1Muḥammad Ibn-Isḥāq, ‘Abd-al-Malik Ibn-Hishām, and Alfred Guillaume. The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of [Ibn] Ishāq’s Sīrat rasūl Allāh (London: Oxford University Press, 1955).
2Ḥājjī Khalīfah. Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wal-funūn, vol. 2. (Beirut: Dār al-ʿIlm, 1994), 604.
3On ʿUrwah ibn al-Zubayr, see Andreas Görke and Gregor Schoeler, Die altesten Berichte über das Leben Muḥammads (Princeton: Darwin Press, 2008).
4Muhammad, 91.
5The precise title of Ibn Isḥāq’s work is not certain, though the most likely candidate is Kitāb al-Maghāzī. Ibn Hishām’s redaction is usually referred to as al-Sīrah al-nabawiyyah (Eng. The Prophetic Life-Story), but this title has little to do with Ibn Isḥāq’s original work. See Horovitz, Earliest Biographies, 80 and n. 93 thereto and Schoeler, Biography, 28–29.
6This is not to say, however, that the earliest testimonies are bereft of historical insight; see Hoyland, “The Earliest Christian Writings on Muḥammad,” and Anthony, “Muḥammad, the Keys to Paradise, and the Doctrina Iacobi.”
7In the West, scholarship on the historical Muḥammad is inevitably considerably indebted to the tradition of historical Jesus scholarship, a tradition that is now over two centuries old. However, it must be said that historians of early Islam are rarely fluent in the most up-to-date scholarship on the historical Jesus. In the massive literature on the challenges and aims of writing the biography of the historical Jesus, E. P. Sanders’ The Historical Figure of Jesus remains a classic.
8Hoyland, “Writing the Biography of the Prophet Muhammad.”
9See Chabbi, “La biographie impossible de Mahomet.” In the most recent decade anglophone scholarship has all but abandoned writing traditional, historical biographies in favor of monographs proposing radical new views of Islamic origins. The two most noteworthy monographs on this score are Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, and Powers, Muḥammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men. Germanophone and francophone scholars, on the other hand, have been considerably more active in writing more traditional, historical biographies during the last decade; e.g., see Tilman Nagel’s massive Mohammed: Leben und Legende and Allahs Liebling, and Hichem Djaït’s three-volume history La vie de Muḥammad (originally written in Arabic). Although the full impact of the scholarly reception of Djaït’s work has yet to be seen, a positive evaluation of Djaït’s project can be found in Nicolai Sinai, “Hisham Djait.” By contrast, the response to Nagel’s biography has been rather tepid; e.g., see Hagan, “The Imagined and Historical Muḥammad,” and Schoeler’s Biography, 11–13 and “Grundsätzliches zu Tilman Nagels Monographie.”
10Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 35–63; Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike, 235–75; Hamdan, “The Second Maṣāḥif Project”; Comerro, La constitution du muṣḥaf de ʿUthmān; Sadeghi and Goudarzi, “Ṣanʿāʾ 1 and the Origins of the Qurʾān.”
11An excellent and fluent introduction to hadith as well as the formation of its canon can be found in Brown, Ḥadīth; however, Brown’s treatment of the earliest phases of hadith transmission and collection is a tad tendentious. For an important corrective, see Reinhart, “Juynbolliana,” 436 ff.
12Cf. Görke, “The Relationship between Maghāzī and Ḥadīth.”
13The reader may find it surprising that the word jihad (Ar. al-jihād) appears only once in the text; see 13.2.
14Cf. the list of maghāzī titles gathered in Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 1:887b–888a.
15Ibn ʿAsākir, Dimashq, 59:393.
16These works include two collections of prophetic traditions, al-Jāmiʿ and Ṣaḥīfat Hammām ibn Munabbih, and ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s exegesis of the Qurʾan, al-Tafsīr; see EI3, “ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Ṣanʿānī” (H. Motzki).
17Boekhoff-van der Voort (“The Kitāb al-maghāzī,” 29–30) recently tabulated the percentage of the materials ʿAbd al-Razzāq derived solely from Maʿmar in the Kitāb al-Maghāzī as 93.9 percent; however, her tabulation is somewhat misleading, as she counts ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s annotations and glosses of Maʿmar’s traditions, which rarely go beyond a sentence or two, as equal to Maʿmar’s fully realized narrations, which stretch on for pages. In fact, all of the narratives derive from Maʿmar except for a short narrative about Abū Bakr (24.3) and two longish narrations that ʿAbd al-Razzāq adds to the end of Maʿmar’s account of the marriage of Fāṭimah (31.2–31.3).
18Donner, Narratives, 255–70; Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 15–17, 92–93.
19Brown, Ḥadīth, 4 f.
20Donner, Narratives, 280 ff.
21See al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār, Muwaffaqayyāt, 332–35.
