The Expeditions. Maʿmar ibn Rāshid

‍• 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 transmission preserves 90 percent thereof (i.e., twenty-nine of the work’s thirty-three divisions).⁵⁷ Quotations and excerpts from other transmissions of Maʿmar’s Maghāzī via ʿAbd al-Razzāq survive, but only in piecemeal fashion and as small parts of larger, collected works, such as the Musnad of ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s student Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855), and not as an integral book. Isḥāq al-Dabarī, by contrast, transmitted Maʿmar’s Maghāzī from ʿAbd al-Razzāq both as part of the latter’s Muṣannaf and as a standalone work.⁵⁸

There are several indications that Isḥāq al-Dabarī was primed to be a key transmitter of the Muṣannaf from a tender age. His father, Ibrāhīm ibn ʿAbbād al-Dabarī, was the appointed lector for ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s works (qāriʾ al-dīwān) late in the scholar’s life, and he supervised his son’s recording of ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s corpus, which his son received via audition (samāʿ).⁵⁹ The main intent of Ibrāhīm al-Dabarī in requiring his son Isḥāq to hear the corpus of ʿAbd al-Razzāq as early as ten, or by some accounts even seven years of age was likely to ensure the durability of his son’s transmission. The most sought-after isnāds for a hadith often had—and continue to have—a property called ʿuluww, a term roughly meaning “height” or “elevation.” There are many reasons an isnād with “height” was the ideal for scholars of the hadith. One pragmatic reason was because such an elevated isnād covers the largest amount of time with the fewest names of scholars, and therefore is easier to commit to memory. More important, however, an elevated isnād contained fewer names between the transmitter (rāwī) and the Prophet, and therefore was “nearer” to the Prophet.⁶⁰ Having heard ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s corpus at such a young age ensured that the isnāds from Isḥāq would have this property of ʿuluww, and his father’s supervision ostensibly assured the accuracy of his transmission.

Most hadith scholars of the subsequent generation indeed recognized Isḥāq al-Dabarī’s transmission as thoroughly reliable;⁶¹ however, it is noteworthy that earlier scholars, in particular older students of ʿAbd al-Razzāq, did question the quality of Isḥāq al-Dabarī’s transmission. Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, for instance, held that because ʿAbd al-Razzāq had lost his eyesight in 200/815–16, subsequent transmissions from him were of a shoddier quality, given that ʿAbd al-Razzāq could no longer personally review and verify the accuracy of his students’ written notes.⁶² Ibn Ḥanbal’s comments may in fact be directed against Isḥāq al-Dabarī’s transmission, which he began receiving via audition sometime between 202/817 and 205/821, after ʿAbd