2 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam These two accounts bookend several centuries of the history of Muslim women as transmitters of religious knowledge. Even stripped of context, they evoke women’s spiritual aspirations and authority in disparate settings. Ra’ita, the speaker in first report, is the sole earner of her household. Worried that her expenditures on her family prevent her from gaining the heavenly rewards for charitable spending, she takes her concern directly to Muhammad. His reassurance and her transmission of it are preserved in Muslim tradition not merely as a historical artifact. Rather, her narration conveys an authoritative legal precedent to all Muslims about charity. The second account encapsulates Zaynab bint al-Kamal’s educational career, which spanned nine decades. She was taken in her infancy to acquire certification for religious texts that she taught later in her life, apparently undeterred by her opthalmia, an eye disease. In her seniority, she attracted large numbers of male and female students eager to partake of her knowledge. These intriguing descriptions whet our curiosity about Muslim women’s religious learning. What else did Ra’ita transmit? Where does she stand with respect to other Companions who also narrated reports? Did Muslims contest her authority, or Zaynab’s? What does it mean for a two-year-old girl to be brought to teachers, and how does she then go on to transmit that knowledge as a ninety-year-old woman? How did women’s religious learning change during the centuries separating Ra’ita and Zaynab and thereafter? And what do women’s intellectual endeavors tell us about their times? This book, inspired by such questions, uncovers a surprising history, and in the process unsettles two well-known and opposing narratives about Muslim women’s religious education. One view, projecting backward from contemporary news reports about the repression of Muslim women by extremists, reads similar oppression into most of Muslim history. The second, extrapolating from the impressive achievements of well-known early women such as Prophet Muhammad’s wife ‘A’isha bint Abl Bakr (d. 58/678), promotes an unfailingly positive account of educational access and opportunities for Muslim women throughout history. My analysis highlights the fluctuating fortunes of Sunni female religious scholars across nearly ten centuries (seventh-sixteenth centuries) and nuances monochromatic views about their education. These shifting, uneven patterns of women’s transmission of religious knowledge (specifically hadith ) structure the narrative of this book. My central thesis is that Hajar’s biography of Zaynab in this excerpt to emphasize a few salient characteristics of women’s hadith transmission in her time.