22Cf. Horovitz, Earliest Biographies, 6–11 and esp. n. 30 thereto. The account of Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik is from al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār, Muwaffaqayyāt, 332–35. A shorter version appears in Balādhurī, Ansāb, 4/2: 490. The dating of these events by al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār may be off by a year or so; see EI3, “Abān b. ʿUthmān” (Khalil Athamina).
23Efforts to locate traces of his work have produced little. His material is often confused with that of another author of a Kitāb al-Maghāzī, the early Shiʿite scholar Abān ibn ʿUthmān al-Aḥmar al-Bajalī (d. ca. 200/816), whose work is also lost. Portions of the latter’s work seem to be preserved by Amīn al-Dīn al-Ṭabrisī (d. 548/1154) in the portion of his Iʿlām al-warā dedicated to the biography of Muḥammad. See Modarressi, Tradition and Survival, 130 and Jarrar, “Early Shīʿī Sources.”
24Görke and Schoeler, Die älteste Berichte, 258 ff., 289; cf. an English summary in Görke, “Prospects and Limits,” 145 f.
25Balādhurī, Ansāb, 4(2):490; Schoeler posits that ʿAbd al-Malik later had a change of heart, but does not speculate why. See Schoeler, Biography, 31.
26Shoemaker (“In Search of ʿUrwa’s Sīra”) provides the most thorough critique of the recent attempts to rediscover ʿUrwah’s corpus in later sources; now, cf. the riposte by Görke, Schoeler, and Motzki, “First Century Sources.”
27Ibn ʿAsākir, Dimashq, 59:393.
28Ibn Saʿd, Ṭabaqāt, 2(2):135, “min abnāʾ al-muhājirūn wa’l-anṣār.”
29Ibn Abī Khaythamah, Tārīkh, 2:127–28; Fasawī, Maʿrifah, 1:479.
30Cited in Lecker, “Biographical Notes,” 34. As Lecker demonstrates (ibid., 37–40), al-Zuhrī served as a judge (qāḍī) for at least three caliphs, administered the collection of taxes, and was known, moreover, for wearing the clothing of the high-ranking Umayyad soldiery (al-jund).
31Fasawī, Maʿrifah, 1:636; cf. Lecker, “Biographical Notes,” 32–33 and n. 46 thereto.
32Guidetti, “Contiguity between Churches and Mosques,” 20 ff.
33Lecker, “Biographical Notes,” 25–28; cf. Cook, “The Opponents of the Writing of Tradition,” 459–62 and Schoeler, Oral and Written, 140–41 on the controversy.
34Abū Nuʿaym, Ḥilyah, 3:363; Ibn ʿAsākir, Dimashq, 59:399–400.
35Ibn Abī Khaythamah, Tārīkh, 1:271, 325–26: Ibn ʿAsākir, Dimashq, 59:412. On collation in the transmission of knowledge, see Déroche, Qurʾans of the Umayyads, 70; Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, 65 ff.; al-Qāḍī, “How ‘Sacred’ Is the Text of an Arabic Medieval Manuscript,” 28 f.; and Mashūkhī, Anmāṭ al-tawthīq, 47.
36Ibn Saʿd, Ṭabaqāt, 2(2):136; Fasawī, Maʿrifah, 1:479, 637–38; Ibn ʿAsākir, Dimashq, 59:400; cf. the discussion in Cook, “The Opponents of the Writing of Tradition,” 459–60. The fate of these writings is unknown, but it is significant that they survived al-Zuhrī’s death despite al-Walīd II’s antipathy toward al-Zuhrī. The caliph allegedly declared that he would have killed the scholar had he survived to see his caliphate. See Horovitz, Earliest Biographies, 58–59. The dislike was apparently mutual. According to one account, al-Zuhrī pleaded with Zayd ibn ʿAlī to delay his revolt against Hishām so that he might openly offer Zayd his support once al-Walīd II had come to power. Zayd, of course, did not follow al-Zuhrī’s council and was crucified as a rebel by Hishām in 122/740. See Balādhurī, Ansāb, 2:621 and Anthony, Crucifixion, 46 ff.
37Cf. Robinson, “The Violence of the Abbasid Revolution.”
38Ibn ʿAsākir, Dimashq, 59:408.
39Ibn ʿAsākir, Dimashq, 36:167, 173 f.; cf. Horovitz, Earliest Biographies, 73.
40This applies not only to the Kitāb al-Maghāzī but also to Maʿmar’s al-Jāmiʿ and, to a lesser extent ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s Tafsīr, or Qurʾan commentary, the bulk of which derives from Maʿmar.
41See Cook, “The Opponents of the Writing of Tradition”; Kister, “Notes on the Transmission of Ḥadīth”; and Schoeler, Oral and Written, 111–41 et passim on this issue.
42Ibn Ḥajar, Tahdhīb, 10:220. Indeed, Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq, Maʿmar’s contemporary, courted controversy by merely integrating the books of others into his Kitāb al-Maghāzī rather than only including materials from scholars under whom he directly studied. See Schoeler, Biography, 26.
