The next 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.) An old woman once desired Mohammed to intercede with God that she might be admitted to Paradise, and he told her that no old woman would enter that place.

She burst into loud weeping, when he explained himself by saying that God would then make her young again.
I was once a fellow-passenger in the Damascus diligence, with a Mohammedan pilgrim going to Mecca by way of Beirut and Egypt, in company with his wife.