It is a veritable godsend for scientific sociology to be able to know in its minute details all this curious regulation of Kabyle marriage. Too often we are forced to content ourselves, in regard to savage or barbarous peoples, with general assertions that have to be completed as well as may be from accounts that are incoherent, sometimes contradictory, and always fragmentary. Here we possess a whole barbarous code, quite an assemblage of old Berber customs, which are more or less confounded with the precepts of the Koran. The law of Mahomet itself is only a sort of compromise between the ancient customs of Arabia and the Biblical precepts relating to marriage. On certain sides the Arab customs are superior to the severity of the Kabyle kanouns, but on others they are inferior to them, as, for example, in not affording to the wife the right of “insurrection.” It is necessary to distinguish between the text of the Koran and practice, which has notably departed from it--sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. The Koran leaves to the husband the absolute right of repudiation. It orders that if the formula of repudiation has been pronounced three times, the husband cannot take back the wife until she has been married to another; it permits him to do it, therefore, in the contrary case.[767] It specifies that the repudiated wife should have a sufficient maintenance provided for her, and that the husband should not keep the dower she brought with her;[768] that the husband should have four months’ grace to retract his decision;[769] that if the repudiated wife is suckling an infant, the husband, or, in his default, the next heir, should supply her needs during the two years that the suckling should last.[770] The Koran orders repudiated wives not to re-marry before three menstrual periods, not to dissimulate their pregnancy, “if they believe in God and in the day of judgment;” and in the last case it advises the husbands to take them back.[771] Lastly, the law of Mahomet encourages amicable arrangements, and these by money payments between ill-assorted couples; it authorises the husband to sell a divorce to his wife for a cession, with her consent, of a portion of her dowry.[772] This is what the texts, which are both legal and sacred, declare: this, then, is the theory. We will now see what is the practice as regards repudiation and divorce in Algeria at the present time. There are three graduated formulas of repudiation: first, the discontented husband says simply to the wife, “Go away,” and if he has only said it once or twice, he may retract his decision; second, but if he has said, “Thou art to me as one dead, or as the flesh of swine,” it is forbidden to take back the repudiated wife until she has been married to another, and then repudiated or left a widow; lastly, there is a formula so solemn that it entails a separation for ever; it is this, “Let thy back be turned on me henceforth, like the back of my mother.”[773]