A Culmination in Traditionalism 179 madrasas tutored individual students and presided over classes in mosques and private homes. Generally, women participated as teachers and students of baditb through study circles in private homes or mosques. As Berkey notes, throughout Islamic history, “education remained fundamentally informal, flexible, and tied to persons rather than institutions.”126 This informality and the persistence of the educational process in diverse locations such as private homes, libraries, and literary salons clarifies how women studied and taught in spite of their formal exclusion from institutions such as madrasas. In light of these alternative modes of education, it is not unusual that the mubadditbas discussed here were granted numerous ijazas and that they disseminated this knowledge to other baditb students. Ibn Hajar notes that Zaynab collected ijazas from scholars of Aleppo, Damascus, Baghdad, Jericho, Harran, Alexandria, and Cairo, and that students crowded around her to read great works with her. Similarly, the reputations of Shuhda and ‘A’isha attracted itinerant students to their study circles. A final characteristic of this collective portrait pertains to the works studied and transmitted. As previously noted, these works are primarily compilations of baditb on particular topics of Muslim ritual and ascetic piety as well as some of the major canonical collections. Tegal commentaries, theological tracts, and Qur’anic exegeses are listed less frequently. There are several possible explanations for the apparent preponderance of the field of baditb in the scholarly activity of women. Among them is that learning and then teaching works of fiqh, theology, or Qur’anic exegesis required prolonged and uninterrupted years of study ( mulazama ), often with one or more shaykhs.12 ' Such contact between men and women who were not married to each other was not condoned. Further, demands placed on women by marriage and child-rearing may have rendered such devotion to education difficult. Our evidence on this issue is uneven. Zaynab did not marry and attained remarkable success. Shuhda and Fatima bint al-Hasan (discussed in Chapter 3), on the other hand, were supported by their husbands in their endeavors. In addition to the time demanded by the study of law or theology, the fact that such subjects were commonly studied and taught under the auspices of madrasas, facilitated 125 Berkey, Transmission of Knowledge, 171; and Roded, Women in Islamic Biographical Collections, 76-78, 85. 126 Berkey, Transmission of Knowledge, 18. 127 Ibn Hajar, al-Dnrar, 2:210. 128 Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 128-29, and Berkey, Transmission of Knowledge, 179-80.