The Imam of Sana[191] was not an old man when I was in Arabia Felix in 1769; but he had 88 children then alive, of whom 14 only were sons.—The priest of the Nile had 70 and odd children; of whom, as I remember, above 50 were daughters.
It may be objected, that Dr Arbuthnot, in quoting the bills of mortality for twenty years, gave most unexceptionable grounds for his opinion, and that my single assertion of what happens in a foreign country, without further foundation, cannot be admitted as equivalent testimony; and I am ready to admit this objection, as bills of mortality there are none in any of these countries. I shall therefore say in what manner I attained the knowledge which I have just mentioned. Whenever I went into a town, village, or inhabited place, dwelt long in a mountain, or travelled journies with any set of people, I always made it my business to inquire how many children they had, or their fathers, their next neighbours, or acquaintance. This not being a captious question, or what any one would scruple to answer, there was no interest to deceive; and if it had been possible, that two or three had been so wrong-headed among the whole, it would have been of little consequence.
I then asked my landlord at Sidon, (suppose him a weaver,) how many children he has had? He tells me how many sons, and how many daughters. The next I ask is a smith, a tailor, a silk-gatherer, the Cadi of the place, a cowherd, a hunter, a fisher, in short every man that is not a stranger, from whom I can get proper information. I say, therefore, that a medium of both sexes arising from three or four hundred families indiscriminately taken, shall be the proportion in which one differs from the other; and this, I am confident, will give the result to be three women to one man in 50° out of the 90° under every meridian of the globe.
Without giving Mahomet all the credit for abilities that some have done, we may surely suppose him to know what happened in his own family, where he must have seen this great disproportion of four women born to one man; and from the obvious consequences, we are not to wonder that one of his first cares, when a legislator, was to rectify it, as it struck at the very root of his empire, power, and religion. With this view, he enacted, or rather revived, the law which gave liberty to every individual to marry four wives, each of whom was to be equal in rank and honour, without any preference but what the predilection of the husband gave her. By this he secured civil rights to each woman, and procured a means of doing away that reproach, of dying without issue, to which the minds of the whole sex have always been sensible, whatever their religion was, or from whatever part of the world they came.
Many, who are not conversant with Arabian history, have imagined, that this permission of a plurality of wives was given in favour of men, and have taxed one of the most political, necessary measures, of that legislator, arising from motives merely civil, with a tendency to encourage lewdness, from which it was very far distant. But, if they had considered that the Mahometan law allows divorce without any cause assigned, and that, every day at the pleasure of the man; besides, that it permits him as many concubines as he can maintain, buy with money, take in war, or gain by the ordinary means of address and solicitations,—they will think such a man was before sufficiently provided, and that there was not the least reason for allowing him to marry four wives at a time, when he was already at liberty to marry a new one every day.
Dr Arbuthnot lays it down as a self-evident position, that four women will have more children by four men, than the same four women would have by one. This assertion may very well be disputed, but still it is not in point. For the question with regard to Arabia, and to a great part of the world besides, is, Whether or not four women and one man, married, or cohabiting at discretion, shall produce more children, than four women and one man who is debarred from cohabiting with any but one of the four, the others dying unmarried without the knowledge of man? or, in other words, Which shall have most children, one man and one woman, or one man and four women? This question I think needs no discussion.
Let us now consider, if there is any further reason why England should not be brought as an example, which Arabia, or the East in general, are to follow.
Women in England are commonly capable of child-bearing at fourteen, let the other term be forty-eight, when they bear no more; thirty-four years, therefore, an English woman bears children. At the age of fourteen or fifteen they are objects of our love; they are endeared by bearing us children after that time, and none I hope will pretend, that, at forty-eight and fifty, an English woman is not an agreeable companion. Perhaps the last years, to thinking minds, are fully more agreeable than the first. We grow old together, we have a near prospect of dying together; nothing can present a more agreeable picture of social life, than monogamy in England.
The Arab, on the other hand, if she begins to bear children at eleven, seldom or never has a child after twenty. The time then of her child-bearing is nine years, and four women, taken altogether, have then the term of thirty-six. So that the English woman that bears children for thirty-four years, has only two years less than the term enjoyed by the four wives whom Mahomet has allowed; and if it be granted an English wife may bear at fifty, the terms are equal.
But there are other grievous differences. An Arabian girl, at eleven years old, by her youth and beauty, is the object of man’s desire; being an infant, however, in understanding, she is not a rational companion for him. A man marries there, say at twenty, and before he is thirty, his wife, improved as a companion, ceases to be an object of his desires, and a mother of children; so that all the best, and most vigorous of his days, are spent with a woman he cannot love, and with her he would be destined to live forty, or forty-five years, without comfort to himself by increase of family, or utility to the public.