the moral and social abuses prevailing among
them, he gradually introduced his social reforms which proved immense
blessings to the Arabs and other nations in the seventh century. Perhaps
some temporary but judicious, reasonable and helpful accommodations had
to be made to the weakness and immaturity of the people, as halting
stages in the march of reforms only to be set aside at their adult
strength, or to be abolished when they were to begin to emerge from
their barbarism under its influence to a higher civilization.
Consequently gradual amelioration of social evils had necessarily to
pass several trials during progress of reform. The intermediate stages
are not to be taken as final and irrevocable standard of morality and an
insuperable barrier to the regeneration of the Arabian nation. Our
adversaries stick indiscriminately to these temporary measures or
concessions only, and call them half measures and partial reforms made
into an unchangeable law which exclude the highest reforms, and form a
formidable obstacle to the dawn of a progressive and enlightened
civilization. I have in view here the precepts of Mohammad for
ameliorating the degraded condition of women for restricting the
unlimited polygamy and the facility of divorce, together with servile
concubinage and slavery.[155] Mohammad's injunctions and precepts,
intermediary and ultimate, temporary and permanent, intended for the
removal of these social evils, are interwoven with each other,
interspersed in different Suras and not chronologically arranged, in
consequence of which it is somewhat difficult for those who have no deep
insight into the promiscuous literature of the Koran to find out which
precept was only a halting stage, and which the latest. It was only from
some oversight on the part of the compilers of the Common Law that, in
the first place, the civil precepts of a transitory nature and as a
mediate step leading to a higher reform were taken as final; and in the
second place, the civil precepts adapted for the dwellers of the Arabian
desert were pressed upon the neck of all ages and countries. A social
system for barbarism ought not to be imposed on a people already
possessing higher forms of civilizations.

[Footnote 155: "The cankerworm of polygamy, divorce, servile concubinage
and veil lay at the root. They are bound up in the character of its
existence. A reformed Islam which should part with the divine ordinances
on which they rest, or at