have had its inception at a banquet, for the book itself is a banquet of sorts—a feast of sacred memory. This book takes one not only into halls of history but also through the passages of memory. Nostalgia permeates its stories. Sifting through its pages, the flavors of memory wash over the palate: the piquant spice of destiny, the bittersweet flavor of saturnine wisdom, the sweetness of redemption, dashes of humor and adventure, and the all-pervasive aroma of the holy.
The maghāzī tradition in general and Maʿmar’s Maghāzī in particular are therefore not merely rote recitations of events and episodes from Muḥammad’s life. They are more potent than that. The maghāzī tradition is a cauldron in which the early Muslims, culturally ascendant and masters over a new imperial civilization, mixed their ideals and visions of their model man, Muḥammad, and brewed them with the triumphalism of a victory recently savored. Muslims recorded and compiled these traditions as their newborn community surveyed the wonders of a journey traveled to a destination hardly imagined at its outset.
The origins and composition of The Expeditions
The Expeditions is best understood not as a conventionally authored book produced by the efforts of a single person but as an artifact of a series of teacher–pupil relationships between three renowned scholars of the early Islamic period. These scholars are Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742) of Medina, Maʿmar ibn Rāshid (d. 153/770) of Basra, and ʿAbd al-Razzāq ibn Hammām of Sanaa (d. 211/827). The relationship between the latter two scholars in particular produced a number of books that have survived until our day, this volume being merely one.16 This serial teacher–pupil nexus is of the utmost importance for understanding not only how this book came into being, but also for reading the book and understanding why its structure unfolds the way it does. Simply put, the traditions contained in The Expeditions represent, for the most part, the lectures of al-Zuhrī recorded by Maʿmar, which Maʿmar in turn supplemented with materials from his other, more minor teachers when lecturing to his own students. Among these students was ʿAbd al-Razzāq, who committed Maʿmar’s lectures to writing and thus preserved the book in the form in which it has survived until today.17 These methods were, in effect, how most books on topics such as history, law, and religious learning were made in second and third/eighth and ninth centuries, but more on this below.
What this means, of course, is that Maʿmar is not the “author” of this text in the conventional sense, which is not, however, to say that he is not directly responsible for this text. My assignation of authorship to him is not arbitrary; in my estimation he remains the pivotal personality responsible for its content and form, even if speaking of his “authorship” necessarily requires some qualifications. The Expeditions actually contains many authorial voices that are not Maʿmar’s, including those of his teachers and, more rarely, that of his student ʿAbd al-Razzāq. How does one explain this?
The simplest place to begin is to point out a formal characteristic of early Arabic literary texts that dominates most narrative writing from the time of its emergence in the first half of the second/eighth century. This formal characteristic is the isnād-khabar (“chain-report”) form, a crucial couplet that forms the building blocks of sacred, historical, and even literary narratives and that gives rise to the distinctively anecdotal character of Islamic historical writing and much of Arabic literature.18 The word khabar and its more sacred
