i94 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam to evolving circumstances. In the Christian case, for example, Herbert Grundmann highlights the pious engagement of European women from the late twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries. He correlates a rise in such activity with Pope Innocent Ill’s reforms, which redrew boundaries between orthodox and heterodox movements in an attempt to bring new, popular religious movements (many of which incorporated women) into the Church’s orbit.1, Talal Asad’s model of discursive tradition and orthodoxy sensitizes us to the strategies of medieval Europeans who validated women’s engagement by recasting “tradition” in order to effectively respond to their unique cultural and historical contexts. This model may also prove fruitful for understanding Jewish women’s evolving engagement with the Torah and Talmud. Although premodern Rabbinic Judaism proscribed women’s scriptural learning and teaching, some Jewish women excelled as religious authorities, mastering both the Torah and the Talmudic traditions.1 Their strategies for rationalizing their education within the discursive traditions of Rabbinic Judaism allow us to see similarities in Jewish and Muslim women’s religious education as well as contrasts between them. My final concluding point concerns the relevance of this history for contemporary concerns about Muslim women’s educational access. Widespread news reports about the denial of such rights by extremists unfortunately mask the reality that Muslim women’s religious education is flourishing and attracting women across the socioeconomic spectrum in diverse global contexts. Yet the forms and purposes of such education have been molded to local exigencies such that the early and classical lineages, as presented in this book, are unacknowledged or barely recognizable. An example from contemporary Syria illustrates this disjuncture. In 2001, the Madrasat al-Hadith al-Nuriyya for women enrolled its first students. Situated in the Old City of Damascus, this institution’s walls adjoin the Umayyad mosque, where ‘A’isha bint Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Hadi held her hadith assemblies in the ninth/fifteenth century. And a few streets away, in the mosque where Umm al-Darda’ is said to have taught in the 15 Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). Caroline Bynum has devoted her landmark Holy Feast and Holy Fast to uncovering the significance of food for pious, ascetic women during this period, which witnessed greater opportunities for women’s religious participation. 14 See, for example, the discussions on Jewish women’s engagement with the Torah in Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe , trans. Jonathan Chipman (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2004), chapters 7 and 8.