The muhaddithat: Aisha ﵂ and the women of the transmission

Half of the community

In the previous article we followed Abu Hurayra ﵁, the most thoroughly documented transmitter of the first generation, and saw how his corpus was written down, counted and checked by his students. But whoever tells the history of the hadith as a history of men alone tells it wrongly. Among the strictest correctors of that very Abu Hurayra ﵁ stood a woman whose authority in the community no one disputed, and in the census of writing Companions ﵃ that was treated two articles ago, women too, alongside the men, appear with their own numbered entries. This article is about them: the muhaddithat, the women who carried hadith, taught it, corrected it, and let it circulate in written form.

Why does this subject deserve a place of its own on this map? Because the presence of women in the chains of transmission is no marginal phenomenon but a structural feature that says something essential about the reliability of the whole. A community that entrusted its most sacred heritage in part to the testimony of women, that recorded that testimony with name and origin, and that decided the greatest legal questions by means of it, behaved like a community that truly wished to know what its Prophet ﷺ had said and done. And conversely: every theory that would dismiss the corpus as a later construction must also explain away these hundreds of female links, together with everything the biographical literature set down about them.

The subject demands precision, for much is claimed about it in popular literature that the sources will not bear. We therefore hold to the method that carries this entire map: what Mohammad Mustafa al-Azami ﵀ documents in his Studies in Early Hadith Literature is told with page reference; what the classical literature offers beyond that is expressly identified as classical; and where the sources fall silent or hesitate, we hesitate along with them. Precisely with this subject it will become clear that the documented reality needs no exaggeration. A transmission in which women of the earliest hour appear as teachers of men, and in which the greatest scholars of the second century copy a woman’s books, speaks for itself.

That the women of the house of the Prophet ﷺ bore an obligation of their own in the preservation of his legacy is, moreover, no construction of later centuries; the Qur’an itself, in the sura of the Confederates, addresses them directly:

The classical commentators have most often understood the Wisdom named here alongside the verses to mean the Sunnah, the teaching of the Prophet ﷺ as it sounded within his houses. However one weighs that interpretation, the verse sets down what history then shows: the houses of the Prophet ﷺ were houses of learning, and the women who dwelt in them were addressed as bearers of what was heard there. What they remembered, as the verse asks, they passed on, and the community recorded it from their mouths.

Aisha ﵂: the memory of the house of the Prophet ﷺ

Every treatment of the muhaddithat begins with Aisha ﵂, Umm al-Mu’minin, the Mother of the Believers. Azami’s census opens her entry with a statement impressive in its sobriety: a very great number of ahadith is transmitted from her. She belonged to the most productive transmitters of the entire first generation, and her material is of a kind of its own. She transmitted not only what was said in the mosque, but what happened in the house: the prayer in the night, the dealings with the household, the illness and the dying of the Prophet ﷺ. Great parts of the picture the community possesses of the inner life of its Prophet ﷺ exist because this woman passed them on.

Concerning her literacy the census is exact in the way a good source ought to be exact: by marking the limit of what can be known. It is certain that Aisha ﵂ could read; whether she also wrote herself is hard to establish. It is repeatedly reported that questions were put to her and that she wrote answers, but Azami notes here that the Arabic word katabat, she wrote, could in the usage of that time also be used when a letter was dictated by her and penned by another. For the evidentiary question of this map that distinction makes little difference, and it is important to see why. A dictated letter is a document just as much as a letter written by one’s own hand: the words were fixed by the authority herself, the text was sent, received and preserved. The transmission of Aisha ﵂ demonstrably ran over paper, whoever held the pen.

For that she let her knowledge go out in written form is documented at the highest political level of her time. Mu’awiya ﵁, by then caliph in Damascus, wrote to her more than once with the request to set down ahadith for him in writing, and she sent them to him in written form. He did the same with other Companions ﵃, among them al-Mughirah ibn Shu’bah ﵁, but that the ruler of the empire turned by letter to a woman for the words of the Prophet ﷺ says everything about where authority over those words was sought. Ziyad ibn Abu Sufyan too wrote to her for ahadith; her answer is known, though the sources do not report with certainty whether it was in writing. And in her possession were documents of an older layer still: she transmitted two letters, two Kitaban, from the Prophet ﷺ himself, which were found in the scabbard of his sword. Whoever has read the article on the Sahifa of Ali ﵁ will recognise the image: the sword as the portable bookcase of the earliest community.

