_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.
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