CHAPTER 3 The Classical Revival The sbaykha, the learned woman, possessed of excellent virtues, the one with the best isnads (al-musnida), Umm al-Kiram, Karima bint Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Hatim al-Marwaziyya, who lived in Mecca (haram Allah). [W]hen she transmitted hadith, she would compare [whatever was being transmitted] with her own copy. She had understanding and knowledge and was virtuous and pious as well. She narrated the Sahib [of al-Bukharl] numerous times . . . Abu Bakr b. Mansur aI-Sam‘anI said, “I heard my father mention Karima, saying, ‘Have you ever seen anyone like Karima?’”1 In the second half of the fourth century, after a lag of nearly 250 years, women began to be incorporated anew as respected hadith transmitters. This chapter focuses on the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries, which were marked by a changing landscape in hadith transmission and legal culture such that women’s participation, heretofore marginalized, came to be extolled. Biographical dictionaries and chronicles evidence this shift in approximately the mid-fourth/tenth century. An overview from Ibn ‘Asakir’s Ta’rikh Dimashq and al-Dhahabl’s Siyar A'ldm al-Nubala ’ illustrates the point. Ibn ‘Asakir’s work provides the biographies of approximately fifty women commemorated as transmitters in the first two centuries, only two in the third and fourth centuries, and fifteen in the fifth and sixth centuries. In al-Dhahabl’s Siyar , there are approximately thirty-five women known for hadith transmission in the Companion and Successor generations, only two women in the third and 1 al-Dhahabl, Siyar, 18:233-35. 1 Bulliet has also noted that there are more entries for women in dictionaries composed after the sixth/twelfth century (see “Women and the Urban Religious Elite,” 68-69). 108