In most of the Coptic and Muslim schools, children learn a little arithmetic, reading and writing, and some passages of the Scriptures or the Koran. Many slaves attend the religious and mission schools, and are often far better educated than their masters, who take great pride in their learning. Copts are as frequently sent to the mission schools as to their own, and are very clever and intelligent. At Cairo there is a boarding-school for girls, conducted by nuns, where many girls spend a year, or attend as day scholars. In the families of the rich, a foreign governess is employed, who teaches French and needle-work; but girls are seldom taught to write, as they might make an improper use of the knowledge. Teachers agree that girls do not keep up their reading after they leave school; the books loaned them are often returned with the leaves uncut. But there have been and are some well educated Muslim women in the higher classes; these are counted particularly dangerous and their example pernicious. WOMAN UNDER THE LAW. This division will include that which custom has legalized without enactments, as well as that found in the written code. The four sects of Mahommedans receive their code of law as well as of morals from the Koran. So strongly rooted is this faith, that even the English have found it unwise to change from the Mahommedan law in India. The framers of the code adopted for the native courts just established in Egypt, have but copied the Koran in all that relates to marriage, polygamy, divorce and concubinage. A Muslim may have at one time four wives, and the Book says: "If you cannot act equitably by them, take from those whom your right hand has acquired,” meaning slaves. This advice of the Prophet, his companions very largely honored, and left their examples recorded for the benefit of the latter-day saints. Mahommedans believe that woman is created for man's pleasure and comfort, and that though she is crafty and dangerous, she must be made to serve him with as little bother as possible during the time he desires her. She will not follow him to Paradise unless he wishes her presence, and he religiously expects to have better society. The Koran has a full recognition of slavery, and supposes it to be a perpetual institution of the country. A slave may not marry her master, while a slave, but the mother of her master's child is usually emancipated, and the child is a legitimate heir. When a girl is old enough to marry, she can of her own free will marry any man by consenting and receiving a part of her dower; but the consent of the girl who is not old enough to marry, is not required, her nearest male relative can dispose of her by receiving her dower. The dower among the poor is small, but there must be something paid by the husband or his father to the nearest male relative of the child. son. A wife may be divorced twice and return to her husband, but if he divorce her a third time, and with a triple divorce declared, and send her away, he cannot live with her again until she has been one month married to another man. After the third divorce, the husband must pay the part of the dower which was set aside for the wife before marriage, and he must support her out of his house during the three months in which she may not marry again. If the wife be separated from the man, and not divorced, she receives a weekly allowance from him. A divorced woman may, after divorce, retain her son, under two years of age, and custom gives the child to the mother till it is seven years old; then the father must claim the When a man forfeits an engagement to marry, he must pay the woman half her dower, and she is free to marry at once. When a wife is disobedient, the husband may beat her; if she persist in disobedience, he may take her with two witnesses, not his relations, to the court, and declare against her, and if she does not promise to be obedient thereafter, is not obliged to feed, lodge or cloth her, but need not divorce her; and if he suspects that she desires to be divorced in order to remarry, he surely will not. If she confesses her wrong, and promise obedience, he must at once divorce her, or take her home. If a wife does not wish to live with her husband, she enters a complaint against him at the court, stating that her family will support her, and makes a demand for separation. If the women of the same hareem, or of different ones, quarrel and are complained of to the court, their husbands are punished by the court; but we may be sure that their vicarious correction does not save the poor women from chastisement. The husband divorces the wife, but the wife cannot divorce the husband. If the Muslim cannot marry a wife of his own faith, or is deeply in love, he may marry a Jewess or a Christian, but the children must follow the faith of the father. A Muslim woman may not marry a man out of the faith, unless compelled by force, and a man may not live with either Jewess or Christian to whom he is not married. A master or mistress cannot marry a slave. Copts do not divorce except for unfaithfulness on the part of the wife; the