Exploring the Role of Female Successor “Amrah Bint Abd Al-Raḥmān” in Narration of Prophetic Traditions

Although several studies have investigated the contribution of Muslim women about their lives and works in large corpus of the ḥadīth sciences until now, but much are needed to be explored. Doubtlessly 'Amrah bint 'Abd al-Raḥmān had contributed to the large corpus of the ḥadīth sciences and also the core of Islamic knowledge parallel to her male counterparts. By highlighting her efforts for learning and her struggle for transmission of fundamental text, reveals how a female successor acquired exemplary reputations in her era. Particularly, her rich insight, deep knowledge in ḥadīth sciences and exemplary piety attracted students and placed parallel to her male counterparts in Islamic knowledge of her time. In sum, this study not merely sheds light upon the prolific contribution of an eminent female successor 'Amrah bint 'Abd al-Raḥmān in ḥadīth narrations, but argues that these scholarly females should be given more credit for being interacting educators and not just transmitters. Doubtlewssly, the study would be helpful to revise our understandings of Islamic knowledge during early period of Islam regarding gendered dynamics and their great contribution to dissemination and transmission of classical text and Islamic knowledge.

Synthesis of Amino Acids by Click Chemistry

This dissertation is about the synthesis of amino acids i.e. L-alanine, D-phenylalanine, D-homoalanine, D-ornithine and D-lysine using Strecker synthesis. For this purpose, different aldehydes were treated with ammonia to synthesize imino derivatives which are treated with aqueous solution of cyanides. The resultant α-aminonitriles are subjected to acidic hydrolysis to form α-amino acids. Furthermore, the synthesis of nickelocene amino acids was then carried out using click chemistry. Moreover, nickelocene is first treated with acetic anhydride in the presence of phosphoric acid then acetyl nickelocene was obtained. After acetylation of nickelocene the compound acetyl nickelocene was reacted with phosphorous oxychloride in the presence of inert atmosphere at 0 °C then an organometallic novel compound of ethynyl nickelocene was synthesized as a precursor for variety of new compounds. To follow the click chemistry methodology this above titled compound ethynyl nickelocene was further reacted with different azides of amino acids like 3-Azido-L-Alanine, 4-Azido-D-phenylalanine, 4-Azido-D-Homoalanine, 5-Azido-D-Ornithine and 6-Azido-D-Lysine in the presence of CuI as a catalyst to obtained nickelocene amino acids. Click chemistry is a synthetic approach in which small building blocks are used or joining two or more than two reagents to make practical and best reliable chemical transformations. In this synthetic approach chemists synthesize the novel compounds and the precursors for further synthesis with greater yield. The applications of click chemistry are numerous especially in drug discovery, combinatorial chemistry, bioconjugation, and research in DNA and proteomics. The use of click chemistry also extended to find structure activity relationship between different chemicals to produce analogue of chemical libraries. There are different types of click reactions performed by the researchers. Here copper catalyzed cyclo-addition reaction was performed to synthesize the novel organometallic compounds. The coupling reactions in which terminal alkynes and azides are taking part and follow the “Copper catalyzed cycloaddition reactions” methodology in click chemistry. The synthesized nickelocene amino acids (organometallic compounds) were characterized by FT-IR, 1HNMR and 13CNMR respectively. Antimicrobial activity of synthesized bioconjugates was also evaluated against various bacterial and fungal strains such as Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, Streptococcus pneumonia, Alternaria alternate, Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus niger.