Beena marriage

Beena is a form of marriage used in pre-Islamic Arabia, in which a wife would own a tent of her own, within which she retained complete independence from her husband, according to William Robertson Smith. The term was suggested by John Ferguson McLennan, who noted that in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) the marriage when a husband goes to live in the wife's village is called "beena marriage", and suggested to use "beena" as a general term for this kind of marriage. The social system by which a couple lives with or near the wife's family is known by anthropologists as matrilocality.