4 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam acumen, linguistic training, direct (face-to-face) contact with teachers, and an ability to undertake long, arduous, solitary journeys in order to acquire even a single report became a sine qua non for accomplished transmitters. Most women could not compete in this environment, and their participation dropped precipitously, remaining negligible for the next two and a half centuries. Remarkably, in the mid-fourth century of Islamic history, women reemerged as trustworthy sbaykhas coveted for their religious learning and revered for their piety. In Chapter 3, I assess how new developments, among them the canonization of baditb collections, the growing acceptance of written (as opposed to oral) transmission, and the increased incidence of kinship-based groupings within the scholarly class ( ‘ulama ’), created favorable conditions for this trend. The revival drew strength from precedents of the female Companions whose contributions as transmitters of reports were recalled in modeling feminine piety and religious learning. Chapter 4 explores how the ascendancy of Sunni traditionalism as an orthodoxy provided the final impetus for a full-scale mobilization of women in this arena from the sixth/twelfth to the ninth/fifteenth century. My narrative ends with another sharp contraction in female participation in baditb transmission in the late Mamluk and early Ottoman period (tenth/sixteenth century). Here, the trajectory of women’s religious education takes a different turn as attested by scattered references in the contemporary literature to their legal training and increasing involvement with organized Sufism. This latter period of decline is therefore substantively different from the one that occurred during the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries. To make sense of how trends in women’s education are intertwined with a host of social, intellectual, and political factors, I draw on interdisciplinary theoretical insights. Studies on the sociology of education, for example, have highlighted the multiple social uses of knowledge. In this vein, the history of women as baditb transmitters affirms that evolving social uses of religious knowledge (specifically baditb) shaped women’s educational access and participation. Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the different forms of capital is helpful in understanding the trend in the classical 4 For an introduction to this field (in contexts other than the Islamic one studied here), see Alan R. Sadovnik (ed.), Sociology of Education (New York: Routledge, 2007). See also Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (eds.), The Sociology of Knowledge, 2 vols. (Northampton: Edward Elgar, 1999), for seminal articles in the field and an overview of its development.