Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Stacy Brown Thellend, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was made using scans of public domain works from the University of Michigan Digital Libraries.) THE WOMEN OF THE ARABS. _WITH A CHAPTER FOR CHILDREN._ BY Rev. HENRY HARRIS JESSUP, D.D., _Seventeen years American Missionary in Syria._ EDITED BY Rev. C.S. ROBINSON, D.D., & Rev. ISAAC RILEY. "The threshold weeps forty days when a girl is born." --_Mt. Lebanon Proverb._ NEW YORK: DODD & MEAD, PUBLISHERS. Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1873, by DODD & MEAD, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. _THIS BOOK_ IS DEDICATED TO THE CHRISTIAN WOMEN OF AMERICA. Beirut, Syria, _July, 1873_. _Owing to the impossibility of my attending personally to the editing of this volume, I requested my old friends_, Rev. C.S. Robinson, D.D., _and_ Rev. Isaac Riley, _of New York, to superintend the work, and would gratefully acknowledge their kind and disinterested aid, cheerfully proffered at no little sacrifice of time._ H.H. JESSUP. PREFACE. The Orient is the birthplace of prophecy. Before the advent of our Lord, the very air of the East was resounding with the "unconscious prophecies of heathenism." Men were in expectation of great changes in the earth. When Mohammed arose, he not only claimed to be the deliverer of a message inspired of Allah, but to foretell the events of futurity. He declared that the approach of the latter day could be distinguished by unmistakable signs, among which were two of the most notable character. Before the latter day, the _sun shall rise in the West_, and God will send forth a cold odoriferous wind blowing from _Syria Damascena_, which shall _sweep away_ the souls of all the faithful, and _the Koran itself_. What the world of Islam takes in its literal sense, we may take in a deeper spiritual meaning. Is it not true, that far in the West, the gospel sun began to rise and shed its beams on Syria, many years ago, and that in our day that cold odoriferous wind of truth and life, fragrant with the love of Jesus and the love of man, is beginning to blow from Syria Damascena, over all the Eastern world! The church and the school, the printing press and the translated Bible, the periodical and the ponderous volume, the testimony of living witnesses for the truth, and of martyrs who have died in its defence, all combine to sweep away the systems of error, whether styled Christian, Moslem or Pagan.