Unique Marriage Customs in Xinjiang
2 min readMarriage Patterns
The marriage of the ethnic minorities in Xinjiang is a typical patriarchalmarriage form characterized by monogamy and characterized in that the wife follows the husband. The practice of the husband follows the wife is uncommon and only if the woman’s family does not have a son or the son is so young needing physical labour, then her husband has to live in the home of the wife’s parents. Influenced by the patriarchy, both the social status and the economic condition of the families where parents live together with the sonin-law are poor. Before the liberation, there were a few polygamous phenomena among the most ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, but the phenomena were restricted to several rich families or the families in which the wives were sterile.
The polygamy was allowed by the Islam, and one man could be married with as many as four wives according to the rule, but he was required to treat each wife equally; otherwise, he was forbidden to have several wives. According to the Koran,”You can choose beloved women, individually marry two, three or four wives, but if you cannot treat them equally, you can only be married to only one wife”. Therefore, in the polygamous Islam families in the past, there was no obvious difference and hierarchy among the wives, the wives called each other sister, and the born children also had the rightful inheritance. Among the minorities such as the Uygur and the Kazak, if the first wife was sterile, she would actively choose a second wife for her husband and arrange the marriage. Among the minorities such as the Mongolian and the Xibe people, the hierarchy between the wife and the concubine was rather clear, and the child born by the legal wife was different from the one born by the concubine. Since the liberation, the polygamous phenomena in the minorities have been completely eliminated.
