In this panel paper, I will advance a reading of al-Jahiz’s Risalat al-Qiyan, (The Epistle of the Singing Slave-Girls) arguing that the epistle is in part an extension—in the area of relations between the sexes—of the author’s longstanding struggle against the influence of proto-Sunni Traditionists (the hushwiyya as he labels them in other texts). The epistle is written pseudonymously as the work of traders in singing female slaves muqayyinun, who defend the legitimacy of their trade while all but admitting that it is often a cloak for prostitution and other transgressions against Muslim norms. In crafting their response to their prudish detractors—whom I read to be closely identified with elements of the hushwiyya—al-Jahiz alternates bold parody of the traders’ hypocrisy with subtly-reasoned defenses of the relatively-free interaction between the sexes that their trade entailed. A sort of hidden dialectic arises between their arguments, strong and dubious, and what can infer were the critiques of their detractors, which seemed to have been similarly varied in quality. The reader is prompted to search for a mean position on the legal and social issues raised between the extreme views portrayed in the epistle. The muqayyinun become al-Jahiz’s mouthpiece in critiquing the textual foundations and reasoning underlying the strictures on gender relations enjoined by the hushwiyya. At the same time the muqayyinun embody an opposing, licentious position in relation to which al-Jahiz can portray his critique of the hushwiyya as a golden mean. Moreover, the casuistry with which the muqayyinun argue for their position against the hushwiyya, reveals how the latter’s use of strictures derived from texts and legal principles without due consideration of the divinely-ordained purpose behind Muslim law can even be twisted into justifications for prostitution and other excesses. The epistle famously closes with al-Jahiz’s claim to be an innocent transmitter of the text he has found, whether it originates from the muqayyinun, from their accomplices or from interlopers on their trade. In so doing he parodies the hushwiyya, who, in their transmission of received rules and texts, fail to consider how they may be contributing to social ills such as the more sinister practices of the muqayyinun. The principle source for this presentation will be the text of R. al-Qiyan in the editions of Beeston and Harun, along with studies by Pellat and Cheikh-Moussa, the arguments of which it will build on and also critique.