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 are not sold.[65]

[Sidenote: Islam sanctions a license between the sexes which
Christianity forbids.
The laws of Christianity deter men from carnal indulgences.
Islam the "Easy Way."]
What I desire to make clear is the fact that such things may be
practiced _with the sanction_ of the Scripture which the Moslem holds to
be divine, and that these same indulgences have from the first existed
as inducements which helped materially to forward the spread of the
faith. I am very far, indeed, from implying that excessive indulgence in
polygamy is the universal state of Moslem society. Happily this is not
the case. There ar