8o Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam has been a traditional approach of hadith scholars attempting to organize and evaluate the contributions of hundreds of transmitters throughout Muslim history. The term tabaqa in the context of describing the intergenerational transfer of hadith typically takes into account a variety of factors including the birth and death dates of a scholar and the teachers from whom he or she transmitted traditions. For the purposes of this study, the tabaqa structure employed by Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalan! is particularly useful as it classifies many (164 of a total of 276) of the women included in my data according to twelve tabaqatd Ibn Hajar’s tabaqa structure is not entirely intuitive. He puts the Companions into one tabaqa , divides the Successors into five tabaqat, and the two generations after the Successors into three groups ( tabaqat ) each. These divisions, particularly the ones among the Successors, are based partially on groupings of the teachers of the Successors and also on whether the Successors in each group actually narrated from the Companions or only saw them. It is also important to clarify that the terms “Companions,” “Successors,” and “Successors to Successors” do not correspond narrowly to three distinct generations in early Islamic history. Each group may be further subdivided according to their ages. For example, Abu Bakr (d. 13/634) is among the eldest of the Companions; ‘A’isha (d. 58/678) falls in the subgeneration after him; and Zaynab bint Abl Salama (d. 73/692) is in the younger subset of Companions. These distinctions do not affect my own conclusions. What is important is that Ibn Hajar ’s divisions are correlated with specific periods, allowing me to map trends in women’s participation in concrete chronological terms, even though there are no death dates for most of the 58 The use of tabaqat as an organizing principle is observable in every field of learning throughout Muslim history. For an overview, see El2, s.v. “Tabaqat,” and Ibrahim Hafsi, “Recherches sur le genre tabaqat ,” Arabica 23 (1976): 227-65 and Arabica 24 (1977): 1-41, 150-86. 59 Ibn Hajar, Taqrib, 1:24-26. 1 prefer to use Ibn Hajar’s classification even though it is not as well known as that of al-Dhahabl. Al-DhahabI employed the tabaqa structure in a number of his works including Tadhkirat al-Huffaz, al-Mu ‘in fi Tabaqat al-Mubaddithin, and Siyar A ‘lam al-Nubala ’. For a more detailed discussion of al-Dhahabl’s use of this organizing principle, see Scott Lucas, Constructive Critics, 40-112. There are two major differences between the tabaqat delineated by al-Dhahabl in his Mu ‘in and those of Ibn Hajar in his Taqrib. First, al-Dhahabl begins his periodization with the eldest generation of Successors, whereas Ibn Hajar starts with the Companions. Second, al-Dhahabi classifies a few selected scholars from each generation up to his own in the early eighth/fourteenth century. Ibn Hajar, on the other hand, limits his work to twelve tabaqat, from the Companions up to the generation of al-Nasa’I (d. 303/915). 60 For a more detailed explanation of Ibn Hajar’s reasoning, see Muhammad ‘Awwama’s introduction to Ibn Hajar’s Taqrib al-Tabdhib (Aleppo: Dar al-Rashid, 1991), 42-47.