He says his prayers, goes home, sups with his friends and leaves them after a time to their pipes and coffee while he proceeds to the harem. There he finds the bride and her attendant. The latter retires; the bridegroom lifts the veil from the bride’s head and for the first time sees her face.
So much for the forms of courtship and marriage.
Another important element of matrimony is divorce, and it is more prevalent than in our own country for the reason that it is easier. Indiana and other states famous for their facilities for unsplicing married couples might learn something from benighted Egypt and something in the language of the popular advertisement “to their advantage.” Divorce is fashionable and every respectable man must indulge in it.
The first few days of my stay in Cairo our party employed a guide whom we found at the hotel. He was an intelligent Mohammedan speaking French quite well, and his certificates of character were most flattering. While I was questioning him about marriage customs he declared with no appearance of regret in any form: "I have had nine wives and am now living with my tenth. When I don’t like a wife I divorce her.”
The whole story is told in the last sentence of his remark—“When I don’t like a wife I divorce her.” The only form of divorce necessary is for the husband to say to the wife in the presence of a single witness, “I divorce you.” No residence in Chicago or Indianapolis is necessary; there are no lawyers to be engaged and no fees to be paid; no troublesome affidavits about im-compatibility of temper and the like are to be signed, nor must one stretch his conscience in making oath to any document. Say only “I divorce you,” and the work is accomplished.
As a consequence of these facilities the people of Egypt are very much married. Men can be found in Cairo by the hundred who have had as many as twenty or thirty wives in half that number of years, and women who have had the same plurality of husbands in a similar time. But divorced women are not considered as desirable as those who have never been married, and consequently these frequent divorces fall more heavily on them than upon men. The Khedive is well aware of the debasing effect of the marriage laws and has improved them in several ways.
Polygamy is becoming less popular every year, and would probably die out altogether in course of time if it were not expressly sanctioned by the Koran.
The legal number of wives is four, but not one man in five hundred in Cairo or Constantinople avails himself of the privilege. A Mohammedan whom I questioned one day on the subject of polygamy made the following reply: