Reconstructing Adab as an Integrative Educational Framework: Educators, Students, Knowledge, and Environment in Ibn Jamāʿah’s Tadhkirat al-Sāmiʿ wa al-Mutakallim

Bahosin Sihombing; Syamruddin Nasution; Sawaluddin Sawaluddin

doi:10.32806/jf.v15i03.2307

Authors

Bahosin Sihombing Universitas Islam Negeri Sultan Syarif Kasim Riau, Indonesia
Syamruddin Nasution Universitas Islam Negeri Sultan Syarif Kasim Riau, Indonesia
Sawaluddin Sawaluddin Institut Agama Islam Rokan, Riau, Indonesia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.32806/jf.v15i03.2307

Keywords:

adab; , Ibn Jamāʿah; , Islamic educational ethics; , moral formation; , educational ecology;, virtue and exemplarity.

Abstract

Islamic education seeks to join intellectual development to moral and spiritual formation, yet how a classical text can articulate that union as a working structure remains underexamined. Ibn Jamāʿah’s Tadhkirat al- wa al-Mutakallim fī Adab ʿĀlim wa al-Mutaʿallim offers an extended account of the ethics of teaching and learning. Still, its prescriptions have been cataloged descriptively rather than analyzed as an interconnected system. This study aimed to reconstruct those prescriptions into an integrative educational framework. Using a qualitative textual–conceptual design, the study applied content analysis to the 96 prescriptions in the Tadhkirat: 38 concerning educators, 36 concerning students, 11 concerning books, and 11 concerning the educational environment. Each prescription was coded and classified by three epistemic levels, distinguishing the text’s explicit categories from the study’s analytical inferences. The analysis found that the four domains form a single relational structure rather than four separate codes: piety (taqwa) provides the normative foundation; educator and student adab constitute the domains of ethical practice; and exemplarity qudwa and habituation function as formative mechanisms operating across knowledge, books, and learning space, with internalized adab (character) posited as a prospective outcome. The five-level structure is the study’s analytical reconstruction, not a model that Ibn Jamāʿah himself states, and its relationships are conceptual rather than empirically validated. The framework reframes adab as a principle that is simultaneously personal, relational, and institutional, and brings a classical Islamic text into dialogue with contemporary scholarship on educational purpose, intellectual virtue, and moral formation, while cautioning against transferring historical forms directly to present-day settings

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