"Due to the paucity of female authors in Islamic history, there has been a temptation to assume that any Muslim woman who was involved in hadith transmission was a scholar.
Davidson thoroughly demolishes this assumption on the basis of his careful analysis of al-Sakhāwī’s (d. 902/1497) famous biographical dictionary, al-Ḍaw’ al-lāmi‘, and audition notices preserved in Damascus.
He shows that a very small number of female transmitters were in fact scholars, such as Karīma al-Marwazi-yya (d. 463/1070) and Zaynab bt. al-Kamāl (d. 740/1339), which the vast majority of them were lay women.
Part of his evidence for this argument is that these female transmitters were only sought out and audited when they were in their seventies and eighties, once their chains of transmission had become shorter than those of their contemporaries. Given that women who survive childbearing generally live longer than men, the Sunni quest for elevated chains of transmission presented long-lived women with an opportunity to become valued hadith transmitters.
However, this same culture that valued elevation also did not demand that the transmitter be literate or a scholar, and this fact is reflected by Davidson’s finding that female transmitters were always passive participants in their audition sessions and rarely described as having scholarly credentials.
In other words, a man read the hadith book out loud to the audience in the presence of the elderly female transmitter, like what we saw above in the case of al-Ḥajjār. This finding is especially devasting for a book such as Mohamad al-Nadawi’s al-Muḥaddithāt: The Women Scholars of Islam (Oxford 2007), because it means that the vast majority of women mentioned in it almost certainly were lay transmitters who lacked the basic credentials associated with Muslim scholarship."
- Scott Lucas, Associate professor of Islamic Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA, in his review of the book Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission across a Thousand Years (BOSTON: BRILL, 2020) By GARRETT A. DAVIDSON in American Journal of Islam And Society 38:3-4
https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/view/2992/2648
