Power Relations and Knowledge Production in Qur’anic Studies: A Perspective from Antonio Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony (d. 1937)

Abstract

Qur’anic education in contemporary Indonesia has expanded from community-based religious instruction into increasingly institutionalized, market-mediated, and digitally networked forms. This study examines how these transformations can be understood as processes of knowledge production and power negotiation through Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. The study used qualitative library research and theory-directed qualitative content analysis of scholarly literature, Gramscian theoretical works, and institutional materials relevant to Qur’anic education in Indonesia. The analysis focused on four connected dimensions: the institutionalization of Qur’anic learning, the role of the state and formal organizations, the commodification of religious education, and the reconfiguration of authority through digital media. The findings indicate that hegemony in Qur’anic education is not produced by a single actor. Rather, it emerges through negotiated relations among educational institutions, state-supported mechanisms of standardization, market expectations, teachers and religious intermediaries, and digital platforms that shape what counts as legitimate Qur’anic knowledge and desirable piety. Institutionalization may improve organizational consistency and access, but it may also privilege administratively visible forms of competence over locally embedded forms of religious authority; similarly, digitalization broadens access while simultaneously creating new forms of visibility-based authority. The study contributes a relational reading of Qur’anic education by showing that Gramscian hegemony is best understood here as a distributed and contested process rather than as a fixed form of domination.