IZ Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam hadith collections date from the late second/eighth to the late third/ninth century, we can at the very least use them to explore what was ascribed to women and in circulation about them in the period contemporary to the compilers of these collections. Through these hadith and the associated biographical literature, we can also extract the profiles of the women who were portrayed as narrating the hadith. Thus our historical evidence permits us to address several questions: Were the female narrators remembered as scholars or more as purveyors of oral tradition acquired through happenstance? To what extent does the portrayal of the narration activity of the female Companions resemble that of women of the Seljuq, Ayyubid, and Mamluk periods? And how did Muslim women who were culturally and religiously restricted in their interactions with men negotiate a field of learning that placed a premium on direct contact and oral transmission between students and teachers? Even though we cannot decisively answer the question of the authenticity of any of the hadith ascribed to women of the earliest generations, we can certainly arrive at conclusions about the perceptions that later generations had regarding female participation in the transmission of religious knowledge. A final methodological comment concerns the type of hadith that I use for this study. The first two chapters, focusing on early hadith transmission, draw data from the six authoritative collections (, al-kutub al-sitta)11 as well as from the Muwatta ' of Malik b. Anas (d. 179/796); the Musnad collections by al-Humaydl (d. 219/834), Ibn Hanbal (d. 241/855), ‘Abd b. Humayd al-Kissi (d. 249/863), and al-Dariml (d. 255/869); and the Sahlh of Ibn Khuzayma (d. 311/924). There are other important Sunni 21 The six collections are as follows: the Sahlh collections of al-Bukhari (d. 256/870) and Muslim (d. 261/875) and the Sunans of Ibn Maja (d. 273/887), Abu Dawud (d. 275/889), al-Tirmidhl (d. 279/892), and al-Nasa’I (d. 303/915). 22 All of the previously named collections have been indexed in a musnad fashion (i.e., according to the Companion narrating the reports) by al-MizzI (d. 742/1341) in his Tuhfat al-Ashraf bi-Ma‘rifat al-Atraf, 13 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Gharb al-Islaml, 1999), and also in the modern compilation al-Musnad al-]ami‘, compiled by Bashshar ‘Awwad Ma‘ruf et al., 22 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-JIl, 1993). In general, the traditions ascribed to female Companions in these two index compilations do not differ much from those in other indices drawn from other collections. A comparison of traditions ascribed to women in these indices with those in Ibn Hajar al-‘AsqalanI’s Ta'jil al-Manfa‘a bi-Zawa’id Rijal al-A’imma al-Arba‘a (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 1996) reveals uniformity in terms of overall content and subject matter attributed to female Companions. The differences lie primarily in the numbers of traditions ascribed to each woman in different compilations. To a much lesser extent, there are differences in terms of the Successors to which the female Companions narrate. The Ta ‘jil al-Manfa ‘a lists the narrators who do not appear in one of the four canonical works, namely the Sahibs of al-Bukhari and Muslim and the Sunans of al-Tirmidhl and al-Nasa’I (i.e., the zawa ’id rijal al-a ’imma al-arba ‘a), but who do appear