Pohon, jaring, menara, roda, dan obor: metafora paradigma keilmuan PTKINTree, web, towers, wheel and torch: metaphors of the knowledge paradigms of Indonesia’s Islamic universities

Before integrative paradigms emerged, the early IAIN stood on a traditional normative-theological paradigm. Study centred on the transmitted sciences of fiqh, exegesis, hadith and kalam, with three aims: training madrasah teachers, mirroring Middle Eastern educational traditions and supplying staff to the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Knowledge was treated as sacred truth to be affirmed rather than examined; its methods were internal to religion, such as usul al-fiqh, while social science and modern science barely entered the curriculum and Orientalism was suspected as a threat. The result was a closed, defensive paradigm: strong in preserving creed, character and the classical heritage, but distant from social reality and empirically weak.

Transformation began in the 1970s and strengthened in the 1980s, driven by contact with the West, national problems, an internal impulse to modernise and a generation of scholars trained abroad or in the social sciences. Progressive journals such as Ulumul Qur’an in the late 1980s tried to join textual study with social analysis. Exegesis and hadith were historicised and subjected to textual criticism, fiqh was analysed sociologically, and creed entered dialogue with philosophy and hermeneutics. Harun Nasution, Nurcholish Madjid and Azyumardi Azra emerged as pioneers of dialogue between religious and general sciences, even as traditionalists accused Islamic campuses of being ‘nests of Orientalists’. The conversion of IAIN into UIN from the early 2000s made integration a watchword, and each campus formulated its own model.

This is where metaphors come in. UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang uses the tree of knowledge: roots as the foundations of religion and Qur’anic language, trunk as integrated knowledge and fruit as graduates of character and competence, with the motto of beginning with the basmala and ending with the hamdala. Conceptually this tree is close to the Islamisation paradigm, which can also be pictured with roots of creed, a trunk of sharia and fruits of character and applied science, as in Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas’s scheme. UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta uses twin towers: two towers of religious and general science standing on a foundation of tawhid and rising to a summit of welfare and God’s pleasure, with the ideal of double excellence.

M. Amin Abdullah at UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta formulated the spider’s web: nodes of disciplines linked by threads of ethical value, tawhid and integrative method, with religion as a polycentric ethical centre. The web became the emblem of the interconnection paradigm, which widens integration into a multidisciplinary, multicultural and theo-anthropocentric dialogue; it is even painted on a campus wall. UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung uses the wheel of knowledge, rendered as a sculpture, while UIN Antasari Banjarmasin uses a river of knowledge flowing into the ocean of tawhid. Integration is often pictured as a bridge between two hills, interconnection as a highway network among ‘cities of knowledge’.

The fourth paradigm, fricativisation, formulated at UIN Ar-Raniry, uses the emblem of the traditional Acehnese torch, the sua, and the breath that kindles it. The term ‘fricative’ comes from linguistics, a sound produced by air forced through a narrow gap, and in this paradigm knowledge is understood as ‘breathed forth’ rather than merely transmitted or constructed. The torch may flare or go out depending on the intention, adab and spiritual quality of the recipient, just as breath in Islamic cosmology conveys life and death, from Gabriel breathing revelation to Israfil blowing the trumpet. The sua is also used in Acehnese ceremonies as a symbol of enlightenment.

The four paradigms can be set on a single spectrum. Islamisation makes Islam core and filter; integration fuses religious and general sciences under tawhid; interconnection links many disciplines and cultures under the guidance of religious ethics; fricativisation understands knowledge as spiritual resonance. Each has its own ontology, epistemology, axiology and symbol, and each is criticised: Islamisation as normative and prone to insularity, integration as often stopping at slogans and ‘appended’ verses, interconnection as abstract and demanding ‘Renaissance minds’, and fricativisation as abstract, elitist and hard to apply to the natural sciences. A 2019 study at UIN Ar-Raniry and UIN Sumatera Utara even found that lecturers at both campuses lacked a clear grasp of integration.

These metaphors are therefore not decoration. They are the way campuses imagine the unity of knowledge and promise a certain kind of graduate. The question that remains for the PTKIN is whether these symbols have been translated into curricula, laboratories, research methods and academic culture, or whether they still stop at emblems on campus gates and walls.