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.]
The facility with which a man can divorce his wife at his pleasure, contrasted with her rights against him, is a still more serious impediment to the development of family life than the institution of polygamy; more serious, also, than veiling and seclusion of women. Where the general opinion is favourable to the improvement of the position of women in society, there is always found a way to secure it to them without conflicting with the divine law; but a radical reform will remain most difficult so long as that law which allows the man to repudiate his wife without any reason, whereas it delivers the woman almost unarmed into the power of her husband, is considered to be one of the permanent treasures of Islâm.
It is a pity indeed that thus far women vigorously striving for liberation from those mediaeval institutions are rare exceptions in Mohammedan countries. Were Mohammedan women capable of the violent tactics of suffragettes, they would rather try to blow up the houses of feminists than those of the patrons of the old régime. The ordinary Mohammedan woman looks upon the endeavour of her husband to induce her to partake freely in public life as a want of consideration; it makes on her about the same impression as that which a respectable woman in our society would receive from her husband encouraging her to visit places generally frequented by people of bad reputation. It is the girls' school that will awaken those sleeping ones and so, slowly and gradually, prepare a better future, when the Moslim woman will be the worthy companion of her husband and the intelligent educator of her children. This will be due, then, neither to the Prophet's Sunnah nor to the infallible Agreement of the Community of the first centuries of Islâm, but to the irresistible power of the evolution of human society, which is merciless to laws even of divine origin and transfers them, when their time is come, from the treasury of everlasting goods to a museum of antiquities.
Slavery, and in its consequence free intercourse of a man with his own female slaves without any limitation as to their number, has also been incorporated into the sacred law, and therefore has been placed on the wrong side of the border that is to divide eternal things from temporal ones. This should not be called a mediaeval institution; the most civilized nations not having given it up before the middle of the nineteenth century. The law of Islâm regulated the position of slaves with much equity, and there is a great body of testimony from people who have spent a part of their lives among Mohammedan nations which does justice to the benevolent treatment which bondmen generally receive from their masters there. Besides that, we are bound to state that in many Western countries or countries under Western domination whole groups of the population live under circumstances with which those of Mohammedan slavery may be compared to advantage.
The only legal cause of slavery in Islâm is prisonership of war or birth from slave parents. The captivity of enemies of Islâm has not at all necessarily the effect of enslaving them; for the competent authorities may dispose of them in any other way, also in the way prescribed by modern international law or custom. In proportion to the realization of the political ideal of Islâm the number of its enemies must diminish and the possibilities of enslaving men must consequently decrease. Setting slaves free is one of the most meritorious pious works, and, at the same time, the regular atonement for certain transgressions of the sacred law. So, according to Mohammedan principles, slavery is an institution destined to disappear. When, in the last century, Mohammedan princes signed international treaties for the suppression of slavery, from their point of view this was a premature anticipation of a future political and social development—a step which they felt obliged to take out of consideration for the great powers. In Arabia, every effort of the Turkish Government to put such international agreements into execution has thus far given rise to popular sedition against the Ottoman authority. Therefore, the promulgation of decrees of abolition was stopped; and slavery continued to exist. The import of slaves from Africa has, in fact, considerably diminished; but I am not quite sure of the proportional increase of the liberty which the natives of that continent enjoy at home.
Slavery as well as polygamy is in a certain sense to Mohammedans a sacred institution, being incorporated in their Holy Law; but the practice of neither of the two institutions is indispensable to the integrity of Islâm.
All those antiquated institutions, if considered from the point of view of modern international intercourse, are only a trifle in comparison with the legal prescriptions of Islâm concerning the attitude of the Mohammedan community against the parts of the world not yet subject to its authority, "the Abode of War" as they are technically called. It is a principal duty of the Khalif, or of the chiefs considered as his substitutes in different countries, to avail themselves of every opportunity to extend by force the dominion of Allah and His Messenger. With unsubdued unbelievers peace is not allowed; a truce for a period not exceeding ten years may be concluded if the interest of Islâm requires it.
The chapters of the Mohammedan law on holy war and on the conditions on which the submission of the adherents of tolerated religions is to be accepted seem to be a foolish pretension if we consider them by the light of the actual division of political power in the world. But here, too, to understand is better than to ridicule. In the centuries in which the system of Islâm acquired its maturity, such an aspiration after universal dominion was not at all ridiculous; and many Christian states of the time were far from reaching the Mohammedan standard of tolerance against heterodox creeds. The delicate point is this, that the petrification or at least the process of stiffening that has attacked the whole spiritual life of Islâm since about 1000 A.D. makes its accommodation to the requirements of modern intercourse a most difficult problem.
But it is not only the Mohammedan community that needed misfortune and humiliation before it was able to appreciate liberty of conscience; or that took a long time to digest those painful lessons of history. There are still Christian Churches which accept religious liberty only in circumstances that make supreme authority unattainable to them; and which, elsewhere, would not disdain the use of material means to subdue spirits to what they consider the absolute truth.