90 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam the same. Ibn Hibban’s work, arranged according to tabaqat, lists approximately 200 women in the Companion generation. In subsequent generations, the numbers drop as follows: eighty-six women in the Successor generation ( al-tabi‘un ), ten women in the next generation (atbd ' al-tdbiln), and only two women in the following one (man raivd ‘an atbd ‘ al-tabi ‘In). Lastly, it is important to consider sources which offer broader perspectives on social, political, and intellectual culture than the biographical literature surveyed earlier. The picture that emerges from the Ta nkb Dimashq of Ibn ‘Asakir is particularly instructive. Ibn ‘Asakir covers the history of Damascus from the rise of Islam up to his lifetime (i.e., the late sixth/twelfth century). Sl! He includes approximately 125 entries for women whose claims to fame include kinship to the ruling elite, prominence as ascetics, badith transmission, and literary and poetic talents. In Ibn ‘Asakir’s biographies, female Companions and Successors, as hadltb transmitters, greatly outnumber their counterparts in subsequent generations up to the fifth/eleventh century. There are, moreover, details in the Ta ’rlkh Dimashq that round out our view of female participation in the cultural and religious spheres. For example, Ibn ‘Asakir chronicles second- and third-century poetesses and ascetics whose accomplishments reveal that women’s declining participation in badith transmission was not mirrored in other arenas. ' 1 79 The Ta’rlkh Baghdad of al-Khatlb al-Baghdadl, another local history, does not serve our purposes as well because it features biographical entries for only thirty-two women. Many of these women, moreover, lived after the fourth/tenth century, a period that is not the focus of this chapter. 80 There are also entries for various pre-Islamic personalities such as Eve, the wife of Adam, and Bilqls, the queen of Sheba, and for prominent early Muslims who are not known to have been residents of Damascus, among them the wives of Muhammad. 81 Examples of poetesses in the Ta ’nkb Dimashq include Hubaba, 69:88-93, and Rayya (the caretaker of Zayd b. Mu‘awiya’s children), 69:158-61. Examples of ascetic women include Fatima bint Mujll, 70:39-40, and Karima bint al-Hashas al-Muzaniyya, who was a student of Umm al-Darda’, 70:49-53. While Ibn ‘Asakir does not provide death dates for them, circumstantial evidence indicates that they lived in the late first/seventh and early second/eighth centuries. With respect to women of the post-Companion generations, Ibn ‘Asakir, like Ibn Sa‘d and Ibn Hajar, records the participation of several women who do not appear in the isnads of the selected badith compilations. Among them is Zaynab bint Sulayman b. ‘All b. ‘Abd Allah b. ‘Abbas (d. ca. mid -third/ninth century), who narrated from her father, Sulayman b. ‘All, to a number of other men including the ‘Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun (d. 218/833); see Ibn ‘Asakir, Ta’rikb Dimashq , 69:169-70. See also Nadwi, al-Muhaddithat, 252-54, for references to a few other women who transmitted traditions during this period of decline.