on the other hand, refers to a chain of supporting authorities that ostensibly certifies the veracity of the account. Every text utilizing this form begins by citing a chain of successive authorities who passed on the story one to another, and only then proceeds to relate the actual narrative.
In practice, the process works like this: Maʿmar’s student ʿAbd al-Razzāq commits to memory and records his teacher’s tradition (i.e., a khabar as related by him) but ʿAbd al-Razzāq also memorizes the chain of authorities (isnād) that Maʿmar cites before he begins relating his tradition. This chain of authorities presumably goes back to eyewitnesses of the events, although in practice this is not always the case. Such chains are also cumulative. On any subsequent occasion in which ʿAbd al-Razzāq relates the tradition, he will begin by citing Maʿmar as his authority for the account and then continue to list all of Maʿmar’s authorities before he relates the text of the account itself. Although citing isnāds is an archaic tradition, it is also a living one: Muslims today still relate such traditions with chains of transmission that reach back to the first generation of Muslims.19
These narratives are usually fairly short, although a khabar can be rather long in the maghāzī genre. Khabars tend to remain relatively short, for example, in works concerned with Islamic ritual and law. The important point to keep in mind is that they are self-contained textual units that proliferated among early Muslims before the existence of any book or any similar type of systematic compilation gathered them together—that is, their transmission was initially oral and their reception initially aural. Such narratives were gathered and preserved by the earliest compilers like precious pearls, worthy of appreciation on the merits of their individual beauty and value alone. Yet, like any collector of pearls is wont to do, these precious pearls of narrative were also arranged to make literary necklaces of sorts, which became the first books. These books could be arranged according to diverse interests: legal and ritual topics (fiqh), the exegesis of the Qurʾan (tafsīr), or, as in the present case, stories of the Prophet’s life and the experiences of his earliest followers. With this systematic presentation of narrative material, the literary phase of early Islamic historiography begins.20
It is difficult to date the beginnings of maghāzī literature with precision because the earliest exempla of the genre are lost or are only partially preserved, sometimes in highly redacted forms, in later works. Maʿmar ibn Rāshid’s most influential teacher, Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī of Medina, is a crucial trailblazer in the composition of maghāzī traditions, but the Islamic tradition names other scholars who predate al-Zuhrī. Two of these merit particular mention.
Abān ibn ʿUthmān (d. ca. 101–5/719–23), a son of the third caliph ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (r. 23–35/644–55), is reported as being among the first, if not the first, to write a book containing “the conduct (siyar) of the Prophet and his expeditions (maghāzī).”21 The sole person to relate a detailed story of Abān’s writing activities is the Abbasid-era historian al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār (d. 256/870). According to him, Abān’s project to compile the story of Muḥammad’s life was first undertaken in 82/702 at the behest of the Umayyad prince, and later caliph, Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, who even furnished Abān with ten scribes (kuttāb) and all the parchment he required for the project. Sulaymān, however, was incensed when he actually read the fruit of Abān’s labors: the text was bereft of tales of Sulaymān and Abān’s Umayyad ancestors from Mecca and was instead chock-full of the virtues of Muḥammad’s Medinese Companions, the Allies (Ar. al-anṣār). How could this be, the prince demanded, when the Allies had betrayed the caliph ʿUthmān, of blessed memory, and Abān’s father no less! In al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār’s account, Abān retorted that all he had written was true, in spite of whatever culpability they shared in ʿUthmān’s assassination in 35/656. Hearing none of it, Sulaymān consulted his father, the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik, who ordered the book burned to ashes.22 This is all one ever hears of Abān’s book of maghāzī, and scant trace of his writings otherwise remain, if indeed they ever existed.23
The situation is more promising for the writings of Abān’s contemporary, the prominent scholar of Medina ʿUrwah ibn al-Zubayr (d. ca. 94/712–13). Like Abān, ʿUrwah was the son of a prominent early Companion of Muḥammad, al-Zubayr ibn al-ʿAwwām (d. 35/656). Furthermore, his mother was the daughter of the first caliph of Islam, Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, and sister to Muḥammad’s favorite wife ʿĀʾishah. Indeed, ʿUrwah’s maternal aunt ʿĀʾishah often serves as a key authority for ʿUrwah’s accounts, if one considers his chain of authorities (isnād) genuine. The man was extraordinarily well connected and deeply imbedded in the circles of the elite of the early Islamic polity.
Although no work of ʿUrwah’s has survived per se, his impact on the works surviving from subsequent generations can be better scrutinized and gauged than can Abān ibn ʿUthmān’s. Modern scholars who have dedicated themselves to excavating later collections for survivals of ʿUrwah’s traditions have concluded that the broad outlines of at least seven events from Muḥammad’s life, ranging from his first revelation and his Hijrah to Medina to his many battles thereafter, can be detected even if the original wording of ʿUrwah’s accounts may be lost.24 Indeed, judging by the citations thereof contained in The Expeditions, this corpus of traditions from ʿUrwah proved to be seminal for Maʿmar’s teacher al-Zuhrī. Several redacted letters attributed to ʿUrwah discussing events from Muḥammad’s life ostensibly also survive in the work of a later historian, Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923). Curiously though, all the letters are addressed to the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān, who is otherwise known for his opposition to such books, preferring instead to promote the study of the Qurʾan and Sunnah (i.e., scripture and religious law), as witnessed in the above story of Abān ibn ʿUthmān’s efforts to compile such traditions.25 Despite considerable advances in our knowledge of ʿUrwah and his corpus in recent decades, the fact remains that his corpus is now lost and its exact contours are the object of speculation (albeit well informed). The authenticity of the ʿUrwah corpus is still being vigorously debated.26
The author of The Expeditions, Maʿmar ibn Rāshid, was born in 96/714 and was active two generations after Abān and ʿUrwah. Maʿmar was a slave-client (Ar. mawlā; pl. mawālī) of the Ḥuddān clan of the Azd, a powerful Arab tribe that had its base of power in Maʿmar’s native Basra as well as Oman. Like many scholars of his generation, Maʿmar was of Persian extraction. However, having lived in the midst of the Islamic-conquest elite all his life, he was deeply entrenched in their culture and had thoroughly assimilated their language and religion, Arabic and Islam, which he claimed as his own. Indeed, his native city of Basra originated not as a Persian city but rather as an Arab military garrison built upon the ruins of an old Persian settlement known as Vaheshtābādh Ardashīr near the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab river. The early participants in the Islamic conquests constructed their settlement on this site in southern Iraq out of the reed beds of the surrounding marshes in 14/635, soon after they had vanquished the Persian armies of the moribund Sasanid dynasty. Basra continued to function as one of the main hubs of culture for the Islamic-conquest elite throughout Maʿmar’s lifetime. Maʿmar served his Azdī masters not as a domestic slave or fieldworker, but as a trader, probably mostly of cloth and similar fineries. Such was the lot of many slaves in the early Islamic period: they were often skilled as traders, artisans, or merchants of some type, and in bondage would continue to practice their livelihood, only with the added necessity of paying levies on their profits to their masters, who in turn granted them access to the wealth, power, and prestige of the new Islamic-conquest elite.
Maʿmar’s duties to his Arab masters required such remuneration, but the burden does not seem to have hampered his freedom of movement and association. He began to study and learn the Qurʾan and hadith at a tender age as he sought knowledge from the famed scholars of his native Basra, such as Qatādah ibn Diʿāmah (d. 117/735) and al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728–29), whose funeral he attended as an adolescent. Indeed, it was his trading that enabled him to journey afar and pursue knowledge and learning beyond
