Abstract
This notice about Sa‘īda, a companion of Ja‘far al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765), the sixth Shī‘ī Imām, provides an intriguing view of female religious learning and authority in early Shī‘ī history. Privileged with access to the Imām’s teachings, Sa‘īda was known to have learned some traditions (ḥadīth) from him, including the waṣiyya of the Prophet, a text dealing with his will and testament.3 The entry, albeit brief, raises many questions about women’s religious participation in early Shī‘ism. This chapter engages with a few of these questions through a study of selected early and classical Imāmī biographical works, a genre that focuses on transmitters of religious knowledge.
I would like to thank Hossein Modarressi for his comments on an earlier draft of this chapter and for sharing his own notes on one of the women examined here. This chapter constitutes a dhayl of my doctoral dissertation on Sunnī women’s hadīth transmission written under the guidance of Professor Modarressi. All mistakes, of course, remain my own.
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Notes
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© 2013 Michael Cook, Najam Haider, Intisar Rabb, and Asma Sayeed
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Sayeed, A. (2013). Women in Imāmī Biographical Collections. In: Cook, M., Haider, N., Rabb, I., Sayeed, A. (eds) Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic Thought. Palgrave Series in Islamic Theology, Law, and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137078957_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137078957_5
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