from the Koran itself by Reeland, in his second book on the Mahometan religion, sect. 18. The truth seems to be, that the impostor, embarrassed by the introduction of the paradisiacal females, whose charms were to reward the male believers, did not well know how to dispose of mere women, and therefore said little about them. That they were so slightly treated in his pretended revelation, co-operated with the licentious example of the impostor himself, to effect that extreme degradation of the female character, which has distinguished the Mahometan nations. Mahomet, though his own law permitted but four wives, indulged himself in the liberty of taking a greater number, for authorising which he provided a special revelation. He accordingly married at least twelve women, of which ten were contemporary; and he took also eleven concubines. Some writers extend the number of his wives even to twenty-six. Hist. of the Arabs, vol. 1. p. 239–244. Like other sensualists he despised the sex, to which he was attached by passion; for the commentators of the Koran record as his saying, that among men there had been many perfect, but four only of the other sex, namely Asia the wife of Pharaoh, Mary the daughter of Imran, Khadijah the daughter of Khowailed, and Fatima his own daughter. Ibid. p. 29. Of these it is to be re marked, that the first was supposed by the Mahometans to have been the niece of Amran or Imran, the father of Moses; and that Mary, the daughter of Imran and sister of Moses, was strangely confounded with the mother of Jesus Christ of these four two only were of his own religion, his first wife and his daughter. Herbelot, art. Asiah and Amran. DR. Robertson has remarked, that the only common enterprise in which the European nations ever engaged, remains a singular monu * History of Charles V. vol. 1. sect. 1. ment of human folly. I am by no means disposed to maintain the wisdom of the enterprise; but in a philosophical view of the progress of European society it deserves to be considered, whether it were not essential to an undertaking, which without reducing the numerous states of Christendom under the domination of one wide-spread empire, should force into combination the incoherent and even repulsive materials of a rude and tumultuary system, and generate and diffuse in it the principles of political improvement, that it should result from some temporary extravagance, rather than from the suggestion of a reasonable policy. In such a period of society it is naturally impossible that numerous states should agree to co-operate upon any reasonable principle of action; and even if this were possible, it might not be so advantageous as the transient influence of a temporary enthusiasm, which when it had produced its effect would be wholly suspended, and leave the several governments in the unimpaired possession of their former distinctness and independence. Of this latter description was the principle of the crusades. Resulting naturally from the previous condition of the nations of Europe, however itself inconsistent with reason, it united the principal states in the pursuit of the same visionary object during nearly two centuries, and then altogether lost |