 Initially, I assumed that these women's names had been covered and forgotten for much the same reason that Western women's lives have been ignored or indeed the lives of formerly enslaved or indigenous people had been ignored, that the old saw that history is written by the powerful. But within the context of many traditional Islamic cultures, the erasure of women seemed to be coming out of a more complex space. It was a kind of linguistic purda, a shielding of women's names out of cultural respect for modesty. The shake explained that many Muslim families, particularly in the earlier centuries, didn't want the names of wives, daughters or sisters on registers of classrooms or madrasas or mosques. This was essentially just a kind of broad definition of the concept of hijab, commonly used to denote Muslim women's head coverings, but more broadly, the modesty required by both men and women. For the shake, it was painstaking work collecting these scraps of information. It was also lonely. When he started, he was at the think tank. We both met at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, where despite his brilliance in Islamic societies, he seemed to be tasked with sort of low level translation work, combing through biographical dictionary for an atlas of the Islamic world or translating letters, asking for funding for a fancy new building that the center was building. Like the women scholars, he was chronicling. His work was pushed into the margins by the mainstream, I think. So the shake had to pursue this on weekends and holidays, but he kept at it, not just as a dutiful scholar uncovering the past, but also as somebody who became increasingly concerned about what this hidden history might be able to do to help women of the present. It attained a certain more pressing moral urgency for him. I watched as over the years. One link to what he began to see as fair access to intellectual resources, the right of every Muslim woman to be able to fulfill what the Prophet said. He told his followers to seek knowledge unto China. I knew his interest in it had shifted from a sort of academic project, compiling another biographical dictionary to something more, not just because I heard him talk about his high aspirations for his six daughters, but because one day he framed it in light of Jahaliyah, the Arabic term, and again, if I mangle that, please correct me, for the ignorance that reigned in Arabia before the advent of Islam. He told me one day, as we discussed how horrible it was that the Taliban were blowing up girl schools in northern Pakistan, he said, preventing women from pursuing knowledge is akin to the pre-Islamic custom of burying girls in the Middle East. God has given girls alive. Cultural barriers to women's education was exactly the same as this pre-Islamic custom. God has given girls qualities and potentials, he said, and if they aren't allowed to develop them and not given opportunities to study and learn, it's basically a live burial.