This is an outline sketch of the pitiful intellectual, social, and moral condition of the nearly four million women and girls in Mohammedan Arabia. To begin with, the percentage of illiteracy, although not so great as in some other Moslem lands, is at least eighty per cent, of the whole number. In Eastern Arabia a number of girls attend schools, but the instruction and discipline are very indifferent; attention to the lesson is not demanded, so that a Moslem school is a paradise for a lazy girl! A girl is removed from school very early to prepare for her life-work and that is marriage. In a majority of cases she soon forgets what little knowledge she may have attained. A few women are good readers, but these are the most bigoted and fanatical of all women, and it is difficult to make any impression upon them as they are firmly convinced that the Koran contains all they need for salvation now and hereafter.

General ignorance is the cause of general unhappiness and such dense ignorance often makes them suspicious and unreasonable. Nothing is done by the men to educate their women. On the contrary, their object seems to be to keep them from thinking for themselves. They "treat them like brutes and they behave as such." The men keep their feet on the necks of their women and then expect them to rise! The same men who themselves indulge in the grossest form of immorality become very angry and cruel if there is a breath of scandal against their women. In Bahrein, a young pearl-diver heard a rumor that his sister was not a pure woman; he returned immediately from the divings and stabbed her in a most diabolical way without even inquiring as to the truth of the matter. She died in great agony from her injuries, and the brother was acquitted by a Moslem judge, who is himself capable of breaking all the commandments.

Polygamy is practised by all who can afford this so-called luxury, particularly by those in high positions. The wives of these men are not happy, but submit since they believe it is the will of God and of His prophet. The women are not at all content with their condition, and each one wishes herself to be the favored one and will take steps to insure this if possible. Those who have learned a little of the social condition of women in Christian lands very readily appreciate the difference.

It is a common thing for us to be asked to prescribe poison for a rival wife who has been added to the household and for the time being is the favorite. Through jealousy some of these supplanted wives plunge into a life of sin. I do not know anything more pathetic than to have to listen to a poor soul pleading for a love-philter or potion to bring back the so-called love of a perfidious husband. Women, whether rich or poor, naturally prefer to be the only wife. Divorce is fearfully common; I think perhaps it is the case in nine out of every ten marriages. Many women have been divorced several times. They marry again, but this early and frequent divorce causes much immorality. Some divorced women return to the house of their parents, while the homeless ones are most miserable and find escape from misery only in death.

All these horrible social conditions complicate matters and it is difficult to find out who is who in these mixed houses. It is far more pathetic to go through some Moslem homes than to visit a home for foundlings. When a woman is divorced, the father may keep the children if he wishes, and no matter how much a heart-broken mother may plead for them, she is not allowed to have them. If the man does not wish to keep them he sends the children with the mother, and if she marries again the new husband does not expect to contribute to the support of the children of the former marriage.

There can be no pure home-life, as the children are wise above their years in the knowledge of sin. Nothing is kept from them and they are perfectly conversant with the personal history of their parents, past and present.

A man may have a new wife every few months if he so desires, and in some parts of Arabia this is a common state of affairs among the rich chiefs. The result of all this looseness of morals is indescribable. Unnatural vice abounds, and so do contagious diseases which are the inheritance of poor little children.

There is a very large per cent. of infant mortality partly on this account, and partly on account of gross ignorance in the treatment of the diseases of childhood.

Instead of a home full of love and peace, there is dissension and distrust. The heart of the husband does not trust his wife and she seeks to do him evil, not good. For example, a woman is thought very clever if she can cheat her husband out of his money or capital, and lay it up for herself in case she is divorced. There is nothing to bind them in sweet communion and interchange of confidences. As a rule, when a man and a woman marry they do not look for mutual consideration and respect and courtesy; marriage is rather looked upon as a good or a bad bargain. That marriage has anything to do with the affections does not often occur to them. If only a man's passions can be satisfied and his material needs provided, that is all he expects from marriage.

But I do not deny that there are grand though not frequent exceptions to this evil system. I have seen a man cling to his wife and love her and grieve sadly when she died. And some Arab fathers dearly love their daughters and mourn at the loss of one, and the little girls show sincere affection for their fathers. And yet all these bright spots only make the general blackness of home-life seem more dense and dismal.

Missionary schools and education in general have done much in breaking up this system. Many Moslems of the higher class are trying to justify the grosser side of their book-religion by spiritualizing the Koran teaching. But secular education will never make a firm foundation for the elevation of a nation or an individual. Those who have been led to see the weakness of a religion that degrades women, have gained their knowledge through the Gospel.

The fact that attention is paid to suffering women by medical missions is already changing the prevalent idea that woman is inferior and worthless. And although it may seem sometimes an impossible task to ever raise these women to think higher thoughts and to rise from the degradation of centuries, yet we know from experience that those who come in contact with Christian women soon learn to avoid all unclean conversation in their presence. Visiting them in their huts and homes is also a means of breaking down prejudice. The daily clinic in the three mission hospitals of East Arabia, where thousands of sick women receive as much attention as do the men, is winning the hearts and opening the eyes of many to see what disinterested love is. They can scarcely understand what constrains Christian women to go into such unlovely surroundings and touch bodies loathsome from disease in the dispensaries.

