Unearthing and representing women scholars through Tabaqãt works

This thesis brings a corrective to the secondary literature that addresses women's participation in the Islamic intellectual tradition in premodern Islamic societies. While some studies have discounted the role of women in Islamic intellectual production, other studies have affirmed that large numbers of women obtained advanced training in religious sciences in the premodern era, especially in ḥadīth studies. This latter observation has depended predominately or entirely on positivist readings of ṭabaqāt sources (biographical dictionaries) as historical data. They have noted particular chronological trends in the levels of women's educational participation. Specifically, they have described women's education to be limited from roughly the mid eighth to eleventh centuries and flourishing from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. I investigate this characterization of a chronological fluctuation against the backdrop of the ṭabaqāt source(s) consulted. To do this, I consider the existing scholarship on the ṭabaqāt form, and draw attention to the evolving nature of this source, providing context for changes in its intention, content and form. I highlight how these textual evolutions impacted women's representations within them. By connecting the observed trends in women's educational opportunities to observed trends in the written record that depicts them, I draw attention the limitations of positivist readings of ṭabaqāt sources for the retelling of women's lives. Chronological shift in levels of Muslim women's religious education, as depicted in the secondary literature, reflect changes in the primary sources employed by these studies rather than women's lived realities. Faced with the inadequacy of positivist readings of biographical materials for the history of women in Islamic intellectual thought, I offer instead other critical ways of reading these dictionaries through the lens of their evolution and transformation. I locate points of silence, where women are conspicuously absent, and provide novel avenues for reconstructing women's histories at these moments of silence. By highlighting the textual basis for women's shifting representations in ṭabaqāt sources, I raise queries about the historiography of the study of women in premodern Muslim societies at large. I end with a discussion of the importance of fully incorporating women's history into the greater project of modern historical writing