The Classical Revival 125 undertake rihlas independently to collect hadith and whose direct contact with men, even in the pursuit of religious knowledge, was curtailed. Scrutiny of the biographies of numerous women from the fourth/tenth century to the Mamluk period reveals increasing use of the term ijaza to denote how women received and transferred much of their knowledge. Given the widespread use of written transmission, it is interesting to consider that women’s literacy rates in the general population may also have risen, thereby enabling access to religious learning even on the part of women who did not belong to ‘ulama ’ families. In previous chapters, I suggest that women flourished as hadith transmitters in the earliest period of Islam when transmission was primarily oral precisely because literacy would not have been an issue. In the second phase of transmission history, as the use of writing grew in hadith circles, women in the general population, who would not have enjoyed the same literacy rates as men, would have been at a disadvantage. However, after this phase, and certainly by the fourth/tenth century, the relatively easy accessibility of paper and evolution in manuscript forms and writing technology is likely to have contributed to an overall increase in literacy rates in the Muslim world. The increased use of the ijaza to certify written transmission among women serves as an important indicator of the spread of a more literate culture in classical Muslim societies among the general population enabling greater participation among a broader range of classes and among women and men beyond the ‘ulama ’ elite. Karima’s career demonstrates the impact of the canonical collections and written transmission on women’s reemergence as hadith transmitters. Fatima bint al-Hasan’s life, analyzed in the next section, provides a lens to examine a third development: the emergence of ‘ulama ’ kinship networks that relied on hadith transmission to confirm and transmit status. 53 Nearly 300 women in al-Sakhawi’s volume devoted to noteworthy women of the ninth century earned ijazas or awarded them to their own students; al-SakhawI, al-Daw ’ alLami‘ li-Ahl al-Qarn al-Tasi‘ (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qudsi, 1936), vol. 12. 54 For intriguing anecdotal information regarding literacy among the female slaves of the ruling elite as well as about female scribes in the fourth/tenth century, see Nadia Maria ElCheikh, “Women’s History: A Study of al-Tanukhl,” in Writing the Feminine: Women in Arab Sources , ed. Manuela Marin and Randi Deguilhem, 129-48 (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 139-40. 55 See Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) for a detailed history of the introduction of paper in the Middle East and its impact on various fields of learning (see, in particular, pp. 90-123). See Hirschler, Written Word, chapter 3 for his analysis of evolution in children’s education and the rise in literacy among children especially in Syria and Egypt beginning in the seventh/thirteenth century.