dissertation on the position of women in the Moslim world,
in which he told his co-religionists the full truth concerning this rather
delicate subject[1]. If social evolution takes the right course, the
practice of polygamy will be abolished; and the maintenance of its
lawfulness in canonical works will mainly be a survival of a bygone phase
of development.

[Footnote 1: Mansour Fahmy, _La condition de la femme dans la tradition
et l'evolution de l'Islamisme_, Paris, Felix Alcan, 1913. The sometimes
imprudent form in which the young reformer enounced his ideas caused him to
be very badly treated by his compatriots at his return from Europe.]

The facility with which a man can divorce his wife at his pleasure,
contrasted with her rights against him, is a still more serious impediment
to the development of family life than the institution of polygamy; more
serious, also, than veiling and seclusion of women. Where the general
opinion is favourable to the improvement of the position of women in
society, there is always found a way to secure it to them without
conflicting with the divine law; but a radical reform will remain most
difficult so long as that law which allows the man to repudiate his wife
without any reason, whereas it delivers the woman almost unarmed into the
power of her husband, is considered to be one of the permanent treasures of
Islam.

It is a pity indeed that thus far women vigorously striving for liberation
from those mediaeval institutions are rare exceptions in Mohammedan
countries. Were Mohammedan women capable of the violent tactics of
suffragettes, they would rather try to blow up the houses of feminists than
those of the patrons of the old regime. The ordinary Mohammedan woman looks
upon the endeavour of her husband to induce her to partake freely in public
life as a want of consideration; it makes on her about the same impression
as that which a respectable woman in our society would receive from her
husband encouraging her to visit places generally frequented by people of
bad reputation. It is the girls' school that will awaken those sleeping
ones and so, slowly and gradually, prepare a better future, when the Moslim
woman will be the worthy companion of her husband and the intelligent
educator of her children. This will be due, then, neither to the Prophet's
Sunnah nor to the infallible Agreement of the Community of the first
centuries of Islam, but to the irresistible power of the evolution