176 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam Ibn Hajar ’s al-Durar al-Kdmina and in al-Sakhawi’s al-Daw ’ al-Lami ‘ were awarded ijdzas before the age of five. 1 1 6 The phenomenon of transmission authority passing from the very old to the very young has been observed in other regions of the Muslim empire. Richard Bulliet’s study of tenth/sixteenth- and eleventh/ seventeenth-century Nishapur assessed the significance of age in male teacher-student relationships and noted similar patterns.11 Using a sample of 200 teachers in Nishapur, Bulliet notes a trend among haditb teachers to have young students, particularly in their final years of teaching. Haditb study often began as early as age four with fathers or uncles taking notes for children in these “classes.” The teachers that haditb students had at a young age appear frequently in their biographies. The practice of granting ijdzas for haditb transmission to the young appears to have intensified beginning in the fifth/eleventh century and peaked around the tenth/sixteenth century. The increased passion over these centuries for acquiring the shortest possible chain of transmission either back to Muhammad or to the compiler of a given work helps account for the rise in ijdzas, which, as discussed in Chapter 3, did not require face-to-face transmission and came to be associated with less stringent standards. Ultimately, the quest for the isndd ‘all proved to be a boon for women’s participation in this arena. That the very old transmitted to the very young is understandable in light of the preference for short isnads. That many of the transmitters, among them our three case studies, lived to ages rarely seen in the classical period prompts scrutiny. There are reasons to believe that reports of such ages do not fall in the realm of myth-making. The practice of recording birth and death dates had become more commonplace by the Mamluk period and may well have been linked to the popular quest for isndd ‘all. Also, many of our records for this era are primary sources that record the birth and death dates of women and men who were more short-lived as well as those blessed with longevity. However, the process of “natural selection” that occurred in the quest for the shortest chains of transmission meant that biographical 116 This is readily observed through a perusal of these two dictionaries as well as Kahhala’s compendium, A 'lam al-Nisa Roded has made similar observations in her study Women in Islamic Biographical Collections, 70-71. 117 Richard Bulliet, “The Age Structure of Medieval Education,” Studia Islamica 57 (1983): 105-17. 118 Berkey, although he did not conduct the same type of quantitative analysis as Bulliet, draws a similar conclusion regarding age structures in educational relationships during the Mamluk period (see Transmission of Knowledge, 177).