woman cannot divorce the husband. If a Coptic wife commits a great crime, her husband may separate himself from her; neither can marry another, but they may remarry after the law has been satisfied. Slavery and the bastinado yet exist in Egypt. The existing law does not recognize primogeniture, and generally gives the woman heir half what it gives the male heir of the same relationship. After debts and legacies are paid, one-eighth belongs to the wives, if there be children; one-fourth if there be none. A husband inherits half of his wife's property if she have no children; if she has children he inherits one-fourth. If a man has only a sister by the same father and mother, she inherits half his property, while the only brother inherits the whole of a sister's. The mother, in certain cases, inherits equally with the father. In the division of a man's property there is no difference made between the children of the legal wives and the slaves and the adopted children. The illegitimate child inherits only from the mother. For the murder of a man under palliating circumstances, twice as much blood-money is demanded as for the murder of a woman. The killing of a robber has no penalty. A woman convicted of murder should be drowned in the Nile; the fine for wounding a woman is half that for wounding a man. The Koran commands that the unfaithful wife be put to death, and this is done secretly, in spite of the efforts to prevent the irresponsible from usurping the prerogative of the Law. A man taken for the army is deemed dead to his family. For many years, mothers have maimed their sons that they might be exempt from military service, and often when the mother failed to do this for her son, he has maimed himself. It is useless to appeal to a man's patriotism, when he must fight for the overthrow of his faith, and the spoilation of his people; no wonder that when the conscripting officers enter a village, the men flee to the tombs and holes in the rocks, to escape their fate. Starvation drives them back again; they are seized, chained neck to neck, and packed upon the transports. And it has not yet occurred to the most Christian nation which inaugurated the last philanthropic war, to change the conditions of military servitude, so as to give the Egyptian women protection against desertion, when it has haled the husband and father from home and family. The wife is left to struggle with increased taxation, fines, morgages, and ignorance. During the years of this afflictive visitation, sickening scenes are perpetual on the banks of the Nile, men forced away, women, with smeared faces, following in crowds, wailing and crying as for the dead, and dancing the funeral dance. And as each conscript walks the long plank from the shore, the women send forth curses on the despoiler, and stretch out their arms in hopeless agony to the poor victim who is to render unwilling service to the captors of his country, the foes of his faith. These sad sights, the constant passing of transports with sick soldiers down the river, and the general unrest of invasion, have for five years prevented intelligent travelers and invalids from visiting Upper Egypt, and destroyed the long-known luxurious peace and healthful repose of the Nile voyage. THEIR FUTURE. Among the rejected Gospels of the New Testament is the Gospel to the Egyptians, in which it is related that Solome asked our Lord how long death should prevail, and the Christ answered; "As long as ye women are mothers." These words have been quoted to support celibacy; but it is through this strongest element in the Egyptian that Egypt's deliverance must come. The mother loves her child, and her love is perpetual, and it has enabled her, under the oppression of these last years, to overcome her indolence and sustain herself and her children, and hold her possessions. And other women, without possessions, have sold in the market, tilled the fields, made trinkets, carried water and driven donkeys for the strangers, that they and their army-orphaned children might live. The class of women known as dancing girls are the pest of the villages, and the beauty that we have read of does not appear; they have not even that excuse for being. But the slave women from the Soudan and Abyssinia are the live, industrial female power of Upper Egypt. Their strong, well-shapen bodies and amiable intelligence, promise a coming race that may equal the Memlooks in daring. But to what source can we look for any speedy elevation of Egyptian women, with a religion which teaches them they must depend on the wish of a man for immortality, that the envious eye of a neighbor may destroy their children, that their guardian angel may play ridiculous tricks, cause them illness and even death, that to be the mother of many children is their justification for existing, that the marital chastisement, authorized by the Prophet, is the best proof of the husband's love; that the daughter is purer and more to be desired in marriage, if she cannot read or write; that if she must go to school, she may not remain after she is ten or twelve years old; |