ISLAMIC RELIGIOUS EDUCATION POLICY AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN INDONESIA
A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS (2015–2026)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30868/ei.v15i04.10989Keywords:
Religious freedom; Islamic religious education policy; madrasah; pesantren; religious moderation; systematic review; bibliometricsAbstract
This study maps the literature on constitutional religious freedom and its implications for Islamic Religious Education (IRE/PAI) policy in Indonesia. It employs a PRISMA 2020-based systematic review combined with bibliometric analysis. Searches were run in OpenAlex as the primary index, with Crossref used for metadata validation and Google Scholar as a supplementary source, using five search strings for publications from 2015 to 2026 (search cut-off: October 2026; 2026 is treated as an incomplete year). Of the 231,895 identified records, the 200 highest relevance-ranked records from each string (1,000 records in total) were retrieved for screening; after de-duplication and eligibility assessment, 277 studies were included. The corpus shows an average annual growth of 23.1% over the complete period 2015–2025, a predominance of Indonesian authorship (192 articles; 69.3%), an average of 8.03 citations per article, and an open-access share of 96.4%. After generic geographical terms were excluded from interpretation, the dominant thematic keywords were pesantren, madrasah, Islamic education, religious freedom, and religious moderation, forming three clusters: Islamic educational institutions, education policy, and religious freedom. These clusters served as the starting point for thematic coding, which yielded seven critical issues: state–religion relations in the constitution; IRE as public policy; madrasah and pesantren governance; religious moderation as education policy; protection of religious freedom and minorities; IRE curriculum and classroom practice; and the gap between regulation and implementation. The study concludes that constitutional guarantees of religious freedom have become the normative foundation of IRE policy, yet the literature addresses norms and value discourses more than evidence of implementation in schools and madrasahs. Its main contributions are a four-layer conceptual framework (constitution–policy–institution–pedagogy) and a research agenda for developing moderate and inclusive Islamic education.
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