Ma'mar ibn Rashid (Arabic: معمر بن راشد, romanized: Maʿmar ibn Rāshid) was an eighth-century hadith scholar. A Persian mawla ("freedman"),[2] he is cited as an authority in all six of the canonical Sunni hadith collections.[2][3]
Ma'mar ibn Rashid was born in 96 AH/714 CE in Basra. He was a Persian mawla ("freedman") of the Huddan clan of Azd,[2] trading cloth and other luxuries on their behalf. Despite this, he was able to study under the Basran scholars Hasan al-Basri and Qatada ibn Di'ama.[4]
While on a journey to trade wares at Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik's court in Resafa, he encountered and became pupil to the elderly scholar Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri. Ma'mar learned and transmitted a large body of traditions from al-Zuhri through audition, public recitation and writing, making his narrations coveted by other hadith scholars.[4][5]: 90
Ma'mar remained in Resafa after al-Zuhri's death, and witnessed the removal of his late teacher's manuscripts from the Umayyad court following the assassination of al-Walid II.[2] Amid the turbulence of the civil wars that followed, Ma'mar departed for Yemen where he married a local woman and taught several students. The most prominent of these was ʽAbd al-Razzaq al-Sanʽani, who he taught for the final seven to eight years of his life. ʽAbd al-Razzaq preserved Ma'mar's traditions in his own musannaf, notably arranging those concerning Muhammad's life into The Book of Expeditions (Arabic: كتاب المغازي, romanized: Kitāb al-Maghāzī), which has survived as one of the earliest extant works of sira-maghazi literature.[4] Also preserved is ʽAbd al-Razzaq's recension of Ma'mar's hadith collection, al-Jāmi'.[5]: 148