With all this one must consider how long her teaching lasted. Aisha ﵂ outlived the Prophet ﷺ by decades and died only in the year fifty-eight after the Hijra. For nearly half a century young Companions ﵃, and then the generation of the Successors, could come to her with their questions, and the classical literature describes how they did just that: whoever in Medina wished to clarify a matter of prayer, fasting, marriage or the legacy of the Prophet ﷺ found in the house by the mosque a living witness who had experienced it from within. For the question of the reliability of the hadith that long period of teaching is of inestimable value. It means that the material of the house of the Prophet ﷺ did not reach the community through a single early transmission, but could be drawn from the same source and verified again and again for decades, in thousands of separate moments of teaching, by students who could then compare one another’s notes.

Around Aisha ﵂ there arose, moreover, precisely what arose around every great teacher of the first century: a circle of students who wrote. The foremost among them was her nephew Urwah ibn az-Zubair ﵀, the son of her sister Asma. Of him Azami notes without ado that he wrote down the ahadith of Aisha ﵂. Urwah ﵀ grew into one of the great systematisers of his generation: he began writing early in his life, taught methodically, dictated to his students, insisted on revision after writing, and is reckoned among the first to set the biography of the Prophet ﷺ down in a coherent record, a pattern that later compilers such as al-Zuhri ﵀ would follow. The knowledge of the house of the Prophet ﷺ thus did not flow anonymously into the community; it ran through a named, writing student whose work will recur at every one of the following links of this map.

The woman who corrected scholars

There is a second role of Aisha ﵂ that for the reliability question of the hadith is at least as important as her own transmitting: the role of corrector. In the classical literature an entire genre is devoted to her istidrakat, her critical remarks on the transmissions of other Companions ﵃; the later scholar az-Zarkashi ﵀ gathered them in a work of his own, al-Ijaba. That genre falls outside the corpus of Azami’s study, and we therefore mention it here only as a classical datum. But one trace of it does stand in his book, and it is a telling trace. When Azami discusses the attacks on Abu Hurayra ﵁, he points out that the objection Aisha ﵂ raised against him was, according to the sources, no objection to his transmissions themselves, but to his manner of transmitting, the pace at which he narrated. The detail is small, but the implication is great: within the first generation there existed a working critical culture, in which a woman had the authority to weigh publicly the method of the community’s most productive transmitter, and in which the later tradition carefully preserved that judgement, including its precise import.

That critical culture is the real answer to a question sceptical readers might raise here: was the material of women taken just as seriously, checked just as strictly? The transmission itself turns the question around. In the canonical collections the ahadith of Aisha ﵂ do not stand in a separate, milder category; they run through the same chains, the same biographical dictionaries and the same criticism as those of the men. And conversely she herself functioned as a touchstone for the material of others. A transmission culture that let its women function both as source and as critic does not behave like a culture busy legitimising a fabricated corpus after the fact; it behaves as what, according to the documents, it was, a community that placed truth above person.

The other women in the census

Aisha ﵂ was the greatest, but she was not alone. Whoever goes through the census of fifty writing Companions ﵃ finds among the men five women with their own numbered entry: besides Aisha ﵂ herself these are Asma bint Umais ﵂, Fatimah ﵂ the daughter of the Prophet ﷺ, Fatimah bint Qais ﵂ and Subai’ah al-Aslamiyah ﵂. Five out of fifty: no majority, but no footnote either, and the variety of their documents is once again the most striking feature.

There is, first of all, Fatimah ﵂, the daughter of the Prophet ﷺ himself, who died already in the year eleven after the Hijra, a scant few months after her father. Of her the census notes in a single line that she wrote down some ahadith of the Prophet ﷺ. A single line, but what a line: the writing of hadith reached into the very house of the Prophet ﷺ, during his life or immediately after, with the woman who of all people stood closest to him.

There is Asma bint Umais ﵂, the woman who lived through the early emigration to Abyssinia and who was later married in turn to Ja’far ibn Abi Talib ﵁, Abu Bakr ﵁ and Ali ﵁. Of her the census records that she possessed a collection of ahadith of the Prophet ﷺ. A collection: no loose recollection, but a gathered whole that was passed on as a unit.

There is Fatimah bint Qais ﵂, whose name lives on in the legal literature through her precise account of her own case of divorce. The census documents in her case the dictating form of written transmission: Abu Salamah wrote down her ahadith while she dictated. A letter of her hand or from her mouth is also mentioned, sent to Usamah ibn Zaid ﵁, in which she described the condition of the Prophet ﷺ.

And there is Subai’ah al-Aslamiyah ﵂, whose case resounds in the inheritance and marriage law of all the legal schools: the young widow who gave birth shortly after the death of her husband and was told by the Prophet ﷺ himself that her waiting period was thereby completed. Decades later, when a dispute arose among the scholars over precisely that question, Amr ibn Utbah and the great Kufan scholar Masruq ﵀ wrote to her with the request for clarification about the ahadith of the Prophet ﷺ concerning the idda. She answered with a letter in which she, so the source says, gave a full account of the events and the accompanying teachings of the Prophet ﷺ. One must pause a moment over what happens here. A legal question divides the scholars; the decisive witness is a woman; they turn to her in writing; and her written answer, from eyewitness to questioner, settles the matter. That is no decorative presence of women in the transmission. That is the transmission itself, functioning at its best.

