A Tradition Invented 2-3 additional historical sources is combined, the following features appear as salient characteristics: 1 . Irrespective of the gender of the narrator, an eyewitness encounter with Muhammad was the only prerequisite for a Companion to narrate reports. That is, the narrations of women were not considered less reliable than those of men. Considerations of whether the narrator was versed in the Qur’an and its sciences or in Arabic grammar, or whether she even possessed basic literacy, were immaterial. Given the rudimentary state of Muslim education after Muhammad’s death, it is anachronistic to conceive of standardized criteria that may have qualified a man or woman to transmit reports. Indeed, we cannot even assert the existence of a field of hadith transmission proper during these early decades. 1 Only in the second century do we see fledgling efforts by scholars to elaborate on the qualifications of a hadith transmitter. 2. Women’s relaying of reports about Muhammad’s actions and speech was in large part an ad hoc enterprise. While some male Companions are reported to have taught in study circles, this is seldom true of women. 1 Rather, female Companions transmitted knowledge in response to specific inquiries about diverse matters from ritual obligations to marriage and divorce, and the virtues of Muhammad and his family. 3. Female Companions typically transmitted within localized kinship and clientage (mawla) networks.1 This is as opposed to transmitters (male and female) of later generations whose networks were 11 Studies of education in early Islam concur that pedagogy took place in study circles (halaqas) in mosques, homes, and public spaces and that recitation and memorization of the Qur’an was central to these circles. Small schools ( kuttabs ) devoted to the study of the Qur’an were among the first institutions specifically devoted to pedagogy. For a general introduction to Muslim education in early and classical Islam, see Jeffrey Burke, “Education,” in The Islamic World , ed. Andrew Rippin, 305-17 (New York: Routledge, 2008); Ahmad ShalabI, Ta’rikh al-Tarbiya al-Islamiyya (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahda alMisriyya, 1966), 44-136; and Sebastian Gunther, “Be Masters in that You Teach and Continue to Learn,” in Islam and Education , ed. Wadad Kadi and Victor Billeh, 61-82 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 12 For a succinct overview of the development of early Sunni hadith criticism, see Brown, Hadith , 77-86. 13 Muhammad Mustafa Azami, Studies in Early Hadith Literature (Indianapolis: American Trust Publications, 1992), 183-99. 14 The term mawla in the context of this chapter generally signifies a patron-client relationship. In early Islam, such bonds, contracted between Muslim Arabs and non-Arabs and between freed slaves and their prior owners, facilitated the management of relationships in