Objective:Religious journalism faces a fundamental challenge: despite increasing quantity, news reports often fail to convey the semantic and existential layers of religious experience. This article aims to propose a conceptual framework for explaining the link between inner experience and outward expression in religious news coverage.
Method:The study employed a qualitative approach based on conceptual analysis and theoretical inference from Transcendent Philosophy (al-Ḥikmah al-Mutaʿāliyah), with particular emphasis on the gradation of existence (tashkīk al-wujūd), knowledge by presence (al-ʿilm al-ḥuḍūrī), substantial motion (al-ḥarakah al-jawhariyyah), and the unity of the intellect and the intelligible (ittiḥād al-ʿāqil wa al-maʿqūl). Philosophical concepts extracted from the works of Mullā Ṣadrā were compared with phenomenological literature and media-religion theories, and their communicative implications were subsequently inferred.
Results: The theoretical outcome is a model designated as the "Gradational Ladder" (al-sullam al-tashkīkī), which formulates the communicative emergence of religious experience across five analytical levels: sense (ḥiss), imagination (khayāl), estimation (wahm), intellect (ʿaql), and beyond-intellect (mā warāʾ al-ʿaql). These levels are not psychological indicators or instruments for measuring existential status; rather, they serve as analytical tools for identifying layers of description and meaning-making within news narratives. Accordingly, the quality of media representation is influenced by the interviewee's perceptual horizon (ufuq idrākī) and the journalist's mode of engagement, without claiming privileged access to sacred truth. Four practical principles for gradational journalism were also extracted: (1) identifying the interviewee's existential-perceptual horizon, (2) cultivating the journalist's intrapersonal communication, (3) employing gradational questioning techniques, and (4) formulating corresponding ethical considerations.
Conclusions: This article provides a conceptual framework for analyzing and evaluating religious reports, rather than offering a definitive solution for the full representation of religious experience. Its novelty lies in the transition from static classifications to a spectral, gradational logic that links intrapersonal and interpersonal communication; empirical validation is left to future field research.