Intellectual Encounters of Indonesian Students in Turkish Theology Faculties

Abstract

This Diaspora Notes reflects on the intellectual experience of Indonesian students enrolled in İlahiyat (Islamic Theology) faculties at Turkish universities. Drawing on a reflective survey of ten current students and alumni, as well as the positionality of both authors as İlahiyat graduates themselves, the notes examine how immersion in Turkish Islamic academia reshapes the ways Indonesian Muslim scholars read religious texts, negotiate religious authority, and understand Islam as a living intellectual tradition. Using Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field, and capital as a light analytical lens, the notes trace the intellectual shocks, productive disorientation, and gradual reorientation that accompany the encounter between the pesantren-formed habitus of Indonesian students and the historicist, reflective epistemology that characterizes Turkish İlahiyat pedagogy. The notes argue that the İlahiyat experience generates a distinctive form of reflexive capital—intellectual, cultural, symbolic, and religious—that students carry back to Indonesia, though the reception of this capital is uneven and at times contested. Rather than presenting a policy blueprint, the notes close with a set of open questions about what Indonesian Islamic education can genuinely learn from Turkish İlahiyat without merely transplanting its institutional and political context.