Introduction 17 perceptions and roles of women in early Islam in general. Finally, I limit my analysis to Sunni Islam and do not include women’s religious learning in other sectarian contexts. The sources that inform this study document women who were active in the urban centers of the Hijaz, Khurasan, Syria, and Egypt, areas with vastly different geographies and their own political, social, and intellectual histories. In presenting case studies, I contextualize the activities of women in terms of the local variables that shaped their careers. The wide-ranging scope of my work permits a greater understanding of the factors that unified women’s educational experiences in spite of the diversity of their specific historical contexts. I have also encountered records of women similarly engaged in far-flung regions including al-Andalus, North and West Africa, the Caucasus, Anatolia, China, and South Asia. I hope that this work will inspire future studies on women’s religious education in other geographical and historical contexts. Although this book spans the first ten centuries of Islamic history, its relevance extends beyond an understanding of early and classical female badltb transmission. My study also contributes to the critical project of historicizing women’s religious activism in the modern period, a prevalent phenomenon in Muslim countries from Morocco to Indonesia. For example, the Qubaysiyyat, a conservative, Sufistic women’s organization originating in Syria, has intrigued both academics and the Western media due to its members’ assiduous and secretive pursuit of Islamic learning. Another prominent example is Farhat Hashemi, who, from her base in Pakistan, has drawn legions of upper-class Muslim women globally into the orbit of traditional Muslim learning. i9 Saba Mahmood’s landmark study of Egyptian women’s religious revival has prompted critical reflection on how Western feminist ideals relate to such contemporary pietistic 1 I analyze representations of Imami women’s hadltb transmission in my article, “Women in Imami Biographical Collections,” in Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic Thought , ed. Michael Cook et al., 81-98 (New York: Palgrave, 2013). See also Mirjam Kiinkler and Roja Fazaeli, “The Life of Two Mujtahidahs: Female Religious Authority in 20th Century Iran,” in Women, Leadership and Mosques: Contemporary Islamic Authority , ed. Masooda Bano and Hilary Kalmbach, 127-60 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 38 For a study of the spread of Qubaysiyyat ideas to the West, see Sarah Islam, “Qubaysiyyat: Growth of an International Muslim Women’s Revivalist Movement in Syria and the United States, 1960-2008” (Master’s thesis, Princeton University, 2010). See also Katherine Zoepf, “Islamic Revival in Syria Is Led by Women,” New York Times , August 29, 2006. 39 For an introductory essay on Farhat Hashemi’s organization, see Khanum Shaikh, “New Expressions of Religiosity: Al-Huda International and the Expansion of Islamic Education for Pakistani Muslim Women,” in Women and Islam, ed. Zayn Qassam, 163-84 (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010).