Paper long abstract:

Throughout history, adoption has held a contentious and ambiguous role in the social imagination of many cultures. Adoption is a complex social, legal, and economic phenomenon that has existed in one form or another in most societies since ancient history. Before Islam, adoption was widespread among the Arabs, and remained valid during the early days of Islam. However, the practice was expressly forbidden under the later Quranic ruling. Not all Muslims will choose to follow the Islamic rules on adoption. Because in Islam the adoption is allowed but not the ownership. Here I will be dealing with adoption among the Uyghurs in Xinjiang in the first half of the 20th century, during the Republican era. To date there are hardly any sources or studies about adoption among the Uyghur available. The recent article “Uyghur Civil documents on child adoption in republican Xinjiang” by the Kazakhstani Uyghur scholar Ablet Kamalov (2018) makes an important contribution to this field. Based on several text corpora consisting of legal documents originating in southern Xinjiang (Khotan Yarkant and Kashgar) from the Republican era, in this paper, I will contribute to our knowledge of the types of adoption taking place in Republican Xinjiang, the reasons and motivations behind the contracts and the proper time to adoption.