The cases of Fatimah bint Qais ﵂ and Subai’ah ﵂ show, moreover, something else that is essential to the nature of the early corpus. Their transmissions are no general pious sayings that anyone could have passed on; they are precise, person-bound legal cases, in which the transmitter herself was the party and the Prophet ﷺ gave the ruling in her own affair. Such transmissions are by definition singular to their source: only the one concerned could bring them into the world. That the legal schools of later centuries treated these women’s transmissions as evidence, weighed them, and in their mutual debates tested them again and again against the original wording, shows that the authority of a transmission in this science hung upon the chain and the witness, and not upon the sex of the one who carried it.

The next generation: students who became teachers

With the death of the last sahabiyyat the female line did not end; it moved to the generation of the Successors, and there too the census documents it with name and page number.

Mu’adhah bint Abdullah al-'Adwiyah ﵂ of Basra transmitted ahadith from Ali ﵁ and others; the classical literature names among her sources also Aisha ﵂, with whom the women of Basra were wont to lay their questions about prayer and purity. In her case Azami notes a detail that in this whole article may weigh the heaviest: Yazid al-Rashk possessed her ahadith in written form, and Shu’bah ﵀ copied her books from the copies of Yazid. Her books. The woman from Basra left behind a written corpus, and the man who transcribed it was no ordinary figure: Shu’bah ibn al-Hajjaj ﵀ is reckoned, as is told at length further on in this map, among the founders of the critical science of transmitter criticism. The strictest examiner of his generation held the books of a woman worth the copying. In the chain of evidence that this map builds, from sahifa to Sahih, one of the links thus demonstrably runs through the writing-room of a muhaddithah.

Umm ad-Darda’ ﵂, the younger bearer of that honoured name, scholar of Damascus and widow of Abu ad-Darda ﵁, stands in the census with an entry of her own: she wrote ahadith for Sulaiman ibn Zaitun. The classical literature draws around this sober line a broader portrait of a woman in whose teaching circle in the mosque of Damascus men and women took part, down to a caliph among her listeners; we pass that portrait on here for what it is, a classically transmitted image, and hold for the evidence to what the census bears: she wrote, and there was writing from her. Here too it holds that the sober line of the catalogue weighs more heavily than the richest portrait, for a line with a chain and a name behind it is verifiable, and verifiability is the coin in which this whole science pays its debts.

The school of Medina: from Aisha ﵂ to the caliphal command

To see how the knowledge of the muhaddithat flowed into the main stream of the transmission, one must follow the school of Medina in the generation after Aisha ﵂. Her knowledge was carried there by two students from her nearest circle, a man and a woman, and from both a documented line runs to the systematic recording of the hadith.

The man was her nephew al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ﵀, the son of her brother Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr, who was raised as a child in her household and grew into one of the seven great jurists of Medina, as the classical literature counts them. In Azami’s census of the Successors he stands with an entry of his own, and that entry names who transcribed from him: Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn Hazm and Talhah ibn Abd al-Malik al-Aili set his ahadith down in writing. The first of those two names should seem familiar to the reader of this map: it is the judge and governor of Medina from the house of Amr ibn Hazm ﵁, the same man to whom Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ addressed his famous command to write down the hadith. The chain is thereby complete, and it is no reconstruction but a sum of documented links: the knowledge of the house of the Prophet ﷺ, carried by Aisha ﵂, passed on to her foster-son al-Qasim ﵀, set down in writing by the very recipient of the caliphal command.

The woman was 'Amrah bint Abd ar-Rahman ﵂ of Medina, the student who grew up in the household of Aisha ﵂ and after her death was held to be one of the most important bearers of her knowledge. When Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz ﵀ around the year one hundred gave his command to set down the hadith systematically in writing, he pointed, so the classical transmission of that decree relates, expressly to her circle: what rested with 'Amrah ﵂ in knowledge was to be recorded. That dossier has been treated at length earlier in this map and falls outside the corpus of this article; here it suffices to establish that at the moment the state let the transmission be officially recorded, the knowledge of a woman was named in particular as something that must not be lost. Whoever lays the two lines side by side sees that the question whether the transmission of Aisha ﵂ made it into the record is no matter of trust: both channels along which her school passed on her knowledge demonstrably issue in the pen.

