Religious Tourism: The Way to Santiago

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW
Most researchers identify religious tourism with the individual’s quest for shrines
and locales where the visitors seek to experience the sense of identity with sites of
historical and cultural meaning (Nolan and Nolan 1989).
Al-Amin (2002), explains how religious tourism is not one type of tourism, as
is the case of secular tourism and describes two different types of religious tourism, a
tourism performed through a religious duty, and tourism where the knowledge is
recorded and quoted for wider dissemination.
Should the aim of religious tourism be to obtain the Blessings of God, it would
achieve another objective, and that is to attract tourists. The aim is to introduce to
tourists a country which the tourists find unfamiliar and which is impossible to know
about without the existence of religious tourism in the first place. Visitors would also
be unable to know more about the people of a country if religious tourism not exists
there. (Al-Amin 2002)
In this way, from the Islamic point of view and according to Shakiry (2003), tourism
is integrated in the global vision of civilized and interdependent tourism, whose
principal bases are respect of the noble human values and ethics which preserves for
the human being, respect for the environment.
Among different statements the most remarkable from Shakiry (2003) are:
• Support for social solidarity by taking care to profit the local populations
from the tourist activity.
• Making the effort to give the right of travel to all people by offering services
at suitable prices to all the social classes.
• Respect for the families of various religions and various people who want to
preserve their values and the education of their children.
• Respects for people who observe the Islamic values; those prohibiting certain
things permitted by certain societies which adopt the principles of freedom
and democracy, without limits or regulations.
David Mashhadigholam Rojo 8