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The Expeditions. Maʿmar ibn RāshidЧитать онлайн книгу.

The Expeditions - Maʿmar ibn Rāshid


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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.

      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.

      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.


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