In the same generation stands Hafsah bint Sirin ﵂ of Basra, sister of the Ibn Sirin ﵀ who elsewhere in this map marks the birth of the isnad requirement, recorded in the classical literature as a scholar and Qur’an-reciter of rank; that a house which brought forth the critical chain-requirement also brought forth a learned daughter marks the climate of those circles. And whoever runs down the centuries to the very transmission-history of the canonical books meets a woman once more: Karima al-Marwaziyya ﵂, whose reading of the Sahih of al-Bukhari ﵀ was among the most sought-after of her time, as was already touched upon in the article on the rihla. The line of the muhaddithat is thus no episode that closes with the first generation; it runs as an unbroken thread through the whole history of the transmission, from the house of the Prophet ﷺ to the reading-halls where the canonical books were handed down.

Thirty chains for one act

How seriously the later science of hadith took the material of the muhaddithat can finally be read off from a single technical example, which Azami himself cites in his discussion of the great numbers. Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀, the great systematiser of Nishapur whose work forms the closing piece of this map, gives in one chapter of his Sahih some thirty different isnads for one single hadith, and that hadith concerns one single act of Aisha ﵂: the cleaning of a garment. Thirty independently documented routes for one domestic detail, transmitted by a woman. Whoever wishes to know whether the transmission of women was treated as second-rank in the apparatus of the science of hadith finds here the answer in the form of a tally: no forger would raise thirty chains for the cleaning of a garment, and no science that mistrusted women’s material would collect thirty for it.

The example bears, moreover, a physical point that is given a leading role further on in this map. Of the Sahih of Ibn Khuzaymah ﵀ an original manuscript folio has been preserved, and the page of which Azami prints a photocopy in his appendices is precisely a page connected with this subject: the chapter around the transmission of Aisha ﵂. The oldest tangible trace of that monument of systematic hadith science thus shows, when one opens it, chains that converge upon a woman. It is no coincidence; it is a faithful reflection of how the corpus is put together.

That same example incidentally unmasks the reversal proposed in sceptical literature, as though the hadith corpus were constructed in male scholarly circles of the third century. A construction chooses its foundations; it builds upon what gives its builders authority. But the corpus as it stands rests in hundreds of places upon the testimony of women: upon the domestic eyewitness account of Aisha ﵂, upon the legal case of Subai’ah ﵂, upon the books of Mu’adhah ﵂ that Shu’bah ﵀ copied. The chains through these women have not been retouched away or anonymised; they stand with name, origin and student-list in the biographical dictionaries, and the greatest collectors built upon them without hesitation. A transmission that deals so with its women bears the mark of a community that passed on what it had truly received.

What the sceptical theory must do with this

Finally it deserves attention what the presence of the muhaddithat means for the sceptical theories that this map treats at length in its later articles. The projection thesis, the idea that the chains of the hadith were constructed backwards in the third century, must explain every link in every chain as a fabrication that slipped through the community’s critical apparatus. For the female links that task becomes heavier still than it already was. The biographical dictionaries on which transmitter criticism rested treated the women, after all, with the same systematics as the men: Ibn Sa’d ﵀ devoted in his Tabaqat a section of its own to the women, and the later rijal works down to Ibn Hajar ﵀ included the female transmitters with name, origin, teachers and students. Whoever wished to invent a chain through Mu’adhah ﵂ or 'Amrah ﵂ had thus not only to name a name, but to hit upon a documented woman who at the right moment in the right city had sat with the right teachers, and whose known circle of students would not give the invented transmission the lie. The apparatus described elsewhere in this map under the science of Jarh wa-Ta’dil stood undiminished around the women.

There is, moreover, something that makes the female chains witnesses of a particular kind. Much of what has been transmitted by way of the muhaddithat concerns the inner side of life: the house, the family, purity, marriage, the last days of the Prophet ﷺ. That is precisely the material for which no public alternative existed; no preacher on a minbar could invent what only a wife could have seen, without his invention foundering at the first test against the actual members of the household. That the community could receive this material solely by way of the women of the house, and did in fact receive it by way of them, with chains that have withstood the criticism of centuries, belongs among the quietest but strongest arguments for the authenticity of the whole.

Toward the sea of knowledge

The census gave us the breadth of the first generation, Abu Hurayra ﵁ the depth of one transmitter, and the muhaddithat showed that this depth was borne by both halves of the community. Now the map returns to the circle of the young students around the Companions ﵃, to the man who as a boy begged for the teaching of dozens of elders and grew into the teacher of an entire school.

In the next article we follow Abdullah ibn Abbas ﵁, the cousin of the Prophet ﷺ who was called the sea of knowledge. We shall see how he questioned dozens of Companions ﵃ about one single event, how his teaching was organised over fixed days and subjects, how writing went on around him until his books rested with his students, and how out of his circle the science of tafsir and hadith of the following century came forth. The line of the written word, which we saw running through the women of the transmission, appears there again: what was set down in the first generation, by men and by women, became science in the second generation, and the names of the muhaddithat travelled along in the chains of that science, into the books the community stores to this very day.