the course of ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s indefatigable pursuit of knowledge: what Sebastian Günther has designated as a “literary composition.”46 Simply put, although The Expeditions was the product of Maʿmar’s lectures to ʿAbd al-Razzāq, the end product was a composition polished enough to be disseminated to others and not restricted to Maʿmar’s private use. Hence, although the work was the product of a teacher’s lessons and granted to a student to transmit as such, The Expeditions, as well as other compositions like it, functioned as a work that conformed to a literary form and was organized according to a topical and well-thought-out presentation of material.
However, such books were not intended to replace the memorization of received knowledge. The practice of memorization was still cultivated with the utmost care. ʿAbd al-Razzāq would fondly recall Maʿmar feeding him the fruit of the myrobalanus plant (Ar. halīlaj), presumably to sharpen his memory.47 Memorization would remain the sine qua non of scholarly mastery for some time to come. Yet even ʿAbd al-Razzāq had considerable resources at his disposal to aid his preservation of vast amounts of hadith, exceeding the capacity of even the most prodigious memory. When he attended lectures of learned men alongside his father and brother, ʿAbd al-Razzāq reputedly brought with him an entourage of stationers (Ar. warrāqūn) to record what they had heard via audition.48
The preservation of texts such as Maʿmar’s The Expeditions is admittedly not entirely straightforward, but this is in large part due to the fact that the genres of Arabic prose were still inchoate and evolving. With the exception of scattered papyrus fragments that testify to their material existence,49 none of the second/eighth-century works of Arabic historical writing survives into modern times, save in later recensions. These recensions themselves are often at least two generations removed from the work’s putative author. Hence, the works of the master architect of the maghāzī genre, the Medinese scholar Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/767–68), survive, but only in abridged, and perhaps even expurgated, versions of later scholars such as Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Hishām (d. 218/834), and al-ʿUṭāridī (d. 272/886).50 That Maʿmar’s Expeditions itself only survives in the larger, multivolume compilation of his student ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī called the Muṣannaf is therefore not in the least atypical.
The two works of Maʿmar and Ibn Isḥāq can be fruitfully compared. Compiled at the behest of the Abbasid caliph al-Manṣūr (r. 136–58/754–75),51 Ibn Isḥāq’s Book of Expeditions (Kitāb al-Maghāzī) is a massive enterprise, a masterpiece of narrative engineering that recounts God’s plan for humanity’s universal salvation, at the apex of which appears the life of Muḥammad, Islam’s prophet.52 Ibn Isḥāq’s work dwarfs Maʿmar’s. The Cairo edition of the Arabic text of Ibn Hishām’s redaction of Ibn Isḥāq’s work, al-Sīrah al-nabawiyyah (The Prophetic Life-Story), runs to over 1,380 pages of printed text. The full version as conceived by Ibn Isḥāq, had it survived, would have been far longer. Originally, the structure of Ibn Isḥāq’s Kitāb al-Maghāzī appears to have been tripartite: al-Mubtadaʾ (“the Genesis,” relating pre-Islamic history and that of the Abrahamic prophets from Adam to Jesus), al-Mabʿath (“the Call,” relating Muḥammad’s early life and his prophet career in Mecca), and al-Maghāzī (“the Expeditions,” relating the events of his prophetic career in Medina until his death). In addition to these three sections, there might have existed a fourth: a Tārīkh al-khulafāʾ, or “History of the Caliphs.”53
Maʿmar’s Expeditions, by contrast, is a far more slender, economical volume, even though it covers similar ground. The Expeditions is a substantial, though probably not exhaustive, collection of al-Zuhrī’s maghāzī materials. Most of the major set pieces are present, though there appear to be some glaring omissions, such as the ʿAqabah meetings between Muḥammad and the Medinese tribes prior to the Hijrah.54 Though some scholars have raised questions about these missing pieces from Maʿmar’s Expeditions, which for whatever reason ʿAbd al-Razzāq did not transmit, such traditions are likely to be few and far between, if indeed they ever existed.55 Hence, the extensive “editing” of Ibn Isḥāq’s materials that one finds in Ibn Hishām’s version of Ibn Isḥāq’s text, for instance, is sparsely present, if not entirely absent, from ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s recension of Maʿmar’s work.
Furthermore, Maʿmar’s narrative in The Expeditions seems, unlike the grandiose architecture one finds in Ibn Isḥāq’s work, to have been compiled without a strong concern for chronology. It does begin with a solid chronological structure: At the outset, we encounter Muḥammad’s grandfather, ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, fearlessly facing down the war elephant and troops of the Axumite vicegerent Abrahah as they march against Mecca. Soon thereafter we witness the fame and divine favor he earns for his steadfast commitment to God’s sacred city and its shrine, the Kaaba, when the location of its sacred well, Zamzam, first discovered by Abraham’s son Ishmael, is revealed to him. The narrative marches onward through Muḥammad’s birth, youth, adulthood, call to prophecy, and even episodes from his Meccan ministry prior to undertaking the Hijrah to Medina. However, after this stretch, the narrative’s wheels appear to fall off and we are suddenly witnessing the treaty of al-Ḥudaybiyah some six years after the Hijrah. Its purposeful march seems to halt and then begin to careen from one episode in Muḥammad’s life to the next without a strong interest in chronological order. Still, one must be careful not to overstate the case. The main battles of the Medinese period appear in chronological order, and the stories of Muḥammad’s succession, the conquests, and the Great Civil War (al-fitnah al-kubrā) appear after the story of the Prophet’s death and roughly in chronological succession. As Schoeler observed, chronology is not determinative for the text’s structure; Maʿmar’s approach is, instead, rather ad hoc.56 Yet this is not to say that Maʿmar’s approach is not also haphazard. The chapter headings, for instance, seem to reflect Maʿmar’s division of the work. Although some of these headings appear redundant at first glance, a closer reading suggests that the somewhat redundant chapter headings function as a divider to mark off materials Maʿmar transmits from al-Zuhrī from those he transmits from other authorities, such as Qatādah or ʿUthmān al-Jazarī. One must emphasize that even if the chronological arc of Muḥammad’s life does not determine the book's structure, its arc remains implicit within each episode.
In summary, the importance of The Expeditions by Maʿmar ibn Rāshid is multifaceted. As an early written work of the second/eighth century, and as one of the earliest exempla of the maghāzī genre, Maʿmar’s text is a precious artifact of the social and cultural history of a bygone age that witnessed the birth of Arabic as a medium of writerly culture. The text demands the attention of specialist and non-specialist readers alike, due to its intrinsic value as an early source for the lives of Muḥammad and his earliest followers. It is for us moderns an indispensable window onto how early Muslims attempted to articulate a vision of their Prophet and sacred history.
Note on the Text
The English Translation
The two guiding lights of this English translation have been fidelity and readability, and I have sought to balance one against the other. With fidelity to the Arabic text comes the hazard of a rendering so wooden and cold that the translation is alienating or unintelligible. With readability in English comes the hazard of bowdlerization, producing a text so pureed that the hearty textures of its original cultural and historical contexts vanish. My hope is that the reader will find much that is delightful, curious, and surprising in the text but that the idiom of the translation and of the original Arabic will work hand in glove and allow the text to come to life.
Readers uninitiated to the genres of prophetic biography and hadith will likely find some features of the text difficult to adjust to at first, so some words of advice on reading the text are in order. First, the presence of chains of transmission, isnāds, between reports may seem disjointed initially. It may be helpful to view them as a snapshot
