Marriage Across the ‘Color’ Spectrum: Making Commitment Palatable in Iran

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, marriage practices in the Islamic Republic of Iran have evolved rapidly as unfulfilled expectations of intimacy in marriages have caused an increase in divorce rates, and the tendency to postpone marriage and engage in unsanctioned intimate partner relationships. In the past decade, the emergence of ‘white marriages,’ or cohabitation, has made these unsanctioned relationships more publicly visible. This practice exacerbates what the state has for decades called a marriage crisis. Prominent clerics and state officials condemn white marriage because it violates Islamic principles. Still, some Iranians prefer this conjugal arrangement to sanctioned permanent or temporary marriages. Through an ethnographic analysis of narratives from clerics, legal experts, and practitioners of white marriage in Iran, this project reveals that through their everyday practices, white marriage practitioners have sparked a public discussion on the politics of intimacy and forced state actors and clerics to revisit legal and Islamic debates about marriage and more broadly, about gender. It also examines the relationship between Islamic jurisprudence and the civil legal code, and the implementation of the state’s hybrid Islamico-civil laws, beyond what is in the official discourse. At a time when state repression and gender oppression are used to justify isolation or military intervention throughout the Middle East, this project brings to light the co-constitutive power dynamic between the state and society, where white marriage practitioners contribute to social non-movements that effect social change. In so doing, this work asks us to reexamine the dichotomous language that scholars often use when talking about liberal, illiberal, or authoritarian legal orders.