Conclusions This book has explored the tradition of women’s hadith transmission and its evolution over nearly ten centuries in the central Islamic lands. The first century and a half of Islamic history witnessed significant rates of female participation, followed by negligible activity for close to two and a half centuries. Around the mid-fourth/tenth century and thereafter, women reemerged as extolled transmitters of hadith. During the Seljuq, Ayyubid, and Mamluk periods (fifth/eleventh to tenth/sixteenth centuries), numerous women achieved superlative reputations, and their transmission authority was coveted by both male and female students throughout the Muslim world. The early Ottoman period (ca. mid-tenth/sixteenth century) is marked by yet another sharp reduction in the numbers of female hadith transmitters. My analysis contextualizes this striking chronology in terms of concurrent developments in Muslim intellectual, political, and social history and highlights the evolving social uses of religious knowledge that help explain these trends. Among the Companions, both well-known and obscure women shared reports about Muhammad and the earliest Muslims. Representing 12 percent of all Companion-Narrators in the major Sunni collections, the female Companions are overall more prolific than women of immediately subsequent generations. They vary tremendously with respect to the quantity and quality of their participation. For example, ‘A’isha and Umm Salama, the most prominent wives of Muhammad, narrated more extensively than other women on various aspects of the Prophet’s sunna. They are also among the few women who regularly display an understanding of the legal import and application of traditions. In this respect, they resemble leading male Companions, such as ‘Umar b. al-Khattab or ‘Abd Allah 186