Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam the four major Sunni schools of law and an understanding that theological reasoning within acceptable boundaries was permissible. 1 As an orthodoxy, traditionalism enjoyed tremendous success and exercised pervasive influence in the central Islamic lands from approximately the sixth/twelfth to the tenth/sixteenth century. Women were able to promote this orthodoxy because those who articulated its social vision upheld the tradition of female transmission of religious knowledge, as originally instituted by the Companion generation, and adjusted the practice in accordance with their needs in the classical era. The accomplishment of traditionalism in including women comes into sharper focus in comparison with Mu‘tazilism, a rationalist orthodoxy that enjoyed success primarily among the ruling and intellectual elites in the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries. Unlike traditionalists, Mu'tazills appear to have eschewed women’s active participation in the promulgation of their ideology, and we find few records of accomplished female Mu‘tazil! theologians in the annals of Islamic history. This pattern will appear counterintuitive from our modernist perspective, which conditions us to think of rationalist ideologies as more amenable to women’s empowerment and participation and traditionalist ones as being inimical to their interests. Asad’s theoretical contribution sensitizes us to the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that underpin different orthodoxies, which in turn profoundly impact women’s involvement. SOURCES AND METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES Given the centrality of hadith to Muslim life, the traditions and their transmitters were subject to scholarly scrutiny. While women’s lives are largely overlooked in the male-authored annals of Islamic history, their participation in the field of hadith was more diligently documented. As a result, this is one of the few areas of premodern Muslim women’s history for which we have considerable source material. Arabic biographical dictionaries and chronicles are among the most important sources for reconstructing women’s hadith participation. These include compilations arranged according to generations of scholars and noteworthy persons, such as the Tabaqat of Ibn Sa‘d (d. 230/845) and the Siyar A'lam al-Nubala ’ of al-Dhahabl (d. 748/ 1348), as well as centenary dictionaries, such as al-Durar al-Kdmina fi 12 Marshall Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 1:276-79 for an introduction to his use of the term Jama ‘I Sunnism. See also Venture of Islam, vol. 2 (passim), where he describes the spread of this understanding of Sunnism across the Muslim world during the classical eras.