The Expeditions

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Maʿmar ibn Rāshid. The Expeditions

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كِتَابُ ٱلمَغَازِي

لأَبِي عُرْوَةَ مَعْمَرِ بْنِ رَاشِد البَصْرِيّ

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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

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