No Unnecessary Contact: A Study of Boy-Girl Relations in Iran

No Unnecessary Contact is the first English edition of a book published in Qom in 2008 by the research arm of Iran's state broadcaster. IRIB holds a monopoly on television and radio in Iran, answers to the Supreme Leader rather than to the elected government, and its research center produces studies meant to guide what the state puts on air. The original runs to 262 pages under the title A Study of Boy-Girl Relationships in Iran and Proposed Corrective Measures.

Its subject is friendship, courtship, and desire between young men and women in a country where such contact is legally and often socially restricted. Under Iranian law and custom, unrelated men and women are expected to keep apart in schools, at work, and in public, and a relationship outside marriage carries real consequences for a family's standing and, at times, legal ones. The author, Abdollah Javan, takes that arrangement as correct and asks why it is failing.

The book assembles its case from hadith, Shi'i jurisprudence, Iranian social history, and Western sources including Kinsey, Freud, Will Durant, and Bertrand Russell. It reports the numbers behind the problem: a marriage age that climbed from 18.4 for girls in 1966 to roughly 25 by 2001, a surplus of more than 2.6 million marriage-age girls over boys, police counts of runaway adolescents, and a university survey that found relations between girls and boys the single subject students most wanted to discuss. Its remedies are marriage in adolescence, sigheh, separation of the sexes, and supervision by parents, schools, clerics, and the state. Its closing section instructs IRIB planners on how to handle the subject on air, down to approved serials, approved discussion questions, and questions to put to young viewers.

Khajistan Press has not softened the document or rewritten it in gentler modern language. Long stretches of theory have been tightened and the closing survey shortened. Nothing it argues has changed. The edition adds a publisher's note, an editorial addendum on what the smartphone did to the world the author describes, a glossary of the text's religious and legal vocabulary, and the full list of works cited in the source.

Part of Texts of the Middle World, a Khajistan Press series on neglected vernacular print cultures of the Islamicate world.

Publisher: Khajistan Press
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 66
ISBN-13: 978-1-970281-17-0
Dimensions: 5 × 8 in
Weight: 0.168 lb