The Successors 81 women who appear in the isnads studied here. Figure 2 charts the numbers of women in links two through four according to Ibn Hajar’s tabaqat. The first group ( Tabaqa 1) consists of Companions who have narrated from other Companions and who therefore would be classified as “link two.” As for the 112 women who are not listed in the Taqrib al-Tabdbib, we can provide approximate classifications based on other sources or on their numerical position in isnads.6 ' Nine of them can be identified as Companions; ninety-six of them are second links who transmitted from Companions. According to Ibn Hajar’s scheme, they may fall in a tabaqa between two and four because the fifth tabaqa designates those who narrated from Successors. A terminus ante quem for their transmission would thus be around the year 125. The remaining seven women are third links. Of these seven, two transmitted from Companions, which again places them in tabaqas two through four. Five of them transmitted from Successors and we may locate them in tabaqas five through nine. Their transmission may have occurred up to the early third/ninth century. Thus, this group of 112 shows a similar distribution across time to the group listed in the Taqrib and confirms the original observation that women’s transmission is seen primarily in the first 150 years of Islamic history and is negligible from the mid-second to the early fourth century. In addition to the low numbers of women overall who participate in the centuries immediately following the post-Companion generation, another striking aspect of female narration up to the fourth/tenth century is its utterly restricted scope for individual women. Two hundred and twenty-three women, approximately 80 percent of our data set, appear in only one isnad in the collections studied. Fifty women narrate between two and fourteen traditions each. Five women - statistical outliers narrate between twenty-one and sixty-six traditions each. Thirteen women are recorded as narrators in the Tabdbib al-Kamal of al-MizzI and Kitab al-Tadbkira of al-Husaynl, but were not found in the isnads checked for this study.6 Judging by their entries in these two works, these 61 For the most part, there is very little information about these 112 women in the biographical sources. Hadlth critics put such narrators in the category of majhiilat (women about whom nothing is known) or write that they do not have enough information to assess a woman’s status as a transmitter (la yu ‘raf halu-ha). The latter phrase is employed in cases where minimal information is available about a narrator. 62 Al-Mizzi’s work provides entries only for the narrators found in the six canonical compilations and in some of the lesser compilations by the authors of these same six compilations. However, in composing the entries and lists of students and teachers, al-MizzI drew on other sources in addition to the canonical works. The same is true of al-Husaynl’s Kitab al-Tadhkira.