1 6 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam methodology to explain patterns in women’s activity from Egypt to Iran over the course of nearly ten centuries in the context of broader currents in Sunni Muslim intellectual and social history. My analysis bears out the view that major developments in Muslim history cannot be fully grasped without an inquiry into the dynamics of gender relations. The emergence of the ‘ulama ’ as a social class and their increasing use of hadith transmission to forge communal identity has been highlighted by Richard Bulliet, Jonathan Berkey, and Michael Chamberlain. My work complements their studies with a thorough investigation of how women’s educational activities perpetuated scholarly networks across time and place. I also draw on the insights of George Makdisi and William Graham who, among others, have elucidated the doctrinal history of Sunn! traditionalism. ,5 I extend the purview to consider the social construction of orthodoxies as a process implicating women as well as men. The demands of manageability circumscribe the scope of my study in three respects. First, my selection of haditb compilations means that I focus on women’s transmission of religious knowledge that was deemed authoritative in the context of the broader legal project of systematically articulating Sunni law and normative practices. Women who transmitted other types of reports, such as akbbdr, are not represented. Second, I do not analyze haditb in which women or issues related to them are mentioned but for which the ascribed authorities (after Muhammad) are all male. The latter would entail a separate study on broader issues of the social female haditb transmitters but contains numerous entries about them and provides valuable references to archival material as well. Richard Bulliet, The Patricians of Nish apur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Bulliet, Islam: A View from the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Berkey, Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo ; Berkey, The Formation of Islam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 149-51, 224-30; and Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus. 35 George Makdisi, “The Sunni Revival,” reprinted in History and Politics in Eleventh Century Baghdad (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1991). William A. Graham, “Traditionalism in Islam.” 36 As mentioned earlier, akhbar are distinct from hadith in that their ultimate source is someone other than Muhammad (e.g., a Companion). Moreover, akhbar often have isnads that are deemed unsound in the world of hadith transmission; that is, they often carry interrupted chains featuring weak transmitters. For a discussion of these reports, the disparate projects represented by hadith and akhbar ( sira-maghazi ), and their value as historical sources, see Shahab Ahmed, “The Satanic Verses Incident in the Memory of the Early Muslim Community: An Analysis of the Early Riwayah s and their Isnads ” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1999), 14-30.