no Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam The purpose and practice of female hadith transmission in the fourth/ tenth century was different from what it had been in the first decades of Islam. Women of the Companion generation were unique in that they often narrated their own experiences and indeed inaugurated a novel tradition with respect to women’s roles in religious learning. As discussed in Chapter 1, Companions were relaying traditions about Muhammad and his community in informal, ad hoc settings as necessitated by the inquiries of early Muslims about rituals and beliefs. The concept of hadith as a formalized saying attributed to Muhammad and conveyed through a proper isnad had yet to take root. Additionally, a number of female Companions exercised a formative influence on legal and exegetical discourse through the narration of their reports. By contrast, the muhaddithas of the classical period were trustworthy links in isnads , which served as vehicles for authenticating not just individual traditions but books in their entirety. In this context, women’s activities facilitated the blossoming of a book culture in classical Islam. Even more broadly, these practices promoted Sunni culture as it was coalescing in the fourth/ tenth century and thereafter. Despite the differences with the Companion generation, the revival of women’s activities after the fourth/tenth century was anchored in and validated through reference to the remembered actions of female Companions. As discussed in the introduction, this creative borrowing is better understood through reference to Talal Asad’s description of the Islamic discursive tradition as “a tradition of Muslim discourse that addresses itself to conceptions of the Islamic past and future, with reference to a particular Islamic practice in the present.”' Such a tradition seeks to relate past practices, institutions, and social conditions to present ones, and to establish practices for future generations. In so doing, “traditional practices” do not seek to perfectly mimic previous generations. Rather, it is “the practitioners’ conceptions of what is apt performance, and of how the past is related to present practices, that will be crucial for tradition, not the apparent repetition of an old form.”7 8 9 Applied to the fourth/tenth-century contexts of women’s hadith transmission, Asad’s conceptualization elucidates that it was the rethinking and reimagining rather than blind imitation of the tradition of female Companions that enabled the reintegration of women in 7 See Konrad Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) for a detailed analysis of reading practices in classical Islam. 8 Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” 14. 9 Asad, “Anthropology of Islam,” 15.