Teaching the Qur’an Through the Screen: Embodied Pedagogy, Spiritual Transformation, and Female Religious Agency
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21274/dinamika.2026.26.2.95-108Keywords:
Online Qur’anic teaching; embodied pedagogy; spiritual transformation; female religious agency; digital religionAbstract
Online Qur’anic instruction is often discussed as a problem of access, platforms, or learner outcomes, while the lived work of women who teach recitation through screens remains comparatively underexamined. This qualitative phenomenological study explores how four Indonesian female tutors at a non-formal Qur’anic education provider experienced the transition to and practice of online teaching. Data were generated through semistructured interviews and analyzed through descriptive phenomenological procedures, including bracketing, repeated reading, meaning-unit condensation, thematic synthesis, and cross-case comparison. Cyberfeminism was used after inductive analysis as an interpretive lens for examining women’s participation in digitally mediated religious knowledge production. Three interdependent themes were identified. First, tutors reconstructed embodied Qur’anic pedagogy under conditions of sensory attenuation by intensifying listening, slowing and repeating recitation, externalizing articulation through images and video, differentiating correction, and cultivating relational presence. Second, teaching became a site of spiritual transformation organized around amanah, renewed intention, patience, tawakkul, gratitude, and continuing self-discipline. Third, online teaching enabled female religious agency through pedagogical authorship, expanded reach, and recognition as knowledge transmitters, but that agency remained negotiated through domestic time, bodily strain, family support, religious concerns, and unstable infrastructure. The study develops the concept of screen-mediated embodied Qur’anic pedagogy and argues that women’s digital religious agency is relational rather than simply emancipatory. It contributes a tutor-centered account to scholarship on digital religion, Qur’anic education, and women’s religious authority, while offering practical guidance for ethically supportive online programs.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Siti Muflichah, Rochmatunnisa Rochmatunnisa, Halya Quzwainie Shaieba
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