Cultural Needs of Foreign Pilgrims of Imam Reza's Holy Shrine: Case of Urdu, Arabic, Azerbaijani and English-Speaking Pilgrims

This paper describes and analyzes cultural needs of foreign pilgrims of Imam Reza’s holy shrine in the city of Mashhad. We conducted a survey to measure cultural needs in 5 dimensions including emotion, belief, ritual, knowledge and consequence. A total of 1427 pilgrims (Azerbaijani, English, Urdu, and Arabic-speaking) were questioned for the survey. Results showed that knowledge need is at the top of the hierarchy of cultural needs and the second level is consequential need. But the emotional, religious and ritualistic needs are located in lower levels. The difference between the degrees of five needs is statistically significant. In addition there are significant differences between four groups of foreign pilgrims in the intensity of cultural needs.