He was a head man in his village and lived some distance from Fatimah's home. "Do you think it will be a good thing for Fatimah?" said I to the mother. "What are we to do?" was the reply; "they say he is kind; and far better to marry her to him than to a young man who will only ill-treat and beat her; we are very poor and cannot afford to get a really respectable young man."
The marriage took place, within two months Fatimah had returned home but was induced to go back again, this was repeated twice and on returning home the third time, she made up her mind to get her husband to permanently divorce her. Her mother of course abetted her, and a woman (as payment for a piece of fancy work she had asked Fatimah to do for her) promised to bring about the divorce by some plan of intrigue which she would arrange.
Fatimah's life is blighted; the best that one can hope for is re-marriage to a poor but respectable man, and to go through her life with him; but the probabilities are she will be married and divorced time after time, and each time sink lower in the social scale. She is not yet fifteen years old.
Aneesah was a little girl of nine, frail and delicate-looking, and an only child and much petted, but often she seemed possessed by the devil so naughty was her conduct. At such times her mother would take her and tie her up, then beat her unmercifully, until the neighbors, hearing the child's screams, would come to the rescue and force the mother to desist. The mother has herself shown me the marks of her own teeth in the flesh of her child's arms, where she has bitten her in order to drive the devil out of her. What is likely to be the future of that child? One shudders to think of it.
Many a time in visiting among the very poor I have sat with the women in an open court, which is like a small yard in the middle of several houses, in which several families own one, two, or three rooms. In the court there may be a dozen or more women, unwashed, uncombed, untidy to a degree; some bread-making, some washing, others seated nursing their babies:—babies who are as sick and unhealthy as they can possibly be, their bodies ingrained with dirt, their heads encrusted with sores and filth, their eyes inflamed and uncleansed, their garments smelling, and one and all looking thoroughly ill and wretched. It is the rarest thing to see a healthy-looking baby.
As I have sat amongst them and talked with them, I have tried to reason with them and point out the advantages of cleanliness and industry; all admit that I am right and that our habits are better than theirs, yet none have the heart or the energy or the character to break away from their customs and their innate laziness and to rise up and be women.
Yet one can hardly wonder at their condition, what chances have they had? Married at ten or eleven, untrained and untaught, many of them not knowing how to hold a needle, or make the simplest garment; still in their teens with two or three children to burden them, whom they long to see big enough to turn out into the streets and play as they did before them. Their only interest in life, each other's family brawls and scandals; their health undermined by close confinement and want of exercise, is it a wonder that they sink into a state of callousness and indifference about everything?
I have seen a bright-spirited, energetic, laughing, romping girl of eleven, turned in one year into a miserable, lazy, dull, inert woman with her beauty and health gone, and looking nearer thirty than thirteen. One often does not wonder at such a condition of things, rather does one wonder when the reverse prevails, and one is able to realize their possibilities in spite of all their drawbacks. I know of women, though they are but very few, equally poor and unfavored as those I have described, who can be found sitting in their own little rooms, their younger children with them, holding themselves aloof from the usual gossip, their rooms swept, themselves clean and tidy, their babies, though not ideal, comparing favorably with the others; their one apparent trouble, the elder children whom they do not know how to train and whom they cannot keep out of the streets; unless indeed there chance to be a mission school in the near neighborhood.
The same state of things pervades all classes of society, though in the middle and upper classes the Moslems are usually very cleanly both in their persons and in their homes, but the majority of the women are in the same low degraded moral state. Life in the harems is spent in smoking and idle gossip, and things far worse; the wife and mother there, no less than among the poorer classes, has no idea of responsibility. She is frequently unable either to sew, read, or write, and leaves her children to the care of dependents. Her life is merely an animal life; she is but a necessary article for use in her husband's household.
A wealthy merchant who has had several wives keeps one in a beautiful house with every comfort, another wife of the same man is left to live where she can with the pittance of something like three pence per day. This is what the Moslem faith allows.