56 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam women, discussed below. Nevertheless, biographers focus on her military achievements perhaps as a means to enhance her reputation as a haditb transmitter. women’s pledge of allegiance (bay‘at al-nisa’) A recurrent theme in the biographies of female Companions is the formal pledge of allegiance to the Prophet. The following Qur’anic verse outlines the prerequisites for women desiring to convert to Islam: O Prophet! If believing women come unto you, taking pledge of allegiance unto you that they will ascribe nothing as partner unto God, and will neither steal nor commit adultery nor kill their children, nor produce any lie that they have devised by their own effort [lit. between their hands and feet], nor disobey you in what is right, then accept their allegiance and ask God to forgive them. Lo! God is Forgiving, Merciful. 1 ’ Ibn Sa‘d begins his section on the biographies of women with an excursus on the topic of their pledge of allegiance to the Prophet. While the accounts indicate that on at least one occasion, the Prophet entered into a formal covenant with women after the hijra, there is no consensus as to who may have been present for the pact(s). It may also have been that such pacts were a routine in which Muhammad outlined the demands of the new religion to women and offered them a chance to accept it. The specific circumstances of these pledges aside, later biographers viewed reports of pledging as a mark of distinction. Many of the women included in this study are said to have offered allegiance to the Prophet. For some women, it is their only claim to fame. Salma bint Qays, for example, is known for only one tradition, in which she seeks clarification from Muhammad on a stipulation of the pledge: that women should not 137 Qur’an, 60:12. It is not clear whether the Qur’anic injunction regarding the pledge of allegiance was intended for every woman who wished to accept Islam or limited only to those who accepted Islam against the wishes of their families and fled to Medina after the Pact of al-Hudaybiyya (6 AH). See also Asma Afsaruddin, “Reconstituting Women’s Lives: Gender and the Poetics of Narrative in Medieval Biographical Collections,” Muslim World 92, no. 3/4 (2002): 461-80, for Afsaruddin’s interpretation of the evolving treatments of the women’s pledge of allegiance in classical Muslim literature. 8 It is not clear what, if any, practical differences in terms of social status existed between women who did not take part in a formal pledge and those who did.