Telephone prompt for permission

Question

Is there a way in Phonegap to manually request permission?

Example:
My application needs to access the device contacts. Therefore, at the first launch (on iOS), a pop-up window appears asking whether to allow or deny the application access to contacts. If the user denied permission, the popup will never appear again and the application will be unusable. Therefore, I need to consider two things:

• Is there a way to get the current permission status? (i.e. does the application have permission to access contacts? ")
• Is there a way to request the user again for permission?