with precision because the earliest exempla of the genre are lost or are only partially preserved, sometimes in highly redacted forms, in later works. Maʿmar ibn Rāshid’s most influential teacher, Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī of Medina, is a crucial trailblazer in the composition of maghāzī traditions, but the Islamic tradition names other scholars who predate al-Zuhrī. Two of these merit particular mention.
Abān ibn ʿUthmān (d. ca. 101–5/719–23), a son of the third caliph ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (r. 23–35/644–55), is reported as being among the first, if not the first, to write a book containing “the conduct (siyar) of the Prophet and his expeditions (maghāzī).”21 The sole person to relate a detailed story of Abān’s writing activities is the Abbasid-era historian al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār (d. 256/870). According to him, Abān’s project to compile the story of Muḥammad’s life was first undertaken in 82/702 at the behest of the Umayyad prince, and later caliph, Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, who even furnished Abān with ten scribes (kuttāb) and all the parchment he required for the project. Sulaymān, however, was incensed when he actually read the fruit of Abān’s labors: the text was bereft of tales of Sulaymān and Abān’s Umayyad ancestors from Mecca and was instead chock-full of the virtues of Muḥammad’s Medinese Companions, the Allies (Ar. al-anṣār). How could this be, the prince demanded, when the Allies had betrayed the caliph ʿUthmān, of blessed memory, and Abān’s father no less! In al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār’s account, Abān retorted that all he had written was true, in spite of whatever culpability they shared in ʿUthmān’s assassination in 35/656. Hearing none of it, Sulaymān consulted his father, the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik, who ordered the book burned to ashes.22 This is all one ever hears of Abān’s book of maghāzī, and scant trace of his writings otherwise remain, if indeed they ever existed.23
The situation is more promising for the writings of Abān’s contemporary, the prominent scholar of Medina ʿUrwah ibn al-Zubayr (d. ca. 94/712–13). Like Abān, ʿUrwah was the son of a prominent early Companion of Muḥammad, al-Zubayr ibn al-ʿAwwām (d. 35/656). Furthermore, his mother was the daughter of the first caliph of Islam, Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, and sister to Muḥammad’s favorite wife ʿĀʾishah. Indeed, ʿUrwah’s maternal aunt ʿĀʾishah often serves as a key authority for ʿUrwah’s accounts, if one considers his chain of authorities (isnād) genuine. The man was extraordinarily well connected and deeply imbedded in the circles of the elite of the early Islamic polity.
Although no work of ʿUrwah’s has survived per se, his impact on the works surviving from subsequent generations can be better scrutinized and gauged than can Abān ibn ʿUthmān’s. Modern scholars who have dedicated themselves to excavating later collections for survivals of ʿUrwah’s traditions have concluded that the broad outlines of at least seven events from Muḥammad’s life, ranging from his first revelation and his Hijrah to Medina to his many battles thereafter, can be detected even if the original wording of ʿUrwah’s accounts may be lost.24 Indeed, judging by the citations thereof contained in The Expeditions, this corpus of traditions from ʿUrwah proved to be seminal for Maʿmar’s teacher al-Zuhrī. Several redacted letters attributed to ʿUrwah discussing events from Muḥammad’s life ostensibly also survive in the work of a later historian, Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923). Curiously though, all the letters are addressed to the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān, who is otherwise known for his opposition to such books, preferring instead to promote the study of the Qurʾan and Sunnah (i.e., scripture and religious law), as witnessed in the above story of Abān ibn ʿUthmān’s efforts to compile such traditions.25 Despite considerable advances in our knowledge of ʿUrwah and his corpus in recent decades, the fact remains that his corpus is now lost and its exact contours are the object of speculation (albeit well informed). The authenticity of the ʿUrwah corpus is still being vigorously debated.26
