Understanding Muslim women’s approach to Islam in the absence of extensive documentary archives has long proved to be an elusive task. In the context of the premodern Persianate world, scholars have paid much attention to a unique Persian text titled ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ (The Beliefs/Dogmatics of Women), also known as Kulthūm Nana after the name of one of its protagonists. This short treatise purports to be a collection of the opinions of a number of learned female authorities on a variety of issues relating to Muslim women’s religious practices. But the text was in fact intended to be a satirical parody of women’s way of engaging with Islam. Recent studies have mostly concentrated on reading the inevitably mediated content of the text as a rare window onto ordinary Muslim women’s religious life in Safavid Iran. My paper in comparison highlights the vast networks of the text’s circulation between Iran, Central Asia, and India from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. In doing so, this paper shifts our focus from recovering subaltern lives to examining the epistemological and affective works that the text performed in various historical contexts. Methodologically, this paper switches from the commonly used published edition of ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ to closely reading multiple manuscripts as well as early printed versions, most of which have never been carefully analyzed before. The textual variations between these copies reveal the complicated afterlives of ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ spanning across much of the Persianate world from Bukhara to Madras and from Tabriz to Delhi. This paper thus argues that these processes of circulation and adaptation attests to a lasting tension embedded in the text of ʿAqāʾid al-nisāʾ between the idea of a distinctly feminine form of knowledge-making and its perceptions among male scholars. While the text was intended to be a satire of women’s religious knowledge, this tension creates an excess of meaning that disrupts the original authorial intention. It exposes how the very definitions of knowledge in both the Islamic and the modern Western intellectual traditions have been profoundly gendered.