Reconstructing Islamic Education Policy in Indonesia: Integrating Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah, Digitalization, and National Education Law

Abstract

Islamic education in Indonesia is administered under two ministries, financed through channels that do not reach all institutions equally, and regulated by statutes drafted at different times for different purposes. The codification of education legislation now before the legislature, together with rapid digitalization, makes this the moment at which the resulting fragmentation can be corrected or entrenched. This study reconstructs Indonesian Islamic education policy by deriving evaluative criteria from maqasid al-shari’ah, applying them to the present architecture and to digitalization, and testing the codification against them. The research is normative juridical and doctrinal, using statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches, with maqasid reasoning and classical educational doctrine as internal normative standards and constitutional analysis as the external one. The architecture is fragmented along four axes: administering authority, financing channel, recognition pathway, and standards apparatus. Measured against the essential interests, the framework performs adequately on access and weakly on equality of provision, on the quality of religious learning, and on the protection of learners in digital environments. Digitalization amplifies rather than relieves these weaknesses, because capacity to exploit it is distributed along the same lines as existing inequality. Reconstruction should equalize financing by function, unify quality assurance while preserving institutional distinctiveness, provide a national digital infrastructure entitlement for religious education institutions, and state learner protection obligations that apply across the whole system.