n Kassim
Amin Bey, counselor of the Court of Appeals in Cairo. In his pamphlet on
the woman's rights question he proposes the following programme:--

Legal prohibition of polygamy.

Woman's right to file a divorce suit. (Hitherto a woman is divorced
if her husband, even without cause, says thee times consecutively
"You are divorced.")

Woman's freedom to choose her husband.

The training of women in independent thought and action.

A thorough education for woman.

In 1910 a congress of Mohammedan women will be held in Cairo.

I may add that the Koran, the Mohammedan code of laws, gives a married
woman the full status of a legal person before the law, and full civil
ability. It recognizes separation of property as legal, and grants the
wife the right to control and to dispose of her property. Hence the Koran
is more liberal than the Code Napoleon or the German Civil Code. Whether
the restrictions of the harem make the exercise of these rights impossible
in practice, I am unable to say.

European schools, as well as the newly founded _Universites populaires_,
are in Turkey and in Egypt the centers of enlightenment among the
Mohammedans. The European women doctors in Constantinople, Alexandria, and
Cairo are all disseminators of modern culture. A woman lawyer practices in
the Cairo court, and has been admitted to the lawyers' society.

The Young Turk movement and the reform of Turkey on a constitutional basis
found hearty support among the women. They expressed themselves orally and
in writing in favor of the liberal ideas; they spoke in public and held
public meetings; they attempted to appear in public without veils, and to
attend the theater in order to see a patriotic play; they sent a
delegation to the Young Turk committee requesting the right to occupy the
spectators' gallery in Parliament; and, finally, they organized the
Women's Progress Society, which comprises women of all nationalities but
concerns itself only with philanthropy and education. As a consequence,
the government is said to have resolved to erect a humanistic _Gymnasium_
for girls in Constantinople. The leader of the Young Turks, the present
President of the Chamber of Deputies, is, as a result of his long stay in
Paris, naturally convinced of the superiority of harem life and legal
polygamy (when compared with occidental practices).[112] The freedom of
action of the Mohammedan women, especially in the prov