190 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam evidence presented here does not establish that the female Companions or Successors to whom these traditions are attributed are actually the ones who uttered them. Rather, it indicates that any fabrications that may have occurred are likely to have taken place in the earliest phases of hadith transmission in a milieu in which women’s participation was still readily accepted and not closely regulated. In this atmosphere, forging a hadith with a woman in the isnad would not have undermined the authority of the haditb itself. I thus conclude that hadith credited to women other than ‘A’isha and Umm Salama are likely to have originated in the first century. As such, these traditions can be valuable in the reconstruction of the earliest period of Islamic social, political, and legal history, an era for which our sources are notoriously scarce. Ultimately, traditions must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis as to their authenticity and dating." However, the hypothesis presented earlier may well serve as a starting point from which to test individual traditions narrated by women. Returning to the chronology analyzed in this book, the prolonged absence of women from the field of hadith studies beginning in the second century makes it difficult to imagine that women would ever reclaim authority in this domain. Yet in the late fourth/tenth century, we see increasing references to revered and accomplished women who were accepted as authoritative transmitters of various hadith compilations. The impediments that had earlier curtailed women’s activities were mitigated not by women’s agency but by happenstance. The compilation of the canonical collections, the rise in written transmission, and the triumph of Sunni traditionalism generated alternative uses for religious knowledge, which in turn favored women’s reentry into this domain. The activities of muhaddithas in the post-fourth/tenth-century revival were qualitatively different from those of female Companions. The latter are depicted as composing hadith narratives, and some of them interpret the legal significance of their reports for contemporary seekers of knowledge. Indeed, Companions (both male and female) are endowed with a creative influence that did not extend to later generations of men and 5 Here it is worth noting that Harald Motzki, using a different methodology, convincingly dates the tradition of Fatima bint Qays (on her divorce) to the earliest decades of Islam. His quantitative analysis is one method that helps identify hadith that are likely to have originated in the first century and that can in turn serve as historical sources to nuance our understanding of a variety of issues. See Harald Motzki, Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence: Meccan Fiqh before the Classical Schools, trans. Marion Katz (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 157-67.