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Introduction
This article sheds light on the forgotten history of women religious scholars in the pre-modern period of Arab Muslim societies. 1 The research follows trends in recent historical studies that have demonstrated the active presence of women in the public sphere through the practice of various professions and occupations. 2 Women's legal rights, their ownership of property, their diverse charitable work, their commercial and investment activities in pre-modern Ottoman times before the nation-state and its administrative disciplinary models have all been subjects of innovative research and important contributions. 3 These studies have dismantled assumptions about modernity and its relation to women's history, about the opposition of modern Enlightenment to traditionalism, about the actual origins of the ideological separation of private and public spheres, domesticity, and other issues. In this vein, the present reading is also meant to dispel stereotypical notions about the characters, lives, and social context of Muslim elite women in Mamluk societies.
Specifically, it is in the area of religious learning and activity that research about women's presence and involvement in their societies and about social interactions can be revealing. The topic here is not so much the "image" or "representation" of the "feminine" in religious texts, but rather Muslim women as historical agents, as subjects not objects. Indeed what was the contribution of women in medieval societies to the fields of religious knowledge, as well as to the teaching or dissemination of these sciences? In what way did they have access and to what branches of this learning? How did the participation in disseminating take place and what characterizes the environment in which it happened? Did this activity provide them with authority and an opportunity to articulate/reveal a gendered identity?
It has always been pointed out that the foremost problem in this field is the general scarcity of formal historical sources and its scattered nature in this particular period of pre-Ottoman times, hence no court records or archives. Such information can be found either in biographical dictionaries that document the lives, births, and deaths of prominent figures in special categories and professions, or can be "hunted" and "dug out" from other types of sources. 4 The information can be very brief and concise, which gives great importance to paying attention to...