84 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam made regarding reliability (la yu ‘rafhalu-hd). Five of them were not found in the rijdl works but were located in the isnads of one of the selected collections. As such, they cannot be considered to have left any meaningful impression as badith transmitters on biographers and badith critics. Of the women who feature as the third link and who are known as reliable transmitters, only two, Karima bint al-Miqdad and Umm al-Aswad al-Khuza‘iyya, are deemed exceptionally reliable (thiqa). Five were placed in the less laudatory but acceptable category of maqbula.' Similarly, the two women who figure as link four in the selected collections narrate only one report apiece. As for their renown as transmitters, Ibn Hajar can only conclude for both, Id yu ‘rafbdlu-ha. Thus the activity that did occur on the part of women in the second/eighth century was not of great consequence to the badith collectors and scholars who documented and studied the transmitters. This remarkably low level of participation allows us to push back the date of significant female involvement in the transmission of religious knowledge to the end of the first/seventh century. The collective portrait that emerges from the isnads highlights the early gender-based differentiation in the careers of male and female transmitters during the period covered in this chapter. Relatively prolific women such as ' Amra bint ‘Abd al-Rahman, Zaynab bint Abl Salama, and Umm al-Darda’ are anomalies in an overall picture of limited female participation. Even though these women were commemorated as exceptional female transmitters, their accomplishments do not approximate those of prominent men in the field. That these women do not appear to have circulated among male Companions to collect and record traditions is the first indication that women’s presence in this domain was incidental. That they did not pass their authority to other women who would in turn have become prominent in the post-Successor generations suggests that female participation in badith transmission was either actively discouraged or not incorporated in a historically significant way. The contrast with minimal common denominators in the biographies of prominent post-Companion male traditionists is striking. Acclaimed male authorities assiduously collect traditions from a number of authorities and, in turn, transmit these traditions to large numbers of students; their narration networks include both kin and non-kin authorities; they learn and For an elucidation of these terms, see Ibn Hajar, Taqrib , 1:24-25. For biographies of Karima bint al-Miqdad, see al-MizzI, Tahdbib , 35:293, and Ibn Hajar, Taqrib , 2:657; and for those of Umm al-Aswad al-Khuza‘iyya, see al-Mizzi, Tahdbib , 35:328, and Ibn Hajar, Taqrib , 2:664. 63