The Successors 89 the Companions, confirms the picture of decline thereafter as suggested by the isnad evidence. In addition to historiographical analysis, we can consider data from the rijal works, which do not always mirror the isnad evidence. Whereas some rijal works are strictly concerned with transmitters in the canonical and noncanonical hadith compilations, others have a broader scope. 6 Even al-Mizzi in his Tahdhib al-Kamal and Ibn Hajar in his Taqrib al-Tahdhib , for all that their stated focus is on the canonical collections, did not confine themselves exclusively to these works in gathering information on the teachers and students of narrators who merit biographical entries. Additionally, rijal works sometimes list women who do not appear at all in the isnads of my data set. For example, Ibn Hajar’s Taqrib al-Tabdbib lists three different women, all named 4 Amra, as narrators from ‘A’isha. However, these three women are not credited with transmission in any of the major Sunni compilations. Other such examples may be found in Ibn Hibban’s Kitab al-Thiqat , a rijal work that does not focus on the canonical works as do al-MizzI’s and Ibn Hajar’s works. Though some discrepancies between the isnads and rijal collections emerge in the lists of female Companions and early Successors, the overall picture of decline in participation over the first three centuries remains 76 The science of describing narrators and assessing their reliability ( Him al-rijal) formed an auxiliary branch of hadith scholarship and produced a vast corpus of biographical literature. An introduction to the history and literature of this field is found in El2, s.v. “Ridjal.” In this article, Juynboll classifies many medieval biographical dictionaries, local histories, and chronicles under the general rubric of rijal literature, given their authors’ concern with hadith transmitters. He thus includes in his description of rijal literature such disparate works as the regional histories of al-Khatlb al-Baghdadl and Ibn ‘Asakir as well as Ibn al-‘Imad’s chronicle Shadharat al-Dhahab. Al-Mizzi* s Tahdhib al-Kamal, for example, is a vastly expanded reworking of the still unpublished al-Kamal fi Ma ‘rifat al-Rijal of ‘Abd al-Ghanl al-MaqdisI (d. 600/1203). In it, al-Mizzi gathers information not only from the six canonical Sunni collections, but also from lesser works, some of which are not available to us today. For example, al-Mizzi cites Hafsa as an authority for traditions from Khalifa b. Ka‘b, Rufay’ Abu al-‘Aliya al-Riyahl, and Umm al-Hasan al-Basrl. However, these people do not appear in her isnads in the selected compilations. Also, al-Mizzi lists eleven men who are said to have transmitted from her. Only seven appear in the isnads of the selected collections. 78 Ibn Hajar, Taqrib, 2:652, nos. 8689, 8690, and 8693. Another important work in this regard is Ibn Hajar’s al-Isaba, which concerns itself only with Companions. Ibn Hajar’s aim in this work was to record all Companions for whom he possessed some historical evidence. Throughout his volumes on women, we see evidence of broader participation on the part of female Companions than is recorded in the selected compilations. For example, Asma’ bint Sa‘Id ( al-Isaba , 12:112, #42) and Hayya bint Abl Hayya ( al-Isaba , 12:209, #318) are both described as narrating from Muhammad. However, their transmissions are not included in the hadith compilations analyzed here.