Guest Pilgrimage to Holy Mashhad and Inter-Cultural Communication of Shiite Communities Surveying the Impact

This article attempts to show that religious travels reinforce cultural communication among Shiite communities. The survey has been undertaken in Mashhad on a sample of 598 pilgrims from four nations that include Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain. The results showed that two features of religious travelers: ‘travel duration’, and ‘previous travels’, bear a significant effect on cultural communications (pilgrim-host cultural and communal relationships). The issue of language seen as a barrier, however, seems to limit cultural communication, yet it does not make it impossible. Nonetheless, having had statistical control over the language barrier, the effect of travel on communal and cultural relationships remained significant and positive. This finding indicates that firstly, pilgrimage as a religious practice provides opportunity for making nonverbal cultural communications between the guest and the host communities. Secondly, despite language and cultural differences, pilgrimage and religious travels can provide a potential for different kinds of social ties to be developed among followers of a religion belonging to different societies.