"On the subject of polygamy," says a writer who has deeply studied Muslim institutions and their effects, "a European has all the advantage in discussion with a Turkish woman, because her feelings are decidedly on the side of her antagonists; but then she has a tremendous power of reply, in the comparison of the practical effects of the two systems, and in the widely spread rumours of the heartlessness and the profligacy of Europe. All the convictions of our habits and laws stand in hostile array against the country where the principle of polygamy is admitted into the laws of the state; but yet, while we reproach Islamism with polygamy, Islamism may reproach us with practical polygamy, which, unsanctioned by law and reproved by custom, adds degradation of the mind to dissoluteness of morals."[279]
It should further be remarked that by sanctioning polygamy Moḥammad did not make the practice general: nay, he could not. It is a licence for the hard-hearted, which restrains them from worse conduct, and in some cases, as already shown, a resource for the tender-hearted. "The permission," observes the author just cited, "does not alter the proportions of men and women. While, therefore, the law of nature renders this practice an impossibility as regards the community, it is here still further restrained among the few who have the means of indulging in it, both by the domestic unquiet that results from it, and by the public censure and reprobation of which it is the object."
I have remarked in a former work that polygamy "is more rare among the higher and middle classes [in Egypt, and I believe in other Arab countries] than it is among the lower orders; and it is not very common among the latter. A poor man may indulge himself with two or more wives, each of whom may be able, by some art or occupation, nearly to provide her own subsistence; but most persons of the higher and middle orders are deterred from doing so by the consideration of the expense and discomfort which they would incur. A man having a wife who has the misfortune to be barren, and being too much attached to her to divorce her, is sometimes induced to take a second wife, merely in the hope of obtaining offspring; and from the same motive he may take a third, and a fourth; but fickle passion is the most evident and common motive both to polygamy and to repeated divorces. They are comparatively few who gratify this passion by the former practice. I believe that not more than one husband among twenty has two wives."[280]