Conclusions 191 women in their capacities as reproducers of these texts.'" In this limited capacity, around the mid-fourth/tenth century, prominent female transmitters acquired superlative reputations, and knowledge seekers throughout the Muslim world sought to include their narrative authority in their own isnads. These muhaddithas, in turn, helped perpetuate the traditionalist ethos that emphasized ascetic piety and devotion to the legacy of Muhammad and the early Muslim exemplars. In this context, women were acclaimed for embodying the virtues promoted by classical Sunni traditionalism and for propagating traditionalist literature via short isnads. Their participation waned again by the beginning of the Ottoman era as a result of a decreased emphasis on hadith narration and a concurrent focus on studying hadith as an auxiliary to law. This history of women as hadith transmitters leads to a reconsideration of two well-promoted positions in Muslim women’s studies. The first concerns the impact of traditionalist Sunn! Islam on women’s public participation. Several recent analyses have advanced the view that this brand of Islam has restricted women’s mobility and active participation in the public sphere. Y et this book shows that it was precisely this strain of Islam that successfully mobilized numerous women in Sunni circles after the fourth/tenth century and engaged them in the public arena of hadith transmission. A second misconception is that women’s range of mobility and status were highest during the first century of Islam and suffered irreversible decline thereafter due to imperial expansion, the absorption of womendemeaning patriarchal values from neighboring Byzantine and Sassanian cultures, and the legal codification of these misogynistic values. ’ Accordingly, women’s activities and influence came to be largely restricted to the domestic realm throughout the early and classical periods. It was only in the nineteenth century that Western discourse about women’s rights, coincident with European imperialism, infiltrated the Muslim 6 Other enterprises in the field of hadith study did permit creativity and individual authorship. These included the tasks of composing commentaries on hadith , exploring their legal significance, and compiling authoritative collections of traditions. Male scholars of the post-Companion generations immersed themselves in these labors, but we have no evidence that women followed suit in significant numbers. See, for example, Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender, Fatima Mernissi, Women s Rebellion and Islamic Memory (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1996); and Asma Afsaruddin, “Reconstituting Women’s Lives.” 8 A range of studies have advanced this position. They include the early works of Lichtenstadter and Stern as well as the more recent studies of Leila Ahmed and Barbara Stowasser.