[60] See Sura ii, v. 88.

[61] Sura iv, 18.  “Exchange” is the word used in the Koran.

[62] Each of his widows had 100,000 golden pieces left her. Life of Mohammed, p. 171.

[63] “These divorced wives were irrespective of his concubines or slave-girls, upon the number and variety of whom there was no limit or check whatever.”—­Annals, p. 418.

[64] Lane adds:  “There are many men in this country who, in the course of ten years, have married as many as twenty, thirty, or more wives; and women not far advanced in age have been wives to a dozen or more husbands successively.”  Note that all this is entirely within the religious sanction.

[65] Pilgrimage to Mecca, by her highness the reigning Begum of Bhopal, translated by Mrs. W. Osborne (1870), pp. 82, 88.  Slave-girls cannot be married until freed by their masters.  What her highness tells of women divorcing their husbands is of course entirely ultra vires, and shows how the laxity of conjugal relations allowed to the male sex has extended itself to the female also, and that in a city where, if anywhere, we should have expected to find the law observed.

[66] In India, for example, there are Mohammedan races among whom monogamy, as a rule, prevails by custom, and individuals exercising their right of polygamy are looked upon with disfavor.  On the other hand, we meet occasionally with men who aver that rather against their will (as they will sometimes rather amusingly say) they have been forced by custom or family influence to add by polygamy to their domestic burdens.  In Mohammedan countries, however, when we hear of a man confining himself to one wife, it does not necessarily follow that he has no slaves to consort with in his harem.  I may remark that slave-girls have by Mohammedan laws no conjugal rights whatever, but are like playthings, at the absolute discretion of their master.

[67] The case of the Corinthian offender is much in point, as showing how the strict discipline of the Church must have availed to make Christianity unpopular with the mere worldling.

[68] [Sidenote:  Laxity among nominal Christians.] Apology, p. 51.  I repeat, that in the remarks I have made under this head, no comparison is sought to be drawn betwixt the morality of nominally Christian and Moslem peoples.  On this subject I may be allowed to quote from what I have said elsewhere:  “The Moslem advocate will urge ... the social evil as the necessary result of inexorable monogamy.  The Koran not only denounces any illicit laxity between the sexes in the severest terms, but exposes the transgressor to condign punishment.  For this reason, and because the conditions of what is licit are so accommodating and wide, a certain negative virtue (it can hardly be called continence or chastity) pervades Mohammedan society, in contrast with which the gross and systematic immorality in certain parts of every European community