While studies of the composition of the earliest narratives of the Prophet Muḥammad's life and the authenticity of the material they contain have proliferated in recent years, translations into English of extant Arabic texts remain relatively rare. Sean Anthony's new edition and complete English translation of the section entitled “Book on the Expeditions” (Kitāb al-Maghāzī) from the Yemeni jurist ʿAbd al-Razzāq ibn Ḥammām's (d. 211/827) Muṣannaf is, therefore, a very welcome publication. The work – as we have quickly come to expect from the Library of Arabic Literature series – is very handsomely produced with a decent introduction preceding the edition and translation itself. There have already been two editions of this Kitāb al-Maghāzī and, since there is only one extant manuscript witness to the text, Anthony's Arabic text offers no particularly important new readings. The major advance here is the production of an Arabic text alongside the translation, which is very readable in a modern English idiom, and well-annotated. I leave the task of making comprehensive suggestions for corrections and emendations to the text and translation to others (for a start, see Maher Jarrar's review in Speculum 90/2, 2015, 560–62); instead, it seems worth using this review to make some broader observations about the authorship of the work and the historiographical value of the text.

Although the text is extracted from a much larger book called the Muṣannaf by ʿAbd al-Razzāq, Anthony is reasonably confident (and he is in generally good company here) that what we really have is a redaction of a work on Muḥammad's career originally taught to ʿAbd al-Razzāq by his teacher, Maʿmar ibn Rāshid (d. 154/770). Anthony suggests that Maʿmar was “the pivotal personality responsible for its content and form” (p. xx), but this is far easier a claim to make for the former than for the latter. The argument that Maʿmar was mainly responsible for the extant Kitāb al-Maghāzī's organization is certainly not implausible, but it remains undemonstrated. The suggestion that this Kitāb al-Maghāzī may be something very close to a final product as Maʿmar imagined it is hard to sustain. At the very least, what we have is a later redaction of Maʿmar's material, some of which seems to have been altered for a range of reasons; Anthony himself notes a possible example of censorship at pp. 192–3 (§21.1.1) and p. 306, n. 227. The work clearly does not include everything taught by Maʿmar on material related to Muḥammad's career and expeditions and even includes three reports – admittedly a tiny number proportionally – not transmitted by Maʿmar: a very clear indication of some level of later redaction.

Anthony is fully aware of all these problems and both his introduction and notes to the translation outline honestly and intelligently the problems posed by considering Maʿmar the principal personality behind this text. He does actually label ʿAbd al-Razzāq as the scholar who “preserved the book in the form in which it has survived until today” (p. xx); others would perhaps push this even later, since the jury is still out on whether or not ʿAbd al-Razzāq was the principal organizer of the extant Muṣannaf which goes by his name. In many ways, this could be considered quite a minor issue; almost everyone would presumably agree that Maʿmar taught his material to ʿAbd al-Razzāq, who edited and redacted it and whose edition and redaction was then probably tweaked slightly by the editor and redactor of his own Muṣannaf. So long as we are clear about this, which Anthony is in the introduction, it may not really matter whether we credit the text principally to Maʿmar ibn Rāshid or ʿAbd al-Razzāq. In light of the question of later editing and redacting, however, it might have been most useful had the edition/translation consistently offered the text from ʿAbd al-Razzāq's Muṣannaf. This is mostly what we get, but on a handful of occasions the odd sentence is edited according to a reading found in a work other than ʿAbd al-Razzāq's Muṣannaf, for example at pp. 16–7 (§1.4).

The wider historiographical significance of the Kitāb al-Maghāzī is tricky to gauge. It offers some narratives either not found elsewhere or found with significantly different details and, as such, is naturally of interest to historians seeking to understand the second-/eighth- and early third-/ninth-century controversies surrounding the composition of narratives about specific episodes in Muḥammad's life. Quranic verses are frequently linked with the narratives, offering more evidence for studies on the relationship between Quranic exegesis and the formulation of prophetic biography. The work also offers a slightly different conception of what constitutes maghāzī when compared to some other works: unlike al-Wāqidī's (d. 207/822) Kitāb al-Maghāzī, for example, the story here does not end with the Prophet's death, but rather with the first fitna. The main benefit I took from reading the work as a whole, however, was the reminder of what a staggering achievement the works of Ibn Isḥāq (d. c. 150/767–768) and his redactors, principally Ibn Hishām (d. c. 218/833–834), were. The Kitāb al-Maghāzī attributed to Maʿmar ibn Rāshid is, as it stands, a rather vaguely organized work with what could perhaps be called a very loose chronological framework with plenty of going back and forth. It has the feel of a collection of material that students who already had some idea of the overarching framework of the career of the Prophet and the first caliphs could dip in and out of. In comparison, Ibn Hishām's Sīra is a masterpiece of communal salvation history-writing, with a carefully crafted and detailed narrative of the context behind and mission of God's final prophet to mankind and his establishment of the Muslim community. For all that, its relatively early date of composition ensures that the Kitāb al-Maghāzī is an extremely important work for modern historians interested in the emergence and development of prophetic biography. Sean Anthony's considerable undertaking to make the text available to a wider readership with a lucid translation and commentary is an important contribution to that study.