Negotiating Religious Authority and Generative AI In Banten Higher Education
DOI:
10.51601/ijersc.v7i5.1080Published:
2026-09-30Downloads
Abstract
Generative artificial intelligence increasingly mediates university students' access to Islamic knowledge, posing challenges for scholarly legitimacy, evidentiary accuracy, and accountability. This article offers a conceptual framework for negotiating religious authority and verification at universities in Banten, Indonesia. Integrative literature review incorporates scholarly perspectives on Islamic authority, digital religion, algorithmic authority, source credibility, epistemic vigilance, AI literacy, and Islamic educational ethics. Purposefully selected academic writings, policy documents, and institutional data are compared and synthesized with the use of thematic analysis. Synthesis reveals the distinction between acknowledged religious legitimacy and epistemic authority which is achievable through accessibility and fluency without interpretive competency and accountability of scholars. Verification process consists of seven steps involving classification of questions, identification of claims, authentication of evidence, independent comparison, contextual interpretation, consultation, and decision-making closure. This article proposes a multi-dimensional negotiation of religious epistemic authority as a conceptual framework that allows assigning different roles to algorithms, texts, ulama, lecturers, and institutions. Four heuristic orientations exemplify potential scenarios of reliance and verification. Banten is used as the background, but not the empirical field site, of the analysis. Both the conceptual framework and the heuristic orientations have not been tested yet. Contribution of the study is the religiously-grounded approach to verification which will prove useful for the development of Islamic religious education, assessment, university governance, and will allow proposing research directions for future comparative analysis.
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