CHAPTER 4 A Culmination in Traditionalism It has not been transmitted on the authority of any scholar that he rejected the tradition of a woman on the basis that it was narrated by a woman. 1 2 Muhammad b. ‘All al-Shawkanl (d. 1250/1834) The trickle of women’s baditb participation that began in the mid-fourth century steadily gained momentum. Al-FarisI, the sixth/twelfth-century historian of Nishapur, documented the lives of only twenty-two women active from the fourth/tenth to the sixth/twelfth century. By the ninth/ fifteenth century, the Egyptian scholar Shams al-Dln Muhammad b. ‘ Abd al-Rahman al-SakhawI (d. 902/1497) could devote an entire volume more than a thousand entries - of his biographical compendium to women alone. Al-Sakhawl’s life was contemporaneous with the zenith of women’s baditb participation. His biographies therefore may not have captured the full extent of women’s involvement in his time. 1 Muhammad b. ‘All al-Shawkanl, Nayl al-Awtar: Shark Mimtaqa al-Akhbar min Ahadith Sayyid al-Akhyar (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qahira, 1978), 8:122. 2 For an overview of the roles of women in this work, see Huda Lutfi, “Al-Sakhawi’s Kitab al-Nisa ’ as a Source for the Social and Economic History of Muslim Women during the Fifteenth Century AD,” Muslim World 71 (1981): 104-24. Nadwi also notes the tremendous rise in baditb transmission activity in the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries, particularly in Syria, Egypt, Mecca, and Medina ( al-Mubadditbat , 255-60). Contemporary research on female baditb transmission tends to cluster around the Mamluk period, reflecting the wealth of evidence for this period. See, for example, AbouBakr, “Teaching the Words of the Prophet”; Berkey, “Women and Islamic Education in the Mamluk Period,” in Women in Middle Eastern History , ed. N. Keddie and B. Baron, 143-57 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); and Roded, Women in Islamic Biographical Collections , 63-89. 144