The Successors 87 COMPARISON OF ISNAD EVIDENCE WITH ADDITIONAL HISTORICAL SOURCES Having extracted a bleak picture of the number of women represented in the isnads in the post-Companion generations, we can ask if the selected Sunni compilations accurately reflect historical patterns. That is, how can we ascertain that the isnad evidence does in fact portray more than merely the selection criteria of a few Sunni compilers in the third/ninth and fourth/ tenth centuries, and that women were actually not active on a larger scale? For example, as we have just seen, Sukayna is said to have relayed reports to Kufan transmitters, but this activity is not represented in the major Sunni collections. There are several avenues for exploring these questions. Ibn Sa‘d’s Tabaqat offers perhaps one of the strongest affirmations that our isnad evidence is not misleading. It is a particularly intriguing portrayal of female participation in hadith transmission because it predates the compilation of most of the canonical and noncanonical collections. Ibn Sa‘d was therefore uninfluenced by the relative contributions of his subjects to the compilations selected for this study, all of which were composed after his death. This is in contrast to the post-fourth-century biographers, who might have been affected by their subjects’ status in the canonical Sunni hadith collections that they studied. Ibn Sa’d’s biographical entries on women, focusing on the Companions and Successors, confirm the picture of largely incidental hadith transmission. While some women, among them ‘Amra bint ‘Abd al-Rahman, Safiyya bint Shayba, and Mu‘adha bint ‘Abd Allah, are described as knowledgeable with respect to ‘A’isha’s traditions, Ibn Sa‘d provides no indication that women occupied themselves with the collection and dissemination of traditions at the level of luminaries such as ‘Urwa b. al-Zubayr. Rather, he confirms that women’s learning and teaching of hadith was incidental and took place in contexts such as moralistic storytelling for popular audiences. Known as qussas, those engaged in such storytelling were popular preachers whose social stature varied greatly. 2 While some were noted for perspicacious sermons, others were condemned as charlatans. In this vein, Ibn Sa‘d cites a report that Umm al-Hasan al-Basrl used to engage in storytelling to women, but he does not elaborate on her 71 For an overview, see El2, s.v. “Kass.” For a more detailed study of popular preaching in classical Islam, see Jonathan Berkey, Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).