A Culmination in Traditionalism 183 research on women’s positions in these and other Sufi institutions is necessary to determine whether this practice was widespread and what women’s duties were for such positions. With respect to Fatima’s religious learning, Ibn al-Tmad notes that she had beautiful calligraphy, copied out many books, and was well-spoken, pious, and devoted to prayer even in times of illness. Further, he notes that Fatima credited her religious education to her husband, Muhammad b. Mir al-Ardablll. Her remark about her husband’s role suggests a different educational trajectory from that of many others, who launched their careers through paternal support. A survey of Ibn al-Tmad’s biographical notices over the ninth/fifteenth and tenth/sixteenth centuries sheds further light on the nature of the decline in women’s participation. Patterns in terminology describing the educational endeavors of male and female scholars show that engagement with hadith shifted away from preoccupation with narration to hermeneutics that is, away from riwaya to diraya. Ibn al-Tmad’s notices for countless scholars at the beginning of the ninth/fifteenth century employ specialized terms such as qara 'a ‘ala (he read to), ajdza lahu (he granted a certificate to him), and haddatha ‘an (he narrated from) to describe the exchanges between scholars and their students: these are terms indicating a continuity of the culture of hadith transmission as practiced in previous centuries. Entries from the late ninth/fifteenth and early tenth/sixteenth centuries, however, evoke a different milieu. The aforementioned terms become rarer and are replaced with increasing references to the legal and Qur’anic learning of scholars. Additionally, scholars’ affiliations with Sufi tariqas and their achievements in this area are noted with greater frequency, indicating that organized Sufism came to play a greater role in this period. Ibn al-Tmad’s work is a valuable testament to the impact of ninth/fifteenth- and tenth/ sixteenth-century evolutions in the social uses of religious knowledge on the prevalence and practice of hadith transmission among both men and women. This late classical trend is qualitatively different from what occurred in the second/eighth century, a period that witnessed the severe marginalization of women from the profession of hadith transmission even as men continued their robust engagement in this arena. The evidence presented in this chapter accords with what we know of the intellectual and religious milieu of the early Ottoman period. An Further research is necessary before we can decisively conclude that Sufi tariqa- based piety edged out individualistic, hadith-based , ascetic piety. See Christopher Melchert’s “Piety of the Hadith Folk,” IJMES 34, no. 3 (2002): 425-39, for his analysis of the characteristics of early (up to the tenth century) asceticism and piety. 141