12,2. Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam context is particularly revealing. Al-Khatib observes that “[after all,] the early scholars ( ‘ulamd ’ al-salaf) accepted the narrations of women, slaves, and those who were not known for their legal expertise even if they narrated merely one or two hadith .”4~ Al-KhatTb’s categorical classification of women and slaves as nonspecialists ( ‘ammat al-nas) and his simultaneous justification for accepting their transmissions are a clear indicator of how the field of hadith had developed a cautious yet accepting stance toward the participation of those who may not have had specialized knowledge of the science of hadith. Al-Khatib’s subsequent section on the similarities and differences between a hadith transmitter ( mnhaddith ) and a legal witness (shahid) provides further proof of developments in this arena and elucidates another aspect of the “liberalizing” effect of the canonization movement. In Chapter 2, 1 mentioned the ambiguities in the usage of the terms riwaya and shahada in the formative period. As the controversies over the hadith of Fatima bint Qays and Busra bint Safwan show, conflation of the concepts of women’s testimony (shahada) and women’s narration (riwaya) produced some negative assessments of women’s hadith participation. In practical terms, there could be little confusion between the two. But at the theoretical level, there was space for muddying the waters, thereby giving license to those who would discriminate against women’s transmission on the basis of gender. The compilation of authoritative hadith manuals served to define clearly the domains of testimony and hadith transmission because, as observed by Eerik Dickinson earlier, the authenticity and legal authority of each tradition was established by the compilers and not by those who transmitted their works.41 Al-Khatib’s discussion affirms that by the classical period, these ambiguities were resolved at the theoretical level. He states unequivocally that gender is not a consideration in hadith transmission and that the narrations of women are accepted on a par with those of men. This is not so in cases of legal testimony where, he notes, the statement of a woman carries less weight than that of a man. It is in this light that we can understand how women such as Karima could readily appear as transmitters of al-Bukharl’s Sahih even though they do not figure as transmitters in it after the generation of the 44 al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, al-Kifaya, 94. 45 All of the published hadith manuals date from the period after the authority of the major canonical hadith collections was established. They are all in agreement that a woman’s riwaya is acceptable and is not the same as her shahada. See my article “Gender and Legal Authority” for analysis of earlier discussions that conflate the two categories. 46 al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, al-Kifaya, 94-95.