184 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam emphasis on the legal training of scholars, especially those within the imperial educational hierarchy, along with the proliferation of organized Sufism are dominant characteristics of the early Ottoman era. However, we know little about the specific evolution of hadlth transmission as a distinct field of religious learning in the early Ottoman period. 2 It is, therefore, not clear how Ottoman reforms impacted curricula of study for those within the state-sanctioned Ottoman madrasas or those outside this framework, as many female scholars would have been. Our comprehension of the social impact of Ottoman education would be greatly advanced not just through closer studies of the curricula of Ottoman institutions but also through an analysis of the shifting pedagogical uses of classical texts. One rare study on the content of an Ottoman curriculum revealed that there were twelve works of fiqh and twelve of hadith in addition to several Qur’an commentaries on a list of required books at an imperial madrasa in the mid-sixteenth century. While these numbers at first suggest equivalent treatment of both law and hadlth, a closer examination of the titles shows that the focus of the hadlth curriculum is on the Sahlh collections and their commentaries, indicating a more legally oriented approach to hadlth. Derivative collections such as the ones that our Mamluk nmhaddithas were transmitting have no place in this imperial syllabus. While such collections may have continued to circulate in other settings, it is also quite possible that values from the imperial madrasas guided and shaped the curricula in less formal settings as well. Referring again to Talal Asad’s understanding of “orthodoxy,” we can hypothesize that just as the articulation of hadlth- oriented traditionalist orthodoxy positively impacted women’s hadlth education, the promotion of a new Ottoman orthodoxy with its increased emphasis on law and Sufism generated new criteria and new dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of women in the practice and perpetuation of this orthodoxy. CONCLUSION The period covered in this chapter witnessed a dramatic flourishing of women’s hadlth participation as the culmination of currents set in motion 142 The Turkish Encyclopedia of Islam does not provide much information on hadlth study under the Ottomans or about the endowment of institutions for hadlth study (dur al-hadlth ), further confirming that the field was marginalized and viewed as secondary to other educational pursuits. I thank Susan Gunasti for her observations in this regard. 143 Shahab Ahmed and Nenand Filipovic, “The Sultan’s Syllabus,” Studia Islamica 98/99 (2004): 183-218.