Digital Tabayyun Literacy in Islamic Religious Education: A Conceptual Framework for Responding to AI-Generated Religious Content

Abstract

The proliferation of AI-generated religious content, including Islamic chatbot platforms, synthetic fatwas, and deepfake dawah materials, poses a systemic epistemological threat to Islamic Religious Education (PAI) in Indonesia. Empirical evaluations confirm that no leading Islamic chatbot platform has achieved the status of "Trusted Educational Output," with documented failures including misattribution of Quranic verses, oversimplification of fiqh reasoning, and the complete absence of authenticated chains of transmission. Despite these risks, existing PAI curricula operationalize the Quranic principle of tabayyun (QS. Al-Hujurat 49:6) narrowly as a social ethics concept rather than a structured digital competency applicable to AI-generated content. This conceptual paper proposes the Digital Tabayyun Competency Framework (DTCF), a three-layer model comprising I'tiraf (Recognition), Tahqiq (Verification), and Naqd (Critical Evaluation), grounded in classical tafsir scholarship, contemporary Islamic epistemology, and current PAI curