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

No Unnecessary Contact is the first English edition of a 2008 Iranian study of friendship, courtship, and desire between young men and women, originally published in Qom by the research arm of Iran's state broadcaster, IRIB. Drawing on Shi'i jurisprudence, hadith, social history, surveys, and Western writers from Freud to Kinsey, Abdollah Javan asks why restrictions on relations between unmarried men and women were increasingly failing and proposes remedies ranging from early marriage and sigheh to segregation, supervision, and state media intervention.This Khajistan Press edition preserves the book's arguments while tightening its original 262 pages. It includes a publisher's note, an editorial addendum on the smartphone era, a glossary, and the source bibliography. Part of Texts of the Middle World, a series on neglected vernacular print cultures of the Islamicate world.