[59] I am not here comparing the value of these observances with those of other religions. I am inquiring only how far the obligations of Islam may be held to involve hardship or sacrifice such as might have retarded the progress of Islam by rendering it on its first introduction unpopular. [60] See Sura ii, v. 88. [61] Sura iv, 18. "Exchange" is the word used in the Koran. [62] Each of his widows had 100,000 golden pieces left her. _Life of Mohammed_, p. 171. [63] "These divorced wives were irrespective of his concubines or slave-girls, upon the number and variety of whom there was no limit or check whatever."--_Annals_, p. 418. [64] Lane adds: "There are many men in this country who, in the course of ten years, have married as many as twenty, thirty, or more wives; and women not far advanced in age have been wives to a dozen or more husbands successively." Note that all this is entirely within the religious sanction. [65] _Pilgrimage to Mecca_, by her highness the reigning Begum of Bhopal, translated by Mrs. W. Osborne (1870), pp. 82, 88. Slave-girls cannot be _married_ until freed by their masters. What her highness tells of women _divorcing_ their husbands is of course entirely _ultra vires_, and shows how the laxity of conjugal relations allowed to the male sex has extended itself to the female also, and that in a city where, if anywhere, we should have expected to find the law observed. [66] In India, for example, there are Mohammedan races among whom monogamy, as a rule, prevails by custom, and individuals exercising their right of polygamy are looked upon with disfavor. On the other hand, we meet occasionally with men who aver that rather against their will (as they will sometimes rather amusingly say) they have been forced by custom or family influence to add by polygamy to their domestic burdens. In Mohammedan countries, however, when we hear of a man confining himself to _one wife_, it does not necessarily follow that he has no slaves to consort with in his harem. I may remark that slave-girls have by Mohammedan laws no conjugal rights whatever, but are like playthings, at the absolute discretion of their master. [67] The case of the Corinthian offender is much in point, as showing how the strict discipline of the Church must have availed to make Christianity unpopular with the mere worldling.