The Successors 97 Malik’s advice provides strong evidence of the trend toward creating an elite scholarly corps who possessed an understanding of the role of badith in formulating legal and ritual norms. Such a development sets a markedly different tone from conditions in the decades just after Muhammad’s death, when women were more readily accepted as transmitters of his sayings. In this earlier period, contact or alleged contact with Muhammad sufficed to confer credibility and authority on a man or woman who wished to transmit reports. From the late first century onward, one could no longer build a reputation simply through association with Muhammad or someone who had seen him. Even as Malik affirms a tightening of standards among jurists, he also casts light on a different and more permissive social use of Prophetic traditions, namely the practice of badith recitation among ascetics and preachers who were not trained in the interpretation and legal application of traditions. Generating anxiety on the part of jurists such as Malik, they used badith to shape popular understandings of Islam and were widely suspected of forging traditions to inculcate piety. Their motives may have been sound, but their traditions were often no more trusted than those of storytellers, mentioned earlier, and others discredited for fabricating badith to further sectarian agendas. Women likely relayed traditions in such unregulated forums throughout the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries when the compilations selected for this study reveal a decline in women’s participation. Yet such participation would not have been documented in the contexts of professionalized badith transmission, an area increasingly committed to the project of articulating Islamic law and creed. My analysis thus far has examined the decline of women’s badith activity as a coincidental, unintended outcome of increasing specialization in the field. A few of our sources also indicate an active resistance to women’s badith participation. These can best be understood in the context of a broader debate about the use of badith. In the first and second centuries, traditionists (ahl al-baditb) had not yet won widespread support for their view that badith were indeed a source of law secondary only to the Qur’an. The professionalization of badith study occurred in the midst of a heated battle about the probative value of these reports in deriving Islamic law and theology. While modern scholarship has tended to focus on the Mu' tazilTs as opponents to the traditionists, the battle drew in a number of 102 As noted earlier in this chapter, Ibn Sa‘d cites a report that Umm al-Hasan al-Basrl was seen preaching to women.