on his studies of maghāzī traditions. He spent the final years of his life, likely from 132/750 onward, as a resident of Sanaa in Yemen, where he married and where he would pass away in 153/770.
The preponderance of materials transmitted by Maʿmar in The Expeditions derives from his teacher, the Medinese scholar Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī. Al-Zuhrī was a master narrator of the maghāzī genre and, after his most accomplished student Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/767–78), is the most seminal practitioner of the genre in early Islamic history. Maʿmar first encountered al-Zuhrī in Medina, while trading cloth on behalf of his Azdī masters. There, Maʿmar claims, he stumbled upon an aged man surrounded by a throng of students to whom he was lecturing. Already having cut his scholarly teeth when studying with the scholars of his native Basra, the young and inquisitive Maʿmar decided to sit down and join their ranks.27 Maʿmar’s encounter with al-Zuhrī in Medina impressed him profoundly, although it was likely somewhat brief. In Medina, it seems, his encounters with al-Zuhrī were mostly those of a curious young onlooker. It was not until al-Zuhrī had relocated his scholarly activities to the Umayyad court in Ruṣāfah and begun to serve as a tutor to the sons of the caliph Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 105–25/723–43) that Maʿmar would once again encounter the aged scholar.
Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī was a formidable figure. His origins were at the farthest end of the social spectrum from Maʿmar’s servile class: al-Zuhrī was of the innermost circles of the conquest elite. He was not merely an Arab and a Muslim; he was also a descendant of the Zuhrah clan of Mecca’s Quraysh, from whose loins the religion of Islam and caliphal polity had sprung. The Quraysh dominated the articulation of Islam and the affairs of its polity from an early date. Although many of al-Zuhrī’s students, like Maʿmar, were non-Arab clients of servile origin, al-Zuhrī reputedly preferred, if feasible, to take his knowledge only from the descendants of Muḥammad’s early followers from the Quraysh and from those Arabs who gave Muḥammad’s early followers shelter in Medina.28 Indeed, al-Zuhrī attributed his own vast learning to four “oceans” of knowledge (Ar. buḥūr) he encountered among the scholars of Quraysh who preceded him: Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab (d. 94/713), ʿUrwah ibn al-Zubayr (d. 94/712–13), Abū Salamah ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (d. ca. 94/712–13), and ʿUbayd Allāh ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUtbah (d. 98/716).29 Furthermore, al-Zuhrī was deeply entrenched within the Umayyad state apparatus and its elite, and this at a time when many of his fellow scholars looked askance at any association with the state. A contemporary Syrian scholar, Makḥūl (d. ca. 113/731), reportedly once exclaimed, “What a great man al-Zuhrī would have been if only he had not allowed himself to be corrupted by associating with kings!”30
The caliph Hishām brought al-Zuhrī from Medina to his court in Ruṣāfah, where the scholar remained for approximately two decades (i.e., nearly the entirety of Hishām’s caliphate), only leaving the caliph’s court intermittently.31 Ruṣāfah, located south of the Euphrates, was once a Syrian Byzantine city named Sergiopolis and was renowned as a destination of pilgrimage for Christian Arabic-speaking tribes visiting the shrine of the martyr St. Sergius as well as for its many churches. Hishām renovated the city and revived the settlement as the site of his court, building a mosque and palaces famous for their cisterns.32 In Ruṣāfah, Hishām compelled al-Zuhrī to begin writing down traditions about the Prophet Muḥammad’s life, as well as about other matters. This was likely against the scholar’s will, as the recording of hadith in writing remained a controversial issue at the time. Part of Hishām’s commission included the employment of state secretaries (kuttāb) to record al-Zuhrī’s lectures as he related them to the Umayyad princes, producing by some accounts a considerable body of written work.33
