Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam movements.4 Yet, the dearth of rigorous analyses on women’s religious participation in early and classical Islam hinders our appreciation of the way in which the activities of modern Muslim women relate to and draw on the past. My own work complements scholarship on contemporary women’s Islamic activism and elucidates continuities and ruptures. The history of women as badlth transmitters in early and classical Islam has mixed implications for contemporary feminist discourse about Muslim women’s agency and empowerment. In interpreting the significance of gender in premodern eras, leading historians such as Joan Scott and Caroline Bynum have cautioned that questions borne of feminist concerns run the risk of producing anachronistic analyses. ’ 1 Mindful of this danger, I aim to represent women’s commitments in terms of the historical contexts that produced them. To understand the fluctuating trends of Muslim women’s participation in early and classical Islam, we must avoid reading into our texts either misogyny or alternatively explicit desires to empower women. As I show in Chapters 3 and 4, women’s agency expressed by a subversion of patriarchal norms is not a theme in the dramatic increase of Muslim women’s pious activism in the classical era. Rather, what was at stake was the faithful preservation of Muhammad’s legacy, an endeavor intended in no small part to counter deleterious factors such as the perceived corruption of the times and the ever-increasing temporal distance from the life of the Prophet. The mass reproduction and consumption of traditionalist literature and the promotion of short chains of transmission (isnad [pi. asariid] ‘all) back to Muhammad were measures taken to mitigate this damage. These impulses rendered women authoritative in limited contexts. It would stretch our imaginations as well as the historical realities conditioning these women’s actions to view them as reflections of the concerns that animate contemporary feminist discourses. The ranges of action of classical Muslim women were constrained by the norms of their communities, which channeled their intellectual potential toward badlth transmission rather than law or theology. It is through embracing and upholding those norms, not subverting them, that they acquired stature and, in all likelihood, personal fulfillment. 40 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Joan Scott “Gender: A Useful Category for Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1055; and Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 8-9 and epilogue. For an articulation of similar concerns for the field of medieval Muslim women, see Julie Scott Meisami, “Writing Medieval Women: Representations and Misrepresentations,” in Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam , ed. Julia Bray, 47-87 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 74.