The author of The Expeditions, Maʿmar ibn Rāshid, was born in 96/714 and was active two generations after Abān and ʿUrwah. Maʿmar was a slave-client (Ar. mawlā; pl. mawālī) of the Ḥuddān clan of the Azd, a powerful Arab tribe that had its base of power in Maʿmar’s native Basra as well as Oman. Like many scholars of his generation, Maʿmar was of Persian extraction. However, having lived in the midst of the Islamic-conquest elite all his life, he was deeply entrenched in their culture and had thoroughly assimilated their language and religion, Arabic and Islam, which he claimed as his own. Indeed, his native city of Basra originated not as a Persian city but rather as an Arab military garrison built upon the ruins of an old Persian settlement known as Vaheshtābādh Ardashīr near the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab river. The early participants in the Islamic conquests constructed their settlement on this site in southern Iraq out of the reed beds of the surrounding marshes in 14/635, soon after they had vanquished the Persian armies of the moribund Sasanid dynasty. Basra continued to function as one of the main hubs of culture for the Islamic-conquest elite throughout Maʿmar’s lifetime. Maʿmar served his Azdī masters not as a domestic slave or fieldworker, but as a trader, probably mostly of cloth and similar fineries. Such was the lot of many slaves in the early Islamic period: they were often skilled as traders, artisans, or merchants of some type, and in bondage would continue to practice their livelihood, only with the added necessity of paying levies on their profits to their masters, who in turn granted them access to the wealth, power, and prestige of the new Islamic-conquest elite.
Maʿmar’s duties to his Arab masters required such remuneration, but the burden does not seem to have hampered his freedom of movement and association. He began to study and learn the Qurʾan and hadith at a tender age as he sought knowledge from the famed scholars of his native Basra, such as Qatādah ibn Diʿāmah (d. 117/735) and al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728–29), whose funeral he attended as an adolescent. Indeed, it was his trading that enabled him to journey afar and pursue knowledge and learning beyond the environs of Basra. In time, his trading took him to the Hejaz, the cultural and religious heart of Islamic society in his era, as well as to Syria, the political center of the Umayyad empire, which stretched from Iberia to Central Asia when he first embarked on his studies of maghāzī traditions. He spent the final years of his life, likely from 132/750 onward, as a resident of Sanaa in Yemen, where he married and where he would pass away in 153/770.
The preponderance of materials transmitted by Maʿmar in The Expeditions derives from his teacher, the Medinese scholar Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī. Al-Zuhrī was a master narrator of the maghāzī genre and, after his most accomplished student Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/767–78), is the most seminal practitioner of the genre in early Islamic history. Maʿmar first encountered al-Zuhrī in Medina, while trading cloth on behalf of his Azdī masters. There, Maʿmar claims, he stumbled upon an aged man surrounded by a throng of students to whom he was lecturing. Already having cut his scholarly teeth when studying with the scholars of his native Basra, the young and inquisitive Maʿmar decided to sit down and join their ranks.27 Maʿmar’s encounter with al-Zuhrī in Medina impressed him profoundly, although it was likely somewhat brief. In Medina, it seems, his encounters with al-Zuhrī were mostly those of a curious young onlooker. It was not until al-Zuhrī had relocated his scholarly activities to the Umayyad court in Ruṣāfah and begun to serve as a tutor to the sons of the caliph Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 105–25/723–43) that Maʿmar would once again encounter the aged scholar.
Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī was a formidable figure. His origins were at the farthest end of the social spectrum from Maʿmar’s servile class: al-Zuhrī was of the innermost circles of the conquest elite. He was not merely an Arab and a Muslim; he was also a descendant of the Zuhrah clan of Mecca’s Quraysh, from whose loins the religion of Islam and caliphal polity had sprung. The Quraysh dominated the articulation of Islam and the affairs of its polity from an early date. Although many of al-Zuhrī’s students, like Maʿmar, were non-Arab clients of servile origin, al-Zuhrī reputedly preferred, if feasible, to take his knowledge only from the descendants of Muḥammad’s early followers from the Quraysh and from those Arabs who gave Muḥammad’s early followers shelter in Medina.28 Indeed, al-Zuhrī attributed his own vast learning to four “oceans” of knowledge (Ar. buḥūr) he encountered among the scholars of Quraysh who preceded him: Saʿīd