The Expeditions. Maʿmar ibn Rāshid
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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 counterpart ḥadīth convey the sense of “report,” “account,” or even “saying.” (This last meaning is especially true for the word ḥadīth, most frequently used to refer to the sayings of the Prophet.) The word isnād, 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