The Successors 65 the transmission of religious knowledge.' We can picture the fellow pilgrims in Medina stopping by the quarters of Safiyya, one of Muhammad’s wives, to inquire about a host of practical feminine concerns. Suhayra and her band are not alone. A group of Kufan women have had the same idea. They listen to each other’s questions and together benefit from Safiyya’s answers. The women, aside from Suhayra and Safiyya, are anonymous. Suhayra’s story is that of numerous women of the Successor generation, whether or not their pursuit of knowledge is documented in the hadith collections. Most of them were not hadith scholars gathering all the traditions known to the Companions they encountered. Nor did they demonstrate legal discernment or understanding of Arabic morphology and grammar - skills that came to distinguish more accomplished transmitters. Rather, daily exigencies dictated their hadith learning as they struggled to understand what was expected of them as Muslim women. Not all of their inquiries were about issues specific to women, such as menstruation, childbirth, or domestic concerns. As is clear from the distribution of the subjects of nearly 525 traditions that feature women of the Successor generation in the isnads, women acquired knowledge on a range of issues, including prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, charity, and eschatology/’ Alongside this informal, unregulated transmission by women whose lives are not commemorated in any detail by historians, there are a handful of more accomplished women whose religious knowledge and exemplary 6 It is worth pointing out here that narrative of the type we encounter in Suhayra’s tradition is even rarer than the detailed accounts related by the Companions. As discussed earlier, Companions shaped the narrative structures of the reports and the task of subsequent generations was to memorize and faithfully reproduce these texts. Information about the circumstances under which Successors and subsequent generations of narrators heard the reports is usually not provided. 7 We can only speculate about whether other aspects of this encounter are relayed in reports other than this one wherein the encounter is explicitly described. In the selected compilations, Safiyya is recorded as narrating two additional traditions to women. One of them is to a woman named Umm Hablba bint Dhu’ayb (see Abu Dawud, Sunan, 3:229). The second is to Shumaysa (alternatively known as Sumayya) about how she (i.e., Safiyya), as a Jewish woman, was received among the wives of Muhammad (see Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 6:380, #26858). The texts of the traditions do not, however, specify whether these exchanges transpired in the context of the meeting mentioned earlier. 8 Suhayra herself is described as “an unknown woman” (imra ’a majbula) in her biographical entry by al-Husaynl in his Tadhkira. There is confusion over her name, and the absence of information about her life and her transmission network clearly indicates that she was not known for systematically collecting and teaching hadith. 9 Of the nearly 525 hadith transmitted by women of the Successor generation for which I recorded the primary subject matter, approximately 50 traditions are on topics related to ritual purity, 6 concern divorce, and only 3 are related to marriage.