The Expeditions. Maʿmar ibn Rāshid

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The Expeditions - Maʿmar ibn Rāshid


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‍• 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.


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