Introduction 3 women’s initial participation - a largely ad hoc, unregulated enterprise was sharply curtailed by the professionalization of this field in the early second/eighth century, only to be resuscitated in the mid-fourth/tenth century as “traditionism” and “traditionalism” became prevalent expressions of Sunni Islam. Hadith transmission emerged early on as the principal arena for Muslim women’s religious education. Conveying Muhammad’s words, decisions, and actions on innumerable matters, hadith constitute the bulk of normative religious knowledge transmitted from the earliest decades of Islam. They are vital as sources of law, second only to the Qur’an, and as records of the early Islamic past. After the death of Muhammad, his Companions (those Muslims who had actually met him) became valued sources about the practice of the new faith. Men and women participated in a free, unregulated exchange of information. This matrix produced the tradition of the female haditb transmitter and provided a template that would be revisited and refashioned to accommodate the needs and visions of subsequent generations of Muslims. Over the course of ten centuries, women’s participation in hadith transmission rose and abated in four distinct phases. In Chapter 1, 1 treat the earliest decades of Islamic history, when many female Companions shared their firsthand knowledge of the Prophet. The communal memory of Muslims preserves not just numerous sayings from ‘A’isha bint Abl Bakr, but also the few words of more obscure women such as al-Jahdama, known to us only because she reported seeing Muhammad with henna in his hair. Further, some women of this first generation are portrayed as interpreting the legal significance of reports with a view to guiding and shaping Muslim practice. As may be expected, several of the Prophet’s wives are prominent transmitters during this period. This early acceptance of women as authoritative sources for information about Muhammad quickly faded - a development that I analyze in Chapter 2. By the end of the first century, these sayings were increasingly deployed to serve political, legal, sectarian, and theological agendas. Forgery became rampant, prompting widespread calls for professionalization and more stringent criteria for determining valid transmission. Legal 3 I use traditionism to refer to the view that upheld the importance of hadith reports in deriving Islamic law and that promoted this view through accurate transmission of them. Traditionalism, on the other hand, references a broader outlook and implicates not just the derivation of Islamic law but also approaches to understanding Muslim history and to mitigating inter-madhbab division among Sunnis. I discuss my usage of this term later in this introduction and provide a more detailed analysis of its historical dimensions in Chapter 4.