168 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam session in the garden of a certain Amin al-Dln. 7h Zaynab also held classes comprised of male and female students in al-Madrasa al-Diya’iyya, where her uncle Shams al-Dln held a post, and in the ribat of Ibn al-QalanisI. Another certificate describes an assembly of a little more than 100 students in the large congregational mosque, al-Jami‘ al-Muzaffarl, in 721/1321. Zaynab was among ten other authorities, most of them male, presiding over this assembly. 8 She would have been seventy-five years old at the time. Yet another sama ' reveals that Zaynab convened a class in her home after a Friday congregational prayer. Twenty-one students, male and female, were present at this assembly.8 The date of the certificate, 738/ 1337, places her in her early nineties at the time. Taken at face value, these sama ‘at depict Zaynab as active and thriving at an age well beyond the reasonable life expectancy in the Mamluk period. More broadly, the chronology of Zaynab’s career recalls the issue of age differentials between scholars and their students in the field of hadith transmission as a whole, a feature that is also prominent in Shuhda’s life. As previously noted, before the age of five, Zaynab was granted ijdzas by teachers who were in the final years of their lives. By the time Zaynab was twelve, most of the teachers named in her biographies had died. She is famed precisely for the ijdzas she received from these men and women, and her prominence derives partly from being among their last surviving students. Al-Dhahabi 76 Mu 'jam al-Sama ‘at, p. 41, ms. 1039, risala 7, sama ‘a 5. Four students were present in this majlis for the reading of a work entitled Karamat al-Awliya ’ by al-Hasan b. Muhammad al-Khallal (d. 439/1047). 77 A description of these institutions can be found in Ibn Tulun, al-Qala’id : for al-Madrasa al-Diya’iyya, see 76-84, and for Ribat al-QalanisI, see 85-87. Ibn Tulun has listed both of these as dur al-hadith , indicating that the functions of different educational institutions often overlapped. In addition, his section on al-Madrasa al-Diya’iyya includes a brief description of the post that Zaynab’s uncle, the aforementioned Shams al-Dln, held in this madrasa. Mu ‘jam al-Sama ‘at, p. 89, ms. 3757, risala 10, sama ‘a 11; the text heard at this assembly was entitled ]uz’ fi-hi hadith wahid ‘an Adam b. Abi Iyas ‘Abd al-Rahman b. Muhammad b. Shu ‘ayb al-Khurasdni al- ‘Asqalani (d. 220/835). 79 Mu ‘jam al-Sama ‘at, p. 30, ms. 955, risala 9, sama ‘a 4. Mu‘jam al-Sama‘at, p. 39, ms. 955, risala 9, sama' a 80 (with editorial designation “ mukarrar ”). 81 In a study of women as custodians of property in the Mamluk period, Carl Petry has suggested that Mamluk women enjoyed lower rates of mortality as they were sheltered from the political violence and instability that characterized this era. This made them more attractive as candidates for inheriting property and managing it within individual Mamluk clans. A similar principle may have applied to civilian women’s roles as hadith transmitters in the Mamluk period. See Carl Petry, “Class Solidarity versus Gender Gain: Women as Custodians of Property in Later Medieval Egypt,” in Women in Middle Eastern History, eds. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron, 122-42 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).