Iranian youths can attend courtship classes and earn a diploma before tying the knot as part of a new government scheme to cut the divorce rate.
The National Youth Organization has unveiled an online course to educate the Islamic republic’s overwhelmingly young population on how to find Mr or Mrs Right, pop the question, and live happily ever after.
Interactive and lasting three months, the course designed by academics and clerics requires pupils seeking the diploma to sit for weekly tests.
PHOTO: AFP
Iranian hardliners condemn dating and relationships out of wedlock and like to see men and women married off ideally in their early 20s in a country where traditionalists frown upon singles in their 30s.
Official estimates, however, show the average age of marriage has risen to 29, mainly because of economic hardship and a change in priorities and values, especially for women who outnumber men at college.
Since rising to power five years ago, conservatives in the parliament and government have made a mantra of “facilitating marriage for young people” in Iran, where about 60 percent of the 70-million population is under 30.
The concept of a “marriage diploma” has unleashed a torrent of jokes on the Web, but officials say Iranians need awareness without revealing much about the content of the course.
“Marriage needs hundreds of hours of education,” Mehrdad Bazrpash, a deputy to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and head of the National Youth Organization, said on Saturday as he inaugurated the program in Tehran.
Ahmad Borjali, a psychologist and adviser to the initiative, said the divorce rate has gone up steadily since 2006, rising by 15.7 percent last year over the previous year, against a 2.1 percent increase in marriages.
One in every four marriages ends in divorce in Tehran alone, he said, citing research by social workers as blaming “sexual” and “communication troubles” among main reasons for the problem nationwide.
“Divorce is taboo and against values, but educational work does not cost much,” he said in a speech. “Face-to-face education is much more important and this can be a start given the size of the country.”
Despite its lofty goals the new initiative has been met with skepticism.
“Awareness is fine but the question is what kind of a family they are seeking to promote,” prominent sociologist Shahla Ezazi said.
“Our society is confused between tradition and modernity, there are both traditional arranged marriages and modern love marriages. But most propaganda is focused on reinforcing men’s leadership and women’s obedience,” she said.
Publicity material for the course showed a very conservative approach by authorities, shunning unmarried romantic relationships and encouraging traditional match-making.
“It is wiser to have different relationships ... I will hang out with a few and then choose one,” a boy with a Westernized appearance is depicted as saying in a booklet.
It was contrasted by a bearded, pious-looking young man who says “short-term illegitimate relationships harm dignity, but God has left the halal [religiously correct] path open.”
Ezazi said the authorities favor traditional, arranged marriages and “consider giving men and women equal rights a terrible feminist thing.”
“But people do not live as advised by the government and changes do not happen based on its orders,” she said.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency