Those who want to accentuate the antithesis between Islâm and modern civilization point rightly to the personal law; here is indeed a great stumbling-block. The allowance of polygamy up to a maximum of four wives is represented by Mohammedan authors as a progress if compared with the irregularity of pagan Arabia and even with the acknowledgment of unlimited polygamy during certain periods of Biblical history. The following subtle argument is to be found in some schoolbooks on Mohammedan law: The law of Moses was exceedingly benevolent to males by permitting them to have an unlimited number of wives; then came the law of Jesus, extreme on the other side by prescribing monogamy; at last Mohammed restored the equilibrium by conceding one wife to each of the four humours which make up the male's constitution. This theory, which leaves the question what the woman is to do with three of her four humours undecided, will hardly find fervent advocates among the present canonists. At the same time, very few of them would venture to pronounce their preference for monogamy in a general way, polygamy forming a part of the law that is to prevail, according to the infallible Agreement of the Community, until the Day of Resurrection. On the other side polygamy, although _allowed_, is far from being _recommended_ by the majority of theologians. Many of them even dissuade men capable of mastering their passion from marriage in general, and censure a man who takes two wives if he can live honestly with one. In some Mohammedan countries social circumstances enforce practical monogamy. The whole question lies in the education of women; when this has been raised to a higher level, polygamy will necessarily come to an end. It is therefore most satisfactory that among male Mohammedans the persuasion of the necessity of a solid education for girls is daily gaining ground. This year (1913), a young Egyptian took his doctor's degree at the Paris University by sustaining a dissertation on the position of women in the Moslim world, in which he told his co-religionists the full truth concerning this rather delicate subject[1]. If social evolution takes the right course, the practice of polygamy will be abolished; and the maintenance of its lawfulness in canonical works will mainly be a survival of a bygone phase of development. [Footnote 1: Mansour Fahmy, _La condition de la femme dans la tradition et l'évolution de l'Islamisme_, Paris, Félix Alcan, 1913. The sometimes imprudent form in which the young reformer enounced his ideas caused him to be very badly treated by his compatriots at his return from Europe.]