The Discipline of Dakwah in Indonesia’s State Education System

Abstract Dakwah (predication) is a popular field of research and study in the tertiary institutions under Indonesia’s Ministry of Religion. To understand this popularity, it is necessary to recognize how individual Islamic sciences—such as dakwah—have been reconstituted within those institutions, for diverse disciplines have evolved along different trajectories. Dakwah has acquired its contemporary disciplinary character through dakwah academics’ efforts to shape it in the models provided by the social sciences and media/communication studies. This is revealed in their appropriations from these disciplines, which commenced after Indonesian independence, when academics identified the national community as a mediated domain to be addressed by new dakwah methods. The authors trace these developments by reviewing the academic outputs of dakwah scholars, noting also that the ‘bureaucratic integration’ of dakwah created a bifurcation in the field: outside the ministry’s institutions, critical dakwah projects have opposed the state-supported version of dakwah.