Is it surprising that I almost accused my fellow-missionaries of misrepresenting the home life of the people? But I only saw the surface and had not yet probed the deep sore of Mohammedanism nor realized the heavy burdens which its system entails.
Let me tell you of three of the heaviest of these burdens: Polygamy, Divorce, and the Ignorance which results from complete lack of education and walks hand-in-hand with its twin-sister, Superstition.
Polygamy shall be placed first, although it is not the greatest bane of Tunisian home life. By Mohammedan law a man is allowed four wives, but in Tunisia, though it is by no means rare for a man to have two, he seldom takes more than that number at one time. Occasionally they live in separate houses, sometimes in different towns, and may be quite unknown to each other. A Moslem will frequently take a second wife in the hope of having children, or it may be a son, the first wife being childless.
In other houses one finds under the same roof two wives of one husband, each having a large number of children. Each wife will have two or three maid-servants who sit with their mistresses and mingle freely in the conversation, and, if the family be wealthy, the elder daughters have their own special attendants. Thus a household may contain a large number of women who live together more or less harmoniously, and whose numerous quarrels do not conduce to the tranquillity of the master of the house. But what does he care as long as he is master and reigns supreme? There is probably not much affection between him and the wife whom he never saw before the wedding-day, but he loves his children, being specially fond of the little ones and showing all a father's pride in his sons. His hours of recreation are spent at the café or the more aristocratic rendezvous—the barber's shop—and the charms of sweet home life he has never imagined.
Year by year, however, Western education is slowly but surely telling on the Oriental mind. The young men, trained in French schools and imbibing modern ideas, show a strong tendency to follow the manners and customs of their teachers, and it is at least considered more "comme-il-faut" to take only one wife and in some measure copy the European "ménage."
Divorce is, however, the great curse which blights domestic happiness, and words fail me to describe the misery it brings.
The Moslem population of the city of Tunis is sixty thousand. Setting aside men and children there remain, roughly speaking, about twenty-five thousand women, and comparing my own experience with that of other lady missionaries we are agreed in affirming that the majority of these women in the middle and lower classes have been divorced at least once in their lives, many of them two or three times, while some few have had a number of husbands. In the upper class and wealthy families divorce is not nearly so common, and for obvious reasons.
I have never known a man to have thirty or forty wives in succession as one hears of in some Mohammedan lands. A man once told my brother-in-law that he had been married eighteen times, and I heard of another who had taken (the Arab expression) twelve wives, one after another; but this last was related with bated breath as being an unusual and opprobrious act.
When a woman is divorced she returns to her father's house and remains dependent on him until he finds her another husband, her monetary value being now greatly reduced. The quarrel which led to the separation is sometimes adjusted and she returns to her husband, but never if he has pronounced the words, "Tulka be thaléthe" (Divorce by three, or threefold). This, even though uttered in a moment of anger, may never be recalled, and if he really care for his wife and wish to take her back again, she must be married to another man and divorced by him before she can return to her first husband. But the laws relating to marriage, divorce, and the guardianship of the children, would require a volume to themselves and cannot be entered upon here.
One is led to ask, what is the cause of this dark cloud of evil which casts its terrible shadow over so many homes?