6z Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam Female Companions were credited with sayings on a large variety of subjects. While Muhammad’s wives were a popular locus for reports concerning ritual purity, marriage, or divorce, they did not narrate exclusively on these topics. Rather, a woman’s traditions were often set in the context of her contact with Muhammad, which in turn could give rise to reports on a host of topics. Finally, there is no apparent concern among biographers for portraying these women as literate, educated, or scholarly. Because we know very little about literacy in the early Islamic period or about the extent of other religious knowledge that these women had, it is difficult to assess how learned they may have been. It is fair to say that there is very little evidence that literacy or legal acumen was a prerequisite for transmission of reports on the part of these female Companions.1 vS ‘A’isha’s case appears exceptional as she was learned in poetry, medicine, mathematics, and genealogy. In general, the Companion-Traditionists were commemorated because they were contemporaries of Muhammad, and as such their experiences were valid precedents subject to the scrutiny of later generations. This picture changes with later generations of female baditb transmitters, whose careers and reputations were in fact based on their mental capacities, and in particular their retentive abilities. A corollary of the observation that the female Companion-Narrators were not always scholars is the fact that they do not appear to have been decisive authorities for legal disputes. In general, female Companions are not portrayed as faqihas (those endowed with the requisite knowledge and acumen for legal discourse). This depiction confirms their limited roles as rawiyas, that is, as narrators of reports that they passed on to future generations with no control over their use in legal discourse. We may readily imagine that the female Companions served as role models for women of subsequent generations who wished to emulate their predecessors. Flowever, an overview of the participation of women from the second/eighth to the fourth/tenth century reveals that this was not the case. The next chapter discusses the female Successors and the rapid demise of women as transmitters of religious knowledge. 158 This observation pertains to the world of male traditionists as well because the transmission of reports, unlike law, was more open to the participation of lay classes of society who may have had little formal training in the religious sciences.