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Mass Wedding in Iran Seeks to Encourage Marriage
With unemployment soaring high enough in Iran to keep many young people from saving the money they need to get married, government officials planned something romantic and cheap: mass weddings.
Wedding day at the Interior Ministry Monday included dancing, folk music, gifts and some 700 young couples exchanging vows. Another 850 pairs got hitched in the same huge hall the day before, and organizers who are representatives of Iran's supreme leader said 14,000 couples were expected to do the same in Tehran and other cities around the country during this week of mass weddings.
The general director of the project, Ahmad Bahraini, says the purpose is to "encourage marriage among our young people and invite the public to hold modest celebrations in order to save money."
Many young Iranian men do not get married before they are 30 because it is too difficult to save enough money. Many couples come to Tehran from country villages for the jammed mass weddings.
Unofficial figures put unemployment at over 30 percent. .
On Monday, men in khaki hats and baggy red trousers danced, women watched and clapped in encouragement.
Bahraini, who represents supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at a Tehran university, said he began organizing mass weddings in 1998 with only 150 student couples. By last year, the number of couples had risen to 1,000.
Each couple receive as presents a gold coin, a copy of the Quran the Muslim holy book, a blanket and a license for a telephone line.
They also take part in a big party with bands from their districts playing traditional music. As Iran's strict interpretation prohibits men and women from dancing in public, it is the men who dance and their wives and female guests clap in encouragement.
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