Religious Moderation in Indonesian Islamic Education: Curriculum Policy, Pesantren Autonomy, and Pedagogical Reconstruction

Abstract

Religious moderation has become the organising concept of Indonesian religious policy and education its principal instrument, yet extensive institutional activity has not been matched by evidence of dispositional change among learners. This study aims to examine how regulatory instruments governing Islamic education construct religious moderation, to identify the normative resources within Islamic legal and educational tradition that supply internal justification for a moderate disposition, and to formulate the pedagogical design required to form that disposition consistently with institutional autonomy. The research applies normative qualitative method combining doctrinal analysis of Islamic legal methodology with document analysis of the Constitution, the National Education System Law, the Pesantren Law, government and presidential regulations on religious education and moderation, and madrasah curriculum regulation, read alongside classical sources and contemporary scholarship on moral formation and intergroup relations. The findings show that the corpus constructs moderation as transmissible content, producing assessability drift, displacement of formation by declarative activity, and a justificatory register grounded in national integration that does not reach the level at which religious conviction operates; and that the tradition itself supplies stronger internal grounds through the objectives of the law, the recognition of qualified juristic disagreement, and the classical ethics of inquiry. The article recommends a pedagogy of structured disagreement, contact organised under empirically specified conditions, investment in teacher scholarly capability rather than declarative programming, and indirect state instruments consistent with guaranteed pesantren autonomy.