43Ibn ʿAsākir, Dimashq, 59:417, mā raʾaynā li-Maʿmar kitāb ghayr hādhihi l-ṭiwāl fa-innahu yakhrujuhā bi-lā shakk.
44Ibn ʿAsākir, Dimashq, 59:395, 409.
45Ibn Abī Khaythamah, Tārikh, 1:324; cf. Cook, “The Opponents of the Writing of Tradition,” 469–70 for further material on Maʿmar’s ambivalent attitude toward written materials.
46Günther, “New Results”; cf. the systematic attempt of A. Elad to apply Günther’s concept of “literary composition” to early Islamic historiography in Syria in his article “The Beginning of Historical Writing,” 121 ff.
47Ibn ʿAsākir, Dimashq, 36:178; according to A. Dietrich, the plant was reputed to confer “a lucid intellect.” See EI2, “Halīladj.”
48Ibn Abī Khaythamah, Tārīkh, 1:330.
49The first of these is a papyrus fragment held at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, erroneously attributed to Maʿmar ibn Rāshid by Nabia Abbott (Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri, 1:65–79), and subsequently correctly identified by M. J. Kister as from the work of the Egyptian scholar and judge (qāḍī) Ibn Lahīʿah (d. 175/790). See Kister, “Notes on the Papyrus Text.” A second papyrus, likely dating to the early third/ninth century, is attributed to Wahb ibn Munabbih (d. ca. 101–02/719–20); on which, see Khoury, Wahb b. Munabbih.
50Schoeler, Biography, 32–34.
51On Ibn Isḥāq and the Abbasids, see Horovitz, Earliest Biographies, 79–80; Sellheim, “Prophet, Chalif und Geschichte.”
52Sellheim, “Prophet, Chalif und Geschichte,” 40 f.; Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 135.
53Horovitz, Earliest Biographies, 80–89. Indeed, Nabia Abbot identified a papyrus fragment from Ibn Isḥāq’s Tārīkh al-khulafāʾ. See Abbott, Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri, 1:80–99. Her comments on the text ought to be supplemented by those of Kister, “Notes on an Account of the Shura.”
54For traditions ascribed to al-Zuhrī on the ʿAqabah meetings, see Bayhaqī, Dalāʾil, 2:421–23, 454; none of these are Maʿmar traditions, but rather come from Mūsā ibn ʿUqbah. For traditions from Maʿmar on the topic, which however are not related on the authority of al-Zuhrī, see ʿAbd al-Razzāq, Tafsīr, 1:129 (ad Q Nisāʾ 4:103); idem, Muṣannaf, 6: 4, 6–7. For other narrations attributed to al-Zuhrī more generally but not related by Maʿmar, see ʿAwwājī, Marwīyāt al-Zuhrī. Most events listed by ʿAwwājī that Maʿmar does not relate in a narration from al-Zuhrī notably derive either from Ibn Isḥāq or Mūsā ibn ʿUqbah.
55Maher Jarrar (Die Prophetenbiographie, 29) believed ʿAbd al-Razzāq to have included only a portion of Maʿmar’s maghāzī corpus from Zuhrī, but the evidence he adduces for this assertion is wanting. Of the examples he cites (ibid., 54 n. 158), at least two of them actually do appear in the Kitāb al-Maghāzī, despite his claims to the contrary (Abū Nuʿaym, Dalāʾil, 2:504–5 is 5.1 of this volume; Dhahabī, Tārīkh, 6:20–21 is 1.10); and two other traditions appear in ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s Tafsīr (Abū Nuʿaym, Dalāʾil, 1:224 = ʿAbd al-Razzāq, Tafsīr, 1:169; Dhahabī, Tārīkh, 1:610 = ʿAbd al-Razzāq Tafsīr, 1:288–89). The other examples he cites are minor, short traditions that are certainly related to “maghāzī” concerns, but are not centerpieces of the maghāzī tradition; see Abū Nuʿaym, Dalāʾil, 1:272 (how the Hāshim clan came to reside in the piedmont of Abū Ṭālib); Dhahabī, Tārīkh, 1:575 (Gabriel announces ʿUmar’s conversion), 594 (on Medina’s female diviner Faṭīmah), 642 (on the prayers as revealed in Mecca). More substantial omissions from Maʿmar ibn Rāshid’s maghāzī materials, especially traditions on the reigns of the first four caliphs, can be found throughout Ansāb al-ashrāf of al-Balādhurī (d. 279/892). The scholar al-Wāqidī and his scribe Ibn Saʿd are a potential source, too, for further maghāzī traditions from Maʿmar; however, Wāqidī is known to play fast and loose with his source material, making the prospect of recovering Maʿmar’s authentic material from him slim.
56Schoeler, Biography, 27.
57See his review in Speculum 90 (2015): 560-62.