Women couldn’t stay in madrasas—they had no separate rooms for female students—but some women, particularly from prominent scholarly families, pursued their studies and managed to achieve a high level of scholarly attainment. Thirty-seven biographical dictionaries listing prominent scholars and interpreters of the Quran preserve the names of hundreds of female scholars. Twenty-three percent of the scholars listed in one dictionary written in 1201 turned out to be female. Multiple female scholars attained sufficient scholarly eminence that men, including those who weren’t their relatives,
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