7 6 Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam other female Successors resident in Mecca had traditions in their possession that could have been widely disseminated, especially during the Hajj season. However, Safiyya is the only Meccan female Successor to have attained significant recognition in the sources studied. Her uniqueness reinforces the idea that the potential for female participation was rarely actualized and that women were marginal in this arena very soon after the Companion generation. The following aspects of women’s hadith participation in the generation immediately after the Companions are worth highlighting. First, none of the women studied is known to have assiduously collected hadith from a broad range of Companions in the manner of ‘Urwa b. al-Zubayr or other prominent male Successors. Their authority is mostly based on their narrations from one or two Companions. Second, there is little evidence of an intergenerational female network of transmission after the Successors. These women narrate predominantly to male authorities. While all of them are likely to have passed some of their knowledge onto other women, such transmissions were not recorded as part of the arena that came to be defined as formal hadith transmission. Rather, women’s learning and teaching of reports was subsumed under other activities such as pious asceticism and popular preaching. A few women, such as ‘Amra and Umm al-Darda’, were explicitly remembered for their legal discernment ( fiqh ), but it was more common for women to be remembered only as reliable traditionists who may not have had a command of the legal application of the sayings they were relating. Finally, the collective careers of all of the prominent Successor women end with the close of the first century. The accomplishments of women in this domain would not manifest themselves again for nearly 250 years. THE DEMISE OF WOMEN’S PARTICIPATION Although the decline in the quantity and quality of women’s hadith participation was profound and pervasive, it has not yet attracted sustained scholarly analysis. The inclusion of significant numbers of female Companions in isnads and the historical evidence of prominent female hadith scholars from the mid-fifth century onward has produced a mistaken assumption of women’s participation on an uninterrupted continuum from the first century AH until well into the Mamluk period (ca. 648-922/1250-1517). For example, M. Z. Siddlql asserts that “at every period in Muslim history, there lived numerous eminent women-traditionists, treated by their brethren with reverence and