Functional Analysis of Religious Tourism in Iran (Meta-analysis on Current Research)

Tourism as a phenomenon is constantly pushing its frontier forward, expanding its importance and involving more people globally. It is now world’s largest industry and as a multifaceted industry, it consists of various components and types. Before the First World War, and according to social class, there was no possibility of separating its different types. But nowadays, due to such various factors as time, place, motive and purpose, its different segmentations are also taken into consideration. The factors just made mention of are defined and classified in terms of time, place, citizenship, and especially incentive travel. Among all the forms of tourism, religious tourism in some countries is more important. This type of tourism is one of the most common forms of tourism around the world and its history is linked to centuries ago; it generally consists of travels and visits in which the main purpose is religious experience. Based on Iran's capabilities in tourist attractions and especially religious tourist attractions and because of its cultural and economic importance there is a huge potential for religious tourism. Hence, the current paper intends to study the consequences and functions of this phenomenon. This research is based on this question: What are the positive and negative implications of religious tourism in economic, social, cultural, and political areas? This research is done in qualitative method. Therefore, by using meta-analysis techniques and emphasis on the Parson's functionalism theory we examine religious tourism and its functions in Iranian society. In a meta-analysis research, results of different researches are synthesized and new information is derived.In this paper, we survey 10 researches written on religious tourism in Iran. Discussion and The results showed that in the biological subsystem, religious tourism causes an improvement in basic infrastructure, creates jobs, increases incomes and brings about economic improvement. In the personality subsystem, the impact of religious tourism on programs and policies is reciprocal. Sometimes increasing religious tourism leads to the adoption of programs and policies, and in some cases, programs are approved for increasing religious tourism. Religious tourism impacts on social subsystem with the increasing quality of life, climbing facilities and increasing social cohesion. Finally, energy obtained from religious tourism arrives to cultural subsystem, here are the cultural subsystem itself suggest with the phenomenon of cultural transmission and the sharing and maintain of the value. In this study, according to Parson's theoretical pattern and reviews of previous studies in this field, consequences and functions of religious tourism are dividedinto four sectors of economic, policy and programs, social and cultural, and then each of them was studied. Finally, the findings of each part with the findings of previous studies in this field were compared. According to Parson’s functionalist theory, the increase of religious tourism, large energy is being created in the environment and moves to the sub-systems. Initially, this energy affected biological and economic subsystem and then the other sub-systems according to the extent of religious tourism of it are influenced. Thus, we can say the entry tourist have positive and negative effects on the society. Employment, entry income into the region, rising wages, economic growth, infrastructure development, enhanced quality of life and facilities, cultural transmission, positive effects are entry religious tourist. Also, the negative effects of religious tourism are increase taxes, increase costs of life, increase crime and destruction of local culture.