6 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam performance has been transmitted) and a future (how the point of the practice can best be secured in the short or long term, or why it should be modified or abandoned), through a present (how it is linked to other practices, institutions, and social conditions). Tradition and its maintenance are valuable not because “traditional practices” are blind imitations of past practices. Rather, discursive traditions enable stable evolution by orienting practices to the past while allowing for modification of original models. Asad conceives broadly of an “Islamic discursive tradition” to address shortcomings in previous anthropological approaches to Islam. Qasim Zaman, in his study of contemporary South Asian ‘ulama ’, draws out the utility of applying Asad’s model to multiple discourses within Islam: the Shari ‘a, classical Islamic historiography, and Sufism are other such examples that Zaman notes. 8 1 extend Asad’s model to understand evolutions in the arena of hadith transmission. In Chapters 3 and 4, I cast the revival of female hadith transmission as exemplifying a discursive tradition in which the ‘ulama ’ as a social class responded to profound changes in the field of hadith studies (such as the canonization of hadith literature and the acceptance of written transmission) and reintegrated women into this arena of Islamic learning. This reintegration, in turn, facilitated adaptation by the ‘ulama ’ to changing political and social orders that accompanied the dissolution of central ‘ Abbasid power and the rise of autonomous dynasties. A second and related foundation for women’s success was that the collective gatekeepers of tradition embraced and sanctioned their accomplishments. Here too Talal Asad’s theoretical insights and conceptual model of “orthodoxy” are instructive. Critiquing the prevalent definition of Muslim orthodoxy as “a specific set of doctrines at the heart of Islam,” Asad defines orthodoxy not as “a mere body of opinion, but a distinctive relationship - a relationship of power.” He continues: “[WJherever Muslims have the power to regulate, uphold, require, or adjust correct practices, and to condemn, exclude, undermine, or replace incorrect ones, 7 Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Occasional Papers Series, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University (1986), 14-15. In developing his outline of tradition, Asad credits the influential works of Alasdair MacIntyre, in particular his After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). See also MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) for further development of his ideas on tradition. Muhammad Qasim Zaman, ‘Ulama’ in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 4-7.