The Scientific Foundations of Islamic Religious Education: Ontology, Epistemology, and Axiology as Mutually Constraining Conditions for Religious Character Formation

Abstract

Islamic Religious Education (Pendidikan Agama Islam, PAI) is often described as having three philosophical foundations, namely ontology, epistemology and axiology. The literature usually takes these to be parallel and complementary, each adding something the others lack. This article argues that the relation is stronger and less comfortable than the complementarity. The three foundations constrain each other, so that a commitment at one level creates binding limitations to what can be done at the other levels. The argument is developed through a conceptual analysis of classical and contemporary Islamic philosophical sources. Al-Jabiri’s tripartite account of Arab-Islamic reason, bayani, burhani and irfani, is the framework of the epistemological discussion and al-Attas’s concept of ta’dib is the framework of the axiological discussion. The main argument here is that the stated axiological purpose of PAI, the formation of akhlaq and a religious disposition that survives outside supervision, is epistemologically unreachable in a situation where the operative epistemology has been narrowed down to bayani transmission only. The empirical evidence on the design of Islamic Religious Education, which finds that ta'lim-oriented outcomes dominate while ta'dib and tarbiyah are rarely integrated, is read here not as a pedagogical failure but as the predictable consequence of that narrowing. The article concludes with an account of implications for curriculum design and assessment, and what would count as evidence against its position