The Requisites of Message Engineering from the Perspective of Islam and Its Application in National Media

This research was conducted with the aim of identifying and elucidating the requisites of message engineering in the media from the perspective of Islam. Given the central role of media in shaping the thoughts and values of society, the necessity of paying attention to Islamic principles and criteria in the design, production, and transmission of media messages is felt. The main objective of the research is to extract a systematic framework based on religious sources for message engineering that can provide a theoretical and practical foundation for the media. This research was conducted with a qualitative approach and by utilizing the thematic analysis method, based on the six-step model of Braun and Clarke. The research population included authentic Islamic sources (the Holy Quran, reliable Aḥādīth from books such as Uṣūl al-Kāfī and Biḥār al-Anwār, exegeses of prominent scholars, and jurisprudential [Fiqhī] sources) and the content of national media programs. Sampling was done purposefully, and 50 Islamic texts and 20 programs from the national media were selected. The data were analyzed through manual coding and by using coding forms. To ensure validity, a triangulation strategy and review by experts in the field of religion and media were used, and reliability was confirmed through recoding with an agreement coefficient of 87%. The results of the thematic analysis have led to the identification of three main categories of requisites. The structural and formal requisites include Islamic aesthetics, beneficial conciseness, logical structure, and the congruence of form with content, which emphasize the importance of designing the form of the message in a beautiful, concise, and coherent manner. The content-related requisites include accuracy and truthfulness, public interest, unity and cohesion, and persuasive superiority, which focus on the necessity of producing truthful, beneficial, and guiding content. The audience-centric requisites included accurate needs assessment, attention to existential dimensions (insightful, evaluative, active), responsibility-taking, and cultural appropriateness, which emphasize the importance of deep understanding of the audience and encouraging them to responsible agency. The evaluation of the conformity of national media programs with these requisites indicated that the overall average conformity is 68%. Content-related requisites had the highest conformity with 73%, and audience-centric requisites had the lowest with 64%. Religious programs and historical series exhibited relatively favorable performance, but commercial advertisements and talk show programs were weak in observing the requisites. The requisites of message engineering from the perspective of Islam are elucidable in three dimensions: formal, content-related, and audience-centric, providing a comprehensive framework for the production of effective media messages. The national media needs to strengthen the conciseness and digitalization of formats, compile jurisprudential [Fiqhī] checklists, and create interactive platforms. This research can pave the way for the development of applied models in the field of Islamic message engineering.