of the divine law, which limited the number of his free wives to four.  We are told that, as a matter of simple caprice, he exercised the power of divorce seventy (according to other traditions ninety) times.  When the leading men complained to Aly of the licentious practice of his son his only reply was that the remedy lay in their own hands, of refusing Hasan their daughters altogether.[63] Such are the material inducements, the “works of the flesh,” which Islam makes lawful to its votaries, and which promoted thus its early spread.

[Sidenote:  Practice in modern times.  The Malays of Penang.  Lane’s testimony concerning Egypt.  The princess of Bhopal’s account of Mecca.] Descending now to modern times, we still find that this sexual license is taken advantage of more or less in different countries and conditions of society.  The following examples are simply meant as showing to what excess it is possible for the believer to carry these indulgences, under the sanction of his religion.  Of the Malays in Penang it was written not very long ago:  “Young men of thirty to thirty-five years of age may be met with who have had from fifteen to twenty wives, and children by several of them.  These women have been divorced, married others, and had children by them.”  Regarding Egypt, Lane tells us:  “I have heard of men who have been in the habit of marrying a new wife almost every month."[64] Burkhardt speaks of an Arab forty-five years old who had had fifty wives, “so that he must have divorced two wives and married two fresh ones on the average every year.”  And not to go further than the sacred city of Mecca, the late reigning princess of Bhopal, in central India, herself an orthodox follower of the Prophet, after making the pilgrimage of the holy places, writes thus: 

Women frequently contract as many as ten marriages, and those who have only been married twice are few in number.  If a woman sees her husband growing old, or if she happen to admire any one else, she goes to the Shereef (the spiritual and civil head of the holy city), and after having settled the matter with him she puts away her husband and takes to herself another, who is, perhaps, good-looking and rich.  In this way a marriage seldom lasts more than a year or two.

And of slave-girls the same high and impartial authority, still writing of the holy city and of her fellow-Moslems, tells us: 

Some of the women (African and Georgian girls) are taken in marriage; and after that, on being sold again, they receive from their masters a divorce, and are sold in their houses—­that is to say, they are sent to the purchaser from their master’s house on receipt of payment, and are not exposed for sale in the slave-market.  They are only married when purchased for the first time....  When the poorer people buy (female) slaves they keep them for themselves, and change them every year as one would replace old things by new; but the women who have children