We would not be wrong to claim that most people among us still, in certain aspects of their social thinking, live in the past age. It is as though they had set up a barrier between themselves and the developments of the present age — economic, scientific, and political — so that they cannot witness its powerful, all-embracing effect in all the fields of life, and especially the social field.

Our wonder at this may vanish if we recall that material development has been, and still is, ahead of spiritual development; and that modern man's development in the field of inventions and applied sciences far exceeds his development in the social and moral spheres. That is to say, society advances materially at tremendous speed, while its social and moral progress keeps the pace of a tortoise. This upsetting of the balance is the source of the misery of present-day society, and the cause of the tremendous crises and problems that the modern age faces.

Here is what a Western researcher says on this subject: "The gap is still vast between our economic system and our social system in point of develop-ment. Our economic circles have opened their doors to the employment of married women, and we have seen the number of working women grow day by day in the factories, the offices, the institutions of higher learning, the hospitals, and the other establishments. Our social system, however, has not yet fully succeeded in adjusting itself to this

economic phenomenon, and still clings to the opinion that woman's place is the home, although this opinion is no longer practicable in our new order of living. What a dwarf, trying to grapple with a giant!"

Yet this social development is inevitably taking place, even if its steps are slow. Its spray has touched all the circles of society, among them the family, which is counted the oldest and most firmly established social institution and, consequently, the citadel of conservatism and rigidity — and sometimes the citadel of reaction.

From its earliest ages the family has performed three basic functions: procreation, economic cooperation, and the

care of the children. Its functions kept widening and adapting themselves as society adapted, so that some have brought them to six: the affec-tional or friendly func-tion, the economic, home recreations, discipline and religious training, and protection. Others gather them into four that embrace everything: the procreative function, the economic, the affec-tional, and the cultural.

The procreative function is still among the most important functions of the family, especially in the countries con-cerned with encouraging offspring for national and military ends, like Germany just before the last war. The impor-tance of this function was at its height in the era of the tribal order, when the standing of the tribe depended on the greatness of its numbers and the number of its fighting males. In that era the taking of several wives flourished, out of the desire to increase offspring and to shelter the captives of war. That is what we see in the pre-Islamic era among the Arabs; and we see remnants of the tribal order apparent among us in the banding together of the family on the pattern of the pre-Islamic tribe, and in its members' desire for as many male children as possible. And though