146 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam that enabled a greater mobilization of women as teachers and students of badith in urban centers west of Khurasan (the regional focus of Chapter 3). Commonly labeled “traditionalism,” this classical cultural matrix came to be equated with Sunn! orthodoxy across the central Islamic lands by about the sixth/twelfth century, once the sustained legal, theological, and sectarian disputes of previous centuries had run their course/ The profiles presented in this chapter enable us to identify common elements of women’s traditionalist education across time and place, from fifth-century Baghdad to ninthcentury Damascus. These features include a characteristic age structure in badith education; license for coeducational exchanges within socially accepted parameters; the persistence of noninstitutional education alongside madrasas ; and the proliferation of lesser, derivative compilations that formed the basis for a course of study in traditionalist circles. The chapter closes with a discussion of the decrease in women’s participation in the early Ottoman period (tenth/sixteenth century) and some reasons for this change. The reemergence of women as badith transmitters in the late fourth/ tenth century, followed by a surge in their numbers from the sixth/twelfth to the ninth/fifteenth century, correlates with the articulation and maturation of traditionalism as a consensus-driven orthodoxy. Distinguished by a tendency to rely on the Qur’an, the badith (as representative of the Prophet’s actions), and the pious early generations ( al-salaf) as the primary sources of religious guidance, traditionalism enabled its adherents to construct and validate their choices through creative and constant reference to the past. The age of the Prophet was unanimously regarded as the golden age, with the corollary that subsequent generations represented a decline in terms of religious practice and morality. Connectedness to the 4 See Roy Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 16-27, for a succinct, insightful commentary on the development of classical Sunnism and his understanding of the chronology of this historical process. The pre-classical debates and their resolutions, the subject of other detailed studies, are dealt with in this book only insofar as they help us understand the environment that cultivated women’s badith participation at unprecedented levels. 5 A number of studies have addressed the significance of traditionalism in Islam. These include Johann Fueck, “The Role of Traditionalism in Islam,” in Studies on Islam , ed. Merlin L. Swartz, 99-122 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Makdisi, “The Sunni Revival”; and Graham, “Traditionalism in Islam.” See also Lucas, Constructive Critics for an extensive study of the development of Sunni Islam and its emphasis on traditionalism. Classical Sunni traditionalism is distinct from modern traditionalist thought, associated with figures such as Martin Lings, Frithjof Schuon, and Sayyid Hossein Nasr. For an introduction to the modern trends, see Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).