ng done _under the supposed
sanction_ of God in the Quran."[142]

Such is the rare accuracy of Mr. Hughes' work. It is needless for me to
repeat here that none of these allegations are either true or facts, or
alleged to have been committed under the sanction of God in the Koran.

The Rev. Marcus Dods writes regarding the character of Mohammad:--

"The knot of the matter lies not in his polygamy, nor even in his
occasional licentiousness, but in the fact that he defended his
conduct, when he created scandal, by professed revelations which
are now embodied as parts of the Koran. When his wives murmured,
and with justice, at his irregularities, he silenced them by a
revelation giving him conjugal allowances which he had himself
proscribed as unlawful. When he designed to contract an alliance
with a woman forbidden to him by his own law, an inspired
permission was forthcoming, encouraging him to the
transgression."[143]

Both of these alleged instances given above are mere fabrications. There
was no revelation giving Mohammad conjugal allowances which he had
himself proscribed as unlawful, nor any permission was brought forward
to sanction an alliance forbidden to him by his own law. This subject
has been fully discussed by me in my work "Mohammad, the True Prophet,"
and the reader is referred to that work.[144] A few verses on the
marital subject of Mohammad are greatly misunderstood by European
writers on the subject, and Dr. Dods shares the generally wrong idea
when he says:--

"He rather used his office as a title to license from which
ordinary men were restrained. Restricting his disciples to four
wives, he retained to himself the liberty of taking as many as he
pleased." (Page 23.)

This is altogether a gross misrepresentation of the real state of
things. Mohammad never retained to himself the liberty of taking as many
wives as he pleased. On the contrary, Sura XXXIII, 52, expressly forbade
him all women except those he had already with him, giving him no option
to marry in the case of the demise of some or all of them. This will
show that he rather used his office as a restraint against himself of
what was lawful for the people in general to enjoy. The only so-called
privilege above the rest of the believers (Sura XXXIII, 49) was not "to
retain to himself the liberty of taking as many wives as he pleased,"
but to retain the wives whom