Beyond rational emancipation: pedagogical ijtihad and the Islamic Extension of transformative learning theory for prospective Islamic Education teachers

Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory (TLT) is grounded in a rational-communicative epistemology that excludes transcendence as a legitimate epistemic foundation, a limitation analytically consequential in the Islamic learning tradition, where rational reflection and divine accountability are mutually entailing rather than competing orientations. Existing cross-cultural critiques of TLT have not tested whether constructs from specific religious traditions structurally extend TLT’s architecture rather than merely applying it to culturally distinct content. This study therefore applied Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) with an abductive approach to 101 reflective narratives of prospective Islamic Religious Education teachers at a large public university in Indonesia. Four themes emerged: T2 identified curriculum authority deconstruction as a pedagogically designed disorienting dilemma (95.0% of full-transformation respondents); T1 captured a paradigmatic identity shift from transmissive to constructive orientation (75.2%); T3 revealed three Islamic epistemological constructs, of which divine amanah has no TLT counterpart, alongside pedagogical ijtihad and grounding celestial values; and T4 operationalised criteria for distinguishing pseudo-reflection from authentic transformation. The study proposes the Islamic Extension of TLT as an epistemological layer operating in parallel with TLT’s emancipatory-rational mechanisms, with implications for Islamic teacher education curricula and for the theorisation of transformative learning beyond its founding intellectual tradition.