When the men have wisdom to perceive that the education of their women and girls means the elevation of their nation, and when they give the women an opportunity to become more than mere animals, then will the nation become progressive and alive to its great possibilities. Reformation cannot come from within but must come from without, from the living power of the Christ. Are you not responsible to God for a part in the evangelization of Arabia in this generation?

The following earnest words, from one who being dead yet speaketh, are a plea for more workers to come out to Arabia. Marion Wells Thoms, M. D., labored for five years in Arabia and wrote in one of her last letters as follows:

"The Mohammedan religion has done much to degrade womanhood. To be sure, female infanticide formerly practised by the heathen Arabs was abolished by Islam, but that death was not so terrible as the living death of thousands of the Arab women who have lived since the reign of the 'merciful' prophet, nor was its effect upon society in general so demoralizing. In the 'time of ignorance,' that is time before Mohammed, women often occupied positions of honor. There were celebrated poetesses and we read of Arab queens ruling their tribes.

"Such a state of things does not exist to-day, but the woman's influence, though never recognized by the men, is nevertheless indirectly a potent factor, but never of a broadening or uplifting character. To have been long regarded as naturally evil has had a degrading influence. Mohammedan classical writers have done their best to revile womanhood. 'May Allah never bless womankind' is a quotation from one of them.

"Moslem literature, it is true, exhibits isolated glimpses of a worthier estimation of womanhood, but the later view, which comes more and more into prevalence, is the only one which finds its expression in the sacred tradition, which represents hell as full of women, and refuses to acknowledge in its women, apart from rare exceptions, either reason or religion, in poems which refer all the evil in the world to the woman as its root, in proverbs which represent a careful education of girls as mere waste.

"When the learned ones ascribe such characteristics to women, is it any wonder that they have come to regard themselves as mere beasts of burden? The Arab boy spends ten or twelve years of his life largely in the women's quarters, listening to their idle conversation about household affairs and their worse than idle talk about their jealousies and intrigues.

"When the boy becomes a man, although he has absolute dominion over his wife as far as the right to punish or divorce her is concerned, he often yields to her decision in regard to some line of action. In treating a woman I have sometimes appealed to the husband to prevail upon his wife to consent to more severe treatment than she was willing to receive. After conversing with his wife his answer has been, 'She will not consent,' and that has been final. Lady Ann Blunt, who has travelled among the Bedouins, says, 'In more than one sheikh's tent it is the women's half of it in which the politics of the tribe are settled.'

"In regard to their religion they believe what they have been told or have heard read from the Koran and other religious books. They do not travel as much as the men, and do not have the opportunity of listening to those who do, hence their ideas are not changed by what they see and hear. All the traditions of Mohammed and other heroes are frequently rehearsed and implicitly believed.

"Although the Arab race is considered a strong one, we find among the women every ill to which their flesh is heir, unrelieved and oftentimes even aggravated by their foolish native treatment. A mother's heart cannot help but ache as she hears the Arab mother tell of the loss of two, three, four, or more of her children, the sacrifice perhaps to her own ignorance. The physical need of the Arab women is great and we pray that it may soon appeal to some whose medical training fits them to administer to this need in all parts of Arabia.

"In the towns in which there are missionaries there are comparatively few houses in which they are not welcomed. In our own station there are more open houses than we have ever had time to visit. Wherever women travellers, of whom there have been two of some note, have gone, they have been met with kindness; hence it will be seen that the open door is not lacking."

Ignorance, superstition, and sensuality are the characteristics which impress themselves most strongly at first upon one who visits the Arab harem, but there are those, too, among the women who are really attractive. It is a dark picture, and we do not urge the need of more workers because the fields are white to harvest. We ask that more offer themselves and be sent soon, rather, that, after they have learned the difficult language, they may be able to begin to prepare the ground for seed-sowing. It is a work that can only be done by women, for while the Bedouin women have greater freedom to go about and converse with the men than the town women have, and while some of the poorer classes in the towns will allow themselves to be treated by a man doctor, and sit and listen to an address made in the dispensary, the better class are only accessible in their houses. Their whole range of ideas is so limited and so far below ours that it will require "line upon line and precept upon precept" to teach these women that there is a higher and better life for them. In fact there must be the creation of the desire for better things as far as most of them are concerned, but love and tact accompanied by the power of the Holy Spirit can win their way to these hearts and accomplish the same results that have been accomplished among other Oriental women.

I have been striving to show that there is a crying need for work among the Arab women and that there are ample opportunities for service. I appeal to the women of the church whose sympathies have so long gone out to heathen women everywhere, not to have less sympathy for them, but to include Mohammedan Arabia and her womanhood more and more in their love, their gifts, and their prayers. In the days of Mohammed, after the battle of Khaibar, in which so many of her people had been mercilessly slaughtered, Zeinab, the Jewess, who prepared a meal for Mohammed and his men, put poison in the mutton and all but caused the prophet's death. It is said by some that he never fully recovered from the effects of the poison, and that it was an indirect cause of his death. It seems to us who have lived and labored in the land of the false prophet that his religion will only receive its death-blow when Christian women rise to their duty and privilege, and by love and sacrifice, not in vengeance but in mercy, send the true religion to these our neglected, degraded sisters,—sisters in Him who "hath made of one blood all nations."