The Role of Ritual Tourism in Preserving Hossein's Mourning Culture; Case Study of Masouleh Town

Religious rituals and mourning ceremonies are amongst the most important resources of reaching identity intellectual ruts and the lifestyle by the individuals who collectively exercise and continue them in a certain region. Hosseini mourning ritual ceremony, in Masuleh Residential Estate, is the performance of traditional rites that put on their symbolic guise on the body of the Muslims’ lamentations after the entry of Islam into this region and updated the traditional ritual style for expressing sympathy with Imam Hussein (PBUH) and his companions. This cultural phenomenon that has been registered as a spiritual heritage needs to be seen so that its practical manifestations can be preserved and guarded hence not lost. Ritual tourism with its dramatic feature, repetition and redisplay of the course of event narrates the ritual actions and reactions before the eyes of the tourists and acts as a powerful medium for preserving the unique and lean characteristics of the regions. The present study is a descriptive and survey research that has been conducted through taking advantage of such means as interview and questionnaire based on convenience and snow ball methods amongst 340 domestic and foreign tourists of Hosseini mourning rites in Masuleh residential estate in 2018. The results of the investigations and analyses of the tourists’ ideas and outputs based on SPSS and Excel are expressive of the considerable role of ritual tourism in the preservation and guarding of the traditional rites and the necessity for equipping the region’s tourism infrastructures. In line with purposive guidance of the tourists and benefiting from the ritual tourism, the holding of specialized and well-planned tours is amongst the primary suggestions of the present study.