The Epistemic Dialects of Tafsir Maqasidi: Application, Fragmentation and Integration in Urban Islamic Education

Contemporary urban Islamic education faces the challenge of integrating classical religious hermeneuticswith modern complexities. Tafsir maqasidi (objective-based Quranic exegesis), with its emphasis onhigher objectives (maqasid), offers a potent framework for contextual teaching. However, its practicalapplication across diverse educational settings remains empirically underexplored. This multi-sitephenomenological study investigates how tafsir maqasidi is understood, translated, and appliedpedagogically across Jakarta's varied Islamic education ecosystems. Employing an embedded mixedmethodsdesign, data were collected through in-depth interviews with 55 educators, participatoryobservation across 12 locations, and a supplementary survey across four distinct sites: a modern Islamicuniversity, a traditional ma'had aly, community-based majelis taklim, and a critical lecturer cohort. Theanalysis reveals four developed yet isolated "epistemic dialects" of tafsir maqasidi academic-integrative,traditional-textual, practical-intuitive, and critical-reflective. A key finding is the "paradox of expertise":deep theoretical knowledge correlates weakly with contextual application (r = .38), whereas extensiveteaching experience strongly predicts applied consistency (r = .67). Strikingly, majelis taklim teacherswith limited theoretical mastery demonstrated 95% application consistency via intuitive, experiencebasedwisdom. The study contributes the original concepts of "epistemic dialects" and "maqasidipedagogical disposition," and proposes a "Trilogy Model" to foster deliberate knowledge circulation acrosstheoretical, contextualization, and applicative hubs. These findings advance the discourse on Islamicreligious pedagogy and offer a practical framework for curriculum and teacher development in pluralurban contexts. Received: 05 December 2025 / Accepted: 25 February 2026 / Published: March 2026