7« Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam numbers is due in part to hadith credited to ‘A’isha, which number close to 1,370 and account for roughly 66 percent of all traditions narrated by female Companions. Umm Salama also narrates a disproportionately large number of traditions in relation to other female Companions; she is credited with 175 traditions in al-Musnad al-]ami‘. Because ‘A’isha and Umm Salama are not representative of the scale of recorded female participation, it makes sense to consider the numbers if we exclude their traditions from our calculations. We are left then with approximately 520 traditions narrated by women in the Companion generation and approximately 525 traditions narrated by women in the subsequent eleven generations up to the end of the third/ninth century.52 A summary of the data on women’s position in these isnads is as follows. Depending on the date of a given hadith compilation, there are generally between four and twelve narrators, or “links,” in an isnad chain between the Companion and the compiler of the work. " There are 276 women who appear in isnads as links two through four."4 Of the 276 women in links two through four, 244, or roughly 88 percent, appear as link two. Of these 244, several are classified as Companions by one or 52 Here I am using Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalam’s definition of generation (tabaqa), which established a standard measure for hadith transmission. I will discuss his definition in more detail in a subsequent section of this chapter. It should be noted that if we remove the entire isnads of ‘A’isha’s and Umm Salama’s traditions from our earlier count (rather than subtracting only instances in which ‘A’isha and Umm Salama narrate), we are left with only approximately 250 instances of narration by women in the post-Companion generations rather than the 525 instances mentioned previously (since in approximately 275 instances women in the post-Companion generations were narrating from either ‘A’isha or Umm Salama). Another way to gauge women’s contributions is to compare the male-female ratio of narrators in the Companion generation with that of later generations. Al-Musnad al-]ami‘ enumerates approximately 17,800 traditions narrated by men and women. Female Companions narrate approximately 12 percent of hadith. In all the subsequent generations combined, women narrate only 3 percent of the traditions. If we exclude the traditions of ‘A’isha and Umm Salama, we emerge with approximately 3 percent of traditions being narrated by female Companions and a little more than 1 percent for subsequent generations after the Companions up to the end of the third/ninth century. 53 On average, Malik’s al-Muwatta ', as an early compilation, would have fewer links in its jsnads than a later compilation, such as the Sahib of Ibn Khuzayma. I use the numbers four and twelve as rough estimates based on the period encompassed by the compilations. 54 As mentioned earlier, the number of female narrators is drawn primarily from the isnads in al-Musnad al-Jami ‘ and from the notices on women that appear in al-Mizzi’s Tahdhib and al-Husaynl’s Kitab al-Tadhkira. The final tally of female narrators does not include women who are listed simply as “a woman of Banu Sulaym” or “a woman of the Ansar,” as it is impossible to control repetitions in such cases. There are less than ten such instances, so excluding them does not alter my evaluation of female transmission.