Strategies for Teaching Islamic Education in Higher Education Institutions in the Context of Contemporary Educational Transformation

Abstract

Classical Islamic pedagogy warrants knowledge through sanad, a chain of transmission traced back to a recognized teacher; digital platforms warrant it through reach, recency, and rhetorical appeal. Lecturers in Islamic Religious Education teach where the two systems meet, in courses that assess and credential. Prior research shows religious authority online is contested and that students arrive with source hierarchies their institutions did not build, but stops at the learner; what teachers do in response is unexamined. This instrumental single-case study asks how lecturers at a State Islamic university that was elevated to university status (UIN Madura) manage competing warrants. Data came from 15 interviews (6 lecturers, 6 students, 3 program directors), 3 classroom observations, and 6 documents, analyzed using hybrid deductive–inductive thematic coding with negative-case testing. Lecturers construed the difficulty not as erroneous content but as a contest over the warrant. They responded with practices we term authority work: re-anchoring a circulating claim to a warranted chain while keeping it open, routinizing verification into a standing slot, and re-sequencing instruction so the classical text arrives as an analytic tool rather than opening doctrine. This work extends digital epistemic authority from learner to teacher. It specifies sanad as the warrant, but it strains against a value the construct does not carry: reverence-ranking of the canonical text, which some students defended as adab. Enabling and blocking conditions were social and administrative rather than technological, relocating the problem from teacher competence to institutional design.