The Successors 83 Number of Haditli fi gure 3 : Graph of the Number of Haditb Narrated by Women of Post-Companion Generations As this figure reveals, the post-Companion generations can hardly be considered prolific transmitters. Only eight women, approximately 3 percent of the total, appear in the isnads of more than ten badith. This picture of the diminishing significance of female traditionists is further reinforced when we reconstruct the circumstances of their narration. Many of these women are identified in biographical sources only through mention of their reports or the remark, unhelpful for our purposes, that they narrated reports and were deemed acceptable narrators. In forty-four cases, women are identified only through a male relative, appearing as “sister of x” or “aunt of y.” Given the paltry information on many women, it is difficult to ascertain what, if any, special qualifications they had as transmitters. Whereas in the decades immediately after the Companions there are a handful of women who distinguish themselves as transmitters, the same is not true for the generations immediately after the Successors. In links three and four (roughly the period from 110/728 to 180/796), just before women’s prolonged disappearance from the hadlth records, their activity is severely constrained. As mentioned previously, of the 276 women in our database, thirty are third links and only two are fourth links. The thirty women who narrate as third links contribute one tradition each in twenty-eight cases and two traditions in the remaining two cases. Half of them are doomed to anonymity in the rijdl works. In Ibn Hajar’s Taqrib, many of them are designated as women about whom no judgments can be