The Role of Muharram Mourning Ceremonies in Student's Sexual Abstinence

The present study is investigating the role of Muharram mourning in sexual abstinence of male students in Tehran universities in 1387-88 through a half-experimental method. The subjects were 104 male students in Tehran universities in 1378-88, selected as available sample. Half of the subjects were those who had participated in Muharram mourning ceremonies for two succeeding years. In this study, the questionnaire of sexual abstinence was conducted in two phases with an interval of one month (10 days before Muharram and 20th of Muharram). To control the interfering variables, another group (52 subjects) who were not resolved to take part in Muharram ceremonies and were negligent of those ceremonies in previous years were selected as the control group. The data were analyzed through dependent T-test and One-way Analysis of Variance. The results showed that the scores of sexual abstinence for the experimental group in post-test were meaningfully higher than their scores in pre-test. Such a meaningful difference was not observed in the control group.