much of the text is not in chronological order, and for this reason the reader should not feel obligated to read the chapters in the order presented by the text. I have included a timeline of events to aid the reader in ascertaining what events happen when. I have also listed these events according to the calculations attributed to al-Zuhrī, Maʿmar’s teacher. I have done so for pragmatic reasons, not because I believe they are necessarily the most correct. Indeed, al-Zuhrī’s calculations occasionally depart considerably from the standard dates one is likely to find in a textbook. With that being said, and despite Maʿmar’s pragmatic approach to chronology, the first chapter remains, in my opinion, the best place to begin. There the reader will find stories of Muḥammad’s youth, his growth into manhood, and his call to prophecy.
Finally, the bilingual nature of this text has determined many of the decisions I have made along the way, and I have chosen to see the presence of the Arabic edition as freeing rather constricting in making decisions about translation. The reader who is bilingual in Arabic and English, or at least aspiring to be, is advised to note the following:
| • | Chains of transmission, isnāds, are set in a smaller font, and I have made explicit the teacher–pupil relationship in the translation where the Arabic merely has ʿan (“from”), by translating the preposition as “on the authority of . . .” |
| • | In the Arabic edition, I have retained honorific invocations for the Prophet and his Companions, such as ṣallā Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam (God bless him and keep him) and raḍiya Allāhu ʿanhu (May God be pleased with him), but I have omitted them in most cases from the English translation. |
| • | I freely replace demonstratives and pronouns with their referents to remove ambiguity and vice versa when English style so dictates. |
| • | Transitional phrases and conjunctions (fa-, thumma, ḥattā idhā, baynamā, lammā, etc.) lend themselves to multiple translations; thus, I have taken the liberty to translate their sense into a variety of nonliteral English permutations. |
| • | Dense and idiomatic Arabic expressions that literal translations into English would leave abstruse have been unpacked, and I have often departed from the syntax of the Arabic original in order to render the text into more idiomatic English. |
| • | Similarly, the repetitive use of qāla/qālat, “he/she said,” in the text would try an English speaker's patience if translated literally; therefore, I have freely translated the verb as he or she said, replied, answered, declared, etc. |
| • | Many technical terms are directly translated into English, hence “the Sacred Mosque” for al-masjid al-ḥarām and “Emigrants” and “Allies” rather than al-muhājirūn and al-anṣār. Yet I have also adopted the anglicized equivalents of other technical terms given their widespread use in English—e.g., hajj for ḥajj, rather than “Pilgrimage,” Hijrah for hijrah rather than “Emigration,” and Shura for shūrā rather than “Consultative Assembly”—mostly due to the imprecision of their English equivalents. (“Pilgrimage,” for instance, does not allow one to distinguish efficiently between the seasonal and non-seasonal pilgrimages: the ḥajj versus the ʿumrah.) All such words, likely to be unfamiliar to the nonspecialist reader, can be located in the glossary. |
| • | For quotations from the Qurʾan, I cite the translation of M. A. S. Abdel Haleem; however, I have also significantly modified Abdel Haleem’s translation when his rendering is either at odds with or does not sufficiently illuminate the interpretation of the Qurʾan suggested by the narrative. Also, there is a minor discrepancy in the manner in which citations of the Qurʾan are found in the Arabic edition and the translation that merits the reader's attention. Citations of the Qurʾan often appear in the Arabic edition in a truncated form. This citational practice reproduces the manuscript and reflects the cultural context in which the text was produced, a context that assumed a baseline fluency in the Qurʾan that is now rare among a modern readership, whether Muslim or non-Muslim. I have thus included qurʾanic citations in their entirety in my English translation for the sake of readers lacking an intimate familiarity with the Qurʾan. |
A note on Arabic names: The forms of names one encounters in Arabic literature can be quite daunting for the uninitiated, but the system is easy to learn with a little time. A typical full name consists of a personal name (ism) followed by a genealogy (nasab) that starts with one’s father and continues back several generations. The nasab is recognizable by the words ibn and bint, which mean “son” and “daughter,” respectively. Hence, Maʿmar ibn Rāshid literally means “Maʿmar, the son of Rāshid” and Asmāʾ bint ʿUmays means “Asmāʾ, the daughter of ʿUmays.” In spoken address, convention often dictates the use of a kunyah, or teknonym, such as Abū (“Father of”) or Umm (“Mother of”). This means that although ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib or al-ʿAbbās ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib are referred to as ʿAlī and al-ʿAbbās in the narrative of the text, in formal direct speech they are referred by their kunyahs, Abū l-Ḥasan (Father of al-Ḥasan) and Abū l-Faḍl (Father of al-Faḍl), respectively, unless they are being addressed by an intimate friend.
Other common names are theophoric, meaning that they include a name of God. These names include two parts: the first is ʿabd, meaning “slave/servant,” and the second the name of God. For example, ʿAbd Allāh means “Servant of God” and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān “Servant of the Merciful.” Many names also contain one or more nisbahs, names that end in –ī for men and –iyyah for women. Nisbahs are adjectives that refer to a tribe and place of birth or residence; thus, al-Zuhrī is so called because he comes from the tribe of Zuhrah, and ʿAbd al-Razzāq is called al-Sanʿānī because he comes from the city of Sanaa.
The Arabic Edition
The Expeditions survives only in ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s redaction and is contained in his Muṣannaf. The relevant section of his Muṣannaf survives only in a single, partial manuscript: Murad Mulla 604, fols. 66r–99r [مم], which dates to 747/1346–47 and is currently held at the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, Turkey. Relying on a sole extant manuscript is, of course, far from ideal. Fortunately, many of the initial difficulties were mitigated by the previous efforts of two editors: Ḥabīb al-Raḥmān al-Aʿẓamī, who first edited and compiled the surviving portions of the ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s Muṣannaf, a project published by al-Maktab al-Islāmī in Beirut in 1972; and an edition of the The Book of Expeditions produced by Suhayl Zakkār under the title al-Maghāzī al-nabawiyyah and published by Dār al-Fikr in Beirut in 1981. Both editions were significant achievements in their own right, in particular Zakkār’s far superior reading of the text, but both also suffer from a number of shortcomings that I have sought to ameliorate in the present edition.
I have aimed to improve upon the previous editions of the text by judiciously taking into account the different transmissions (Ar. riwāyāt) of the text, no matter how piecemeal. Even here, however, there are hazards. It is significant that the transmission (riwāyah) for the Murad Mulla manuscript of ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s Muṣannaf in which the sole transcription of Maʿmar’s Kitāb al-Maghāzī survives is from the Yemeni scholar Abū Yaʿqūb Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm al-Dabarī (d. ca. 285–86/898–99). Isḥāq al-Dabarī was a native of Sanaa who seems to have remained in the city throughout his life, establishing a reputation as one of the most important transmitters of ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s scholarly corpus. Indeed, of the thirty-three books that survive from the Muṣannaf as cobbled together by its modern editor, al-Aʿẓamī, Isḥāq al-Dabarī’s
