A Culmination in Traditionalism 145 The tenth/sixteenth century, however, witnessed a second dramatic decrease in women’s badith transmission. One reason for this was that a de-emphasis on the narrative aspects of badith transmission ( riwdya ) in this period was accompanied by a renewed engagement with interpretive activity (diraya). Simultaneously, women’s religious involvement inclined more toward tariqa- based Sufism and increasingly found expression through Sufi institutional frameworks such as zdwiyas and kbdnqabs. These trends help account for the drop in women’s badith participation. Nonetheless, this was not a reenactment of the second/eighth-century saga of decline. Rather, women’s resounding successes from the fourth/tenth to the ninth/fifteenth century had indisputably established the acceptability, even desirability, of women’s badith transmission. Their contributions to this realm, though reduced, continued to garner praise. The reshaping of historical memory as a by-product of these evolutions is evident in the words attributed to al-Shawkanl, the thirteenth/ nineteenth-century jurist, cited at the beginning of this chapter. In asserting that scholars had not rejected traditions because they were narrated by women, al-Shawkan! shows no awareness of the ways in which gender-related variables had impacted women’s fortunes from the late first/eighth to the early fourth/ninth century. By al-Shawkam’s time, the ambivalence about the value of women’s traditions, including those of Companions such as Busra bint Safwan and Fatima bint Qays, had been overlaid by unequivocal acceptance. This chapter chronicles the resurgence and culmination of women’s participation from the sixth/twelfth to the ninth/fifteenth century through a study of three extraordinary muhaddithas: Shuhda al-Katiba (482-574/ 1089-1178), Zaynab bint al-Kamal (646-740/1248-1339), and ‘A’isha bint Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Hadi (723-816/1323-1413). The lives of these three women manifest parallels and continuities with those of women active in the fourth/tenth century such as Karima al-Marwaziyya and Fatima bint al-Hasan, discussed in the previous chapter, and reflect the relatively stable model of feminine piety and learning that prevailed during the classical and late classical eras. Further, the collective portrait that emerges from their profiles illuminates hallmarks of classical Sunni culture 3 In the context of classical Sufism, the terms zawiya, kbanqdh, and ribdt often refer to physical structures devoted to Sufis and to the provisioning of travelers. The functioning of individual institutions varied; each institution is best understood in its particular historical context. For introductions to the history and evolution of these institutions, see El2, s.v. “ribdt,” “ khankah ” and “zdwiya.”