The Expeditions. Maʿmar ibn Rāshid

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. Maʿmar reputedly composed such a tome (Ar. sifr) for his fellow Basran scholar Ayyūb al-Sakhtiyānī on one occasion,⁴⁴ and for ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī on another.⁴⁵ The Expeditions may have been one such work preserved in 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