Sunday the women were all present, as meek and quiet as could be wished.
The missionary was delighted, and asked one of the men how they
persuaded them to come? He replied, "We all beat our wives soundly until
they consented to come!" This wife-beating custom has evidently been
borrowed by the Christian sects from their Moslem rulers and oppressors,
and nothing but a pure Christianity can induce them to abandon it.

III. Some have supposed that there will be no place in the Moslem
Paradise for women, as their place will be taken by the seventy-two
bright-eyed Houris or damsels of Paradise. Mohammed once said that when
he took a view of Paradise he saw the majority of its inhabitants to be
the poor, and when he looked down into hell, he saw the _greater part_
of the wretches confined there to be _women_! Yet he positively promised
his followers that the very meanest in Paradise will have eighty
thousand servants, seventy-two wives of the Houris, _besides the wives
he had in this world_. The promises of the Houris are almost exclusively
to be found in Suras, written at a time when Mohammed had only a single
wife of sixty years of age, and in all the ten years subsequent to the
Hegira, women are only twice mentioned as the reward of the faithful.
And this, while in four Suras, the proper wives of the faithful are
spoken of as accompanying their husbands into the gardens of bliss.

"They and their wives on that day
Shall rest in shady groves." (Sura 36.)

"Enter ye and your wives into Paradise delighted." (Sura 43.)

"Gardens of Eden into which they shall enter
Together with the just of their fathers, and their wives." (Sura 13.)