The Successors 105 men on their journeys for Hajj or trade and in the process learned traditions from various locales as indicated by biographies of women from the classical era. Yet a hallmark of the rihla, as exemplified by Jabir b. ‘Abd Allah’s tradition mentioned earlier, was the ability to undertake journeys alone and unfettered by domestic or financial limitations. It is, therefore, not a coincidence that women’s participation in hadith shows a precipitous decline when the rihla came into vogue. The rihla movement was especially detrimental to women’s participation from the mid-second/eighth century until approximately the fifth/eleventh century when developments such as the increased acceptance of written transmission mitigated the imperative for oral, face-to-face contact between teachers and students. CONCLUSION This chapter has presented empirical evidence of women’s diminishing participation in hadith transmission from the time of the Companions until the compilation of the major Sunni hadith collections. In the broadest sense, patterns of decline in women’s role in hadith transmission mirror trends previously observed in other historical studies on Muslim women. Several works have shown how women’s range of activity, options, and freedoms suffered setbacks after the early decades of Islamic history. Most of these studies identify the transition of Muslim society from a tribal culture to an imperial one as the major catalyst for the reduction in women’s status. This shift was accompanied by the absorption not only of elements of the more urbanized Byzantine and Sassanian cultures but also of patriarchal structures inherent in the neighboring religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. The consensus in such studies is that foreign cultural and religious accretions, combined with elements of Arabian tribal patriarchy, were sanctified as Islamic religious norms and negatively affected Muslim women’s roles from the beginnings of the Muslim imperial expansion up to the modern period. This line of analysis is evident in Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam , which surveys Muslim women’s history to extract patterns and a theory of Muslim gender relations. In this work, Ahmed asserts that the gender egalitarianism of Islam was undermined during the period of early imperial expansion and cultural assimilation. In her view, the effects of this process are evident from the time of the ‘ Abbasids up to our own times. 127 See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, parts I and II, for her elaboration of the idea that women’s liberties were limited by borrowings from Mesopotamian cultures that Muslim societies encountered in their early history.