102 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam thereafter, Juynboll argues that the spread of such rihlas cannot have been earlier than the mid-second/eighth century. ' Juynboll’s hypothesis draws its support from a tradition claiming that the first hadith transmitter to have undertaken extensive rihlas purely for the sake of hadith was Ma‘mar b. Rashid (d. 153/770). 11 Disagreement over the precise chronological origins of the rihla aside, there is sufficient historical evidence that such journeys proliferated around the middle of the second/eighth century. Numerous isnads reflect a period of regionalism (i.e., transmission within regional centers) for the first century and a half of transmission followed by the dissemination of these traditions to other centers of learning. This chronology places the increase in importance of the rihla in the midsecond/eighth century, a period that coincides with the decline in the record of women’s hadith participation. Rihlas to disseminate hadith were driven by the imperatives of preference for direct, oral transmission and the need to bolster one’s reputation in the field, as well as the more ethereal promise of divine reward. Anecdotes about men traveling great distances to authenticate a single hadith abound in Muslim tradition literature. The following account of a rihla illustrates well the need to hear a report directly from the best available source: It is reported that Jabir b. ‘Abd Allah said, “I heard of a man from among the Companions who narrated a hadith that I had not heard from him [i.e., the Prophet] myself. I prepared for the journey and traveled to him [i.e., the man] for a month until I reached al-Sham, and there learned that he was ‘Abd Allah b. Anls al-Ansari. I sent an emissary to him to tell him that Jabir had come to call ... I said to him [i.e., ‘Abd Allah b. Anls], “I have heard that there is a hadith that you have heard from the Prophet on the topic of mazalim that I have not heard. I was afraid that I would die or that you would die before I had a chance to hear it [directly from you]. 1 1 The corpus of such anecdotes confirms that traveling was deemed indispensable to the career of a transmitter. ‘Abd Allah b. Ahmad b. Hanbal reports that he asked his father, the renowned scholar and hadith critic, whether it is better for a man who seeks knowledge to keep the constant company of one scholar and record what he knows or to travel to different places and hear from a number of scholars. Ibn Hanbal advised that it would be better for him to travel and record the knowledge of the Kufans, the Basrans, the 116 Juynboll, Muslim Tradition, 66-70. 117 Reports such as these in the awa’il (“firsts”) genre of tradition literature form the backbone of Juynboll’s chronology of early hadith transmission. 118 al-Baghdadi, Rihla, 53-54.