Navigating the Digital Transformation of Islamic Education: Authority, Verification, and the Problem of Unsourced Religious Content

Abstract

Digital platforms have become a primary route through which Indonesian students encounter religious knowledge, and teachers of Islamic education increasingly meet classroom questions whose answers students have already obtained from sources carrying no chain of transmission. This study examines how the digital transformation of Islamic education reconfigures the relationship between teacher, text, and learner, and asks what verification practice becomes possible when the volume of accessible religious content exceeds any teacher’s capacity to authenticate it. The study is a conceptual synthesis of peer-reviewed literature, policy documents, and institutional reports, selected purposively and analysed thematically across accessibility, content authenticity, pedagogical innovation, teacher role, ethics, and institutional readiness. The analysis finds that digitalisation expands access decisively but redistributes interpretive authority in ways existing teacher preparation does not address; that content generated by artificial intelligence intensifies rather than creates this problem, since fluency without sanad is already characteristic of much online religious material; and that blended learning models developed for school-age learners transfer poorly to the adult and para-professional audiences that dominate Islamic non-formal education without andragogical adjustment. The study argues that the practical task facing institutions is not the adoption of technology but the design of verification competence, and proposes three design principles: teaching provenance rather than conclusions, making the limits of teacher authority explicit, and building institutional review of digital content into curriculum governance rather than leaving it to individual discretion.