Introduction 5 period when women reemerged as celebrated teachers of hadlth . 1 Bourdieu has prompted us to think of capital not just as accumulated material resources, but also as assets that can accrue in the form of social dispositions and cultural goods, which in turn confer coveted status and upward social mobility. Women’s accumulation of hadlth learning during the classical period translated well into cultural capital and lent status to the scholarly families who supported their endeavors.'1 Women’s resounding successes from the fourth/tenth to the ninth/fifteenth century were built on two foundations. First, their participation was seen as a continuation of established tradition, based on the precedent of the prominent female transmitters of the Companion generation. However, notwithstanding the appearance of and claims to continuity, the roles of female Companions were distinct from those of women of the classical era. The former, as witnesses to Muhammad’s life, were authors of the accounts they narrated. Some of them were also sought out for their opinions on legal, ritual, and credal matters. In their time, the reports lacked the formal structure of hadlth , namely an isnad (chain of transmission) appended to a distinct matn (text). The formulaic accounts preserved in the collections of hadlth should not mask that their contribution lay in the very origination of these reports. By contrast, women of the classical period were honored primarily as faithful reproducers of hadlth proper, which by their time had been sifted and arranged and had generated extensive commentary. Additionally, women of the later eras are praised in the historical literature for embodying feminine piety by espousing asceticism and engaging with hadlth transmission from the cradle to the grave. Talal Asad has distilled the theoretical underpinning of such reworking of past models in his outline of an Islamic discursive tradition, thereby providing a framework for analyzing evolutions in the forms and contents of women’s hadlth transmission. Asad states: A tradition consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given practice that, precisely because it is established, has a history. These discourses relate conceptually to a past (when the practice was instituted, and from which the knowledge of its point and proper 5 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” trans. Richard Nice, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson, 241-58 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986). 6 Michael Chamberlain has also applied Bourdieu’s ideas to his analysis of practices associated with religious learning in classical Muslim societies. See his Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190-1350 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).