128 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam scholarly elite. By Fatima’s lifetime, this culture had not just reintegrated women’s public religious participation but also extolled it in the annals of tabaqat and chronicle literature, genres that functioned to identify and demarcate the ‘ulama Fatima’s biographers paint a compelling portrait of a girl born in the final quarter of the fourth/tenth century who was doted on by her father with all the attention and care ordinarily reserved for sons. Fie took charge of her education, inculcating in her the ways of religious etiquette and Sufi piety. He brought her to assemblies for hearing hadith starting at the age of seven. Beyond that, he paved for her an exemplary path of religious learning such that she not only memorized the entire Qur’an but was also proficient with respect to its interpretation. Given her father’s background and her educational milieu, she is likely to have been well versed in Sufi interpretations of the Qur’an. Though Fatima was only fourteen when her father died, his efforts clearly set the trajectory for her life as a leading female religious scholar. Abu ‘All’s connections gave Fatima access to an esteemed network of teachers and a scholarly lineage that was a cornerstone of her reputation. Fatima’s biography and the biographies of other women active in the scholarly circles of Nishapur attest to the ways in which kinship networks mitigated restrictive norms with respect to contact between men and women, a factor that over the next few centuries would come to play an important role in female access to education. Kinship to Abu ‘All was clearly critical to Fatima’s early exposure to the scholarly elite of Nishapur. Without his mediation, she could not have acquired certifications from leading scholars at such a young age. Further, her father is the one who convened assemblies for her and taught her the material that would be recited there. Fatima’s attendance at the sessions of luminaries testifies to her father’s awareness and astute calculation of the fact that her reputation as a hadith transmitter would rest on a network constructed before she even reached puberty. Her first hadith assembly for hearing traditions was at the age of seven in the presence of Abu al-Hasan al-‘AlawI (d. 401/1011), a scholar who had attained the rank of musnid of Khurasan. Al-DhahabI notes that out of piety and humility, al-‘AlawI refused to transmit traditions until The term musnid was used with varying connotations in different periods of Islamic history. Generally, the term referred to someone who could transmit traditions or a collection with a reliable chain of transmission. An understanding of the legal implications and applications is not implied in the use of this term. 62