It was during al-Zuhrī’s residence at the caliph’s court in Ruṣāfah that Maʿmar journeyed there as a trader hoping to sell his wares. He humbly requested the attendees at a marriage banquet to grant him access to al-Zuhrī and, thus, to the scholar’s famed learning. According to his own testimony, Maʿmar took the majority of his learning from al-Zuhrī while he resided in Ruṣāfah, where Maʿmar claims he had al-Zuhrī nearly all to himself.34 Maʿmar learned al-Zuhrī’s traditions via two means: audition (samāʿ) and collation via public recitation (ʿarḍ)—meaning that once Maʿmar had memorized the traditions he would recite them back to al-Zuhrī for review and correction. The combination of these two features of Maʿmar’s studies with al-Zuhrī rendered his transmission of al-Zuhrī’s materials highly desirable in the eyes of other scholars.35 It is likely that Maʿmar remained in Ruṣāfah, or at least Syria, even beyond al-Zuhrī’s death in 124/742. He testifies to having witnessed al-Zuhrī’s personal stores of notebooks (dafātir) being hauled out on beasts of burden for transfer to some unspecified location after the caliph al-Walīd II ibn Yazīd was assassinated in a coup d’état by Yazīd III in Jumada II 126/ April 744.36
After the coup had toppled Walīd II, Syria descended into a vortex of violence that made life there precarious; even the Umayyad dynasty did not survive the ensuing conflicts that collectively came to be called the Third Civil War (fitnah). The denouement of this conflict in 132/750 also saw the ascendance of a new caliphal dynasty, the Abbasids.37 It was likely this tumultuous series of events that caused Maʿmar to journey far to the south, to Sanaa in Yemen. Scholars of any sort, let alone one of Maʿmar’s stature, seem to have been rare in the region at the time, so the locals quickly made arrangements to marry him to a local woman with the hope of tethering him to the city for the long haul.38
In Yemen, Maʿmar’s most promising and, in due time, most famous pupil was ʿAbd al-Razzāq ibn Hammām al-Ṣanʿānī. Of the twenty-odd years Maʿmar reputedly spent in Yemen until his death in 153/770, his relationship with ʿAbd al-Razzāq spanned the final seven to eight years.39 The importance of ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s role in the preservation of Maʿmar’s learning is beyond doubt. This is in part due to the considerable scholarly output of ʿAbd al-Razzāq himself, which included the ten surviving volumes of his own hadith compilation, the monumental al-Muṣannaf. However, ʿAbd al-Razzāq was also the first scholar to transmit and present Maʿmar’s scholarship in a recognizably “book-like” form.40
Early Muslim scholars did not usually compose books in order to display their scholarly prowess. Indeed, to possess such books for any purpose except private use could considerably harm one’s scholarly reputation, as it suggested that one’s knowledge (Ar. ʿilm) was not known by heart, and therefore not truly learned.41 Knowledge was, in this sense, expected to be embodied by a scholar and only accessible by personally meeting and studying under said scholar. As a general rule, books were for private use, not public dissemination. This attitude toward writing and knowledge, indeed, was the root of al-Zuhrī’s alarm when the Umayyad caliph Hishām compelled him to have his knowledge copied into books. Maʿmar, one of al-Zuhrī’s closest students at Ruṣāfah, seems to have first seen al-Zuhrī’s private collection of notebooks only after they were removed from his teacher’s private storage (Ar. khazāʾin) after his death, for al-Zuhrī’s books were largely irrelevant to the interpersonal process of the transmission of knowledge that Maʿmar enjoyed under his tutelage. Books were no substitute for the authenticating relationship between a scholar and his pupil. Those who had derived their knowledge only from books were scorned. Indeed, when a Damascene scholar who had purchased a book by al-Zuhrī in Damascus began to transmit the material he had found therein, he was denounced as a fraud.42
Hence, it was as a compliment to his revered teacher’s learning and to his awe-inspiring ability to recall vast stores of hadith from memory at will that ʿAbd al-Razzāq would remark that he never once saw Maʿmar with a book, except for a collection of long narratives (as one finds in The Expeditions, for instance), which he would occasionally take out to consult.43 However, it would be inaccurate to say that written materials had no role to play whatsoever. Teachers could and did bestow private writings on students or close confidants. Such writings, it seems, would fall somewhere between the “lecture notes” used by scholars as an aide-mémoire and the published books produced by later generations.
