Any one of these senseless reasons, which have often the force of law with unenlightened races, can be set aside, and the repudiation counted null when it has been pronounced during a critical period of the woman.[774] The woman with child, on the contrary, can be repudiated, but she has a right to an “allowance during pregnancy.”[775] Actual custom also admits voluntary divorce, at the proposal of the wife, for a redemption paid by her to her master. Sometimes the initiative comes from the husband, who, knowing that his wife desires her liberty, says to her, “I repudiate thee, if thou givest me this _pallium_ of Herat, or this horse, or this camel,” etc. It is then a sort of divorce by mutual consent, and the two part as good friends.[776] Lastly, there is obligatory divorce, pronounced by the Cadi, on the plaint of the woman, when the husband is impotent, when in spite of these matrimonial conventions he tries to compel the woman to quit the house of her parents, or when he has corrected her with excessive brutality.[777] Then the divorced wife goes away, taking her dowry with her. Taken altogether, these customs, while conforming to the spirit of the Koran, have in a certain measure improved the position of the married woman. This is because progress is the law of the social as well as the organic world; more or less slowly, more or less quickly, it ends by modifying in practice even theocratic legislations, which are the most rigid of all. But the old customs are still found almost intact in certain districts of Arabia which have remained more or less completely isolated. Thus in nearly all Arab countries there is one especial reason which justifies immediate repudiation of the marriage, and that is the absence of virginity, when it has been affirmed in the agreements preceding the union. But in Yemen this circumstance justifies far more than mere repudiation; it excuses the murder of the bride;[778] it is a practical return to the old law preserved in the Bible ordering the guilty woman to be stoned.