In Iran, the legal age for marriage is thirteen for girls and fifteen for boys. However, many child marriages in Iran are not registered, as they happen in rural areas and among tribal and impoverished families.
Religion: Sharia-based Iranian law states that the legal age for marriage is 13 for girls and 15 for boys, but marriages can still be carried out at a younger age with the consent of fathers and permission from court judges. This has enabled a culture whereby child marriage is considered somewhat socially acceptable.
According to the United Nations Children's Fund ( UNICEF ), in the region taken as a whole, 15 per cent of women aged 20-24 were married before the age of 18 (world average: 19 per cent). Two per cent of these women were married before the age of 15 (world average: 5 per cent).
According to Iran's civil law, the marriage of an Iranian woman with a foreign emigrant depends on the special permission of the Iranian government. The issuance of permission to marry an Iranian woman with a foreign national has been delegated to the Ministry of the Interior of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This means that in 2020, for every 100 registered marriages, 32.9 divorces occurred. According to the statistics reported in Iran's Report on the Social and Cultural Status, published in the fall of 2020, some 51,270 marriages that ended in divorce lasted between one to five years.
The age distribution of the couples studied had a wide range: for husbands, it was between 20 and 63; for wives, between 18 and 48. The mean age of men was 40 years; for women, it was 32 years (Table 2). The duration of marriage ranged from 1 to 27 years; the average was about nine years.
Grooms' family is expected to pay for all expenses and if they can not, they will be looked down at. The higher the status and social standing of the bride, the more lavish will be the banquets and the presents, especially the jewelry. An elaborate wedding in Iran presently costs around a hundred thousand dollars.
“Under Iran's penal code, adultery is a 'crime against God' for both men and women,” she said. “It is punishable by 100 lashes for unmarried men and women, but married offenders are sentenced to death.”
A man can marry up to four women at one time; women can only marry one husband. A woman needs a male guardian's consent — either from her father or paternal grandfather—to marry. Muslim women cannot marry non-Muslim men, while Muslim men can marry Jews, Christians or Zoroastrians.
For marriage, Islam has not provided any particular age, either for the male or for the female. Islam, though, has only proposed getting married at a young age. That a child may escape sins by marrying at a young age. Sex at a young age often has certain perks, such as having both physical and moral chastity.
Similarly, in Equatorial Guinea and São Tomé and Principe, children can marry at the age of 14 with their parents' consent but have to wait until they are 18 otherwise. There are a considerably high number of countries that allow children to marry at the age of 15 and 16 as long as their legal guardians sign off on it.
Couples with an age gap of 1 to 3 years (with the man older than the woman) were the most common and had the greatest levels of satisfaction. Relationship satisfaction decreased slightly for couples with age gaps of 4 to 6 years and continued to decrease for couples with an age gap of 7 or more years.
Since the Pahlavi era fewer Iranians have practised cousin marriages. There is a strong preference for marrying a first cousin, but no specific preference for the father's brother's daughter. For the quarter of women married after age 21 it was found that the incidence of consanguinity declined to 28%.
Iran forbids women from traveling without the consent of her husband. According to article 18 of the Passport Law passed in 1973, a husband can ban his wife from leaving the country. A woman is required by Iranian law to have the permission on her husband before she can leave the country or obtain a passport.
There is no age of consent in Iran, as all sexual activity outside of marriage is illegal. The minimum age of marriage for men is 18, and is 16 for women.
The experts recalled that under the current version of Iran's Islamic Penal Code, any act deemed “offensive” to public decency is punishable by 10 days to two months in prison or 74 lashes. Women seen in public without a veil could be sentenced to between 10 days and two months in prison or a fine.
The overall frequency of consanguinity was found to be 50.7% in urban and 86.2% in rural areas. There was a significant difference between rural and urban areas in types of marriages (χ 2=24.8, df=4, p<0.001) and first cousin marriages (51.8%) were the most common type.
Under Book 5, article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code, women in Iran who do not wear a hijab may be imprisoned from 10 days to two months, and/or required to pay fines from 50,000 up to 500,000 rials adjusted for inflation.
Iran is a safe destination for solo travelers, although it's important to be aware of the local customs and laws, especially for women. Solo female travelers may experience some discrimination, and it is important to dress modestly and cover the head and hair with a scarf.
53% married women in Iran are subjected to some kind of domestic violence in the first year of their marriage, either by their husbands or by their in-laws.
Many of the countries that permit polygamy have Muslim majorities, and the practice is rare in many of them. Fewer than 1% of Muslim men live with more than one spouse in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran and Egypt – all countries where the practice is legal at least for Muslims.
As opposed to western cultures, marriage proposal in Iran takes place in a formal family-gathering called Khaastgaari ceremony and develops through negotiations between the prospective couples' families.
The traditional gift is a ring. Usually before doing the marriage in the official way, the bride and groom (alone or with mothers) will go for buying the marriage rings. Usually the marriage rings are not simple, especially for women, which usually should be full of diamonds.
The future groom, in Persian called khaastegaar, along with his family goes to see his wife-to-be and her family on a certain date, bringing them flowers, sweets and the like. During this visit, which is similar to a party, or mehmaani, the girl, or dokhtar, often offers tea to the guests.