Ethnic group minangkabau is indigenous to the lands on the west side of Sumatra, riding a Indonesia. Your culture is matrilineal, that is, it passes from mother to daughter, while religious and political romances belong to men (despite the fact that some women also play important roles in these areas). Today, 4 million minang live in West Sumatra, while about 3 million more are distributed in different cities and towns in Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula.
The Minangkabau are strongly Islamic, but they also follow ethnic traditions. The minangkabauadat It was derived from animistic beliefs before Islam came along, and traces of animistic beliefs can still be seen in some people. The present relationship between Islam and adat is described in the saying "Tradition founded Islamic law."
The name Minangkabau was thought to be the union of two words: minang (victorious) and kabau (buffalo). There is a legend that the name derives from a territorial dispute between Minangkabau and a neighboring prince. To avoid the battle, local people proposed a fight to the death between two buffalo, to clear up the dispute. The prince agreed and produced the biggest, baddest and most aggressive buffalo. The Minangkabau produced a hungry baby buffalo, with its little horns as sharp as knives. Seeing the adult buffalo at the other end, the baby ran hoping to find milk. The large buffalo saw no threat in the baby and paid no attention, as he looked around for his opponent. When the baby rushed to put his head against the stomach of the adult buffalo, the sharp horns embedded themselves and killed him, with Minangkabau being the winner of the contest and the dispute.
The line of the roofs of traditional West Sumatra houses, called ruma madang, it bends from the middle and at the ends, being an imitation of the curves that have the horns of buffaloes. The first people to arrive in Sumatra did so around 500 BC, as part of an expansion from Taiwán towards Southeast Asia. The Minangkabau language is a member of the Austronesian language family, and very similar to the Malay language.