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SOME MUSLIM LAWS AND BELIEFS.
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when it depends on the will, pleasure or caprice of their husbands whether they shall be re-married in the other world or not. Mrs. Caudle herself would scarcely hazard a curtain lecture with this atrocious alternative in prospect. Try to fancy being an old-maid or grass-widow for ever and ever where all the men are very much married, having six dozen wives each at the very lowest! Such a heaven to a good woman were ten times crueller than hell. When the Muslim women have been aroused to a sense of their rights, they will insist on being treated in the next world on equal terms with the men: the meanest woman of the faithful (supposing any woman can be mean) shall have her eighty thousand beautiful servants, and her seventy-two husbands of the youths of Paradise, resplendent, adoring, ever obedient. This settled first, it will be a question for consideration between herself and her terrene spouse whether they shall combine their several establishments, or agree to be divorced by death. But I digress; women always lead us into digressions, only these are usually much more interesting than the dusty high-road along which it is our business to trudge. The meanest of Muslims will further have a very large tent bejewelled with pearls, jacinths and emeralds. He will be waited on by three hundred attendants while he eats, and served in dishes of gold, whereof three hundred shall be set before him at once, each containing a different kind of food, "the last morsel of which will be as grateful as the first." This absence of satiety, this ever-fresh vigor, I believe, is to mark all his enjoyments, however freely he may indulge in them. Though wine is forbidden in this life, he may drink of it ad libitum in the next, and the wine of Paradise doth not inebriate. He shall have perpetual youth, and as many children as he may desire. He shall be ravished with the songs of the angel Israfeel, "whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures." I really cannot go on; my feelings are too much for me. I remember when young being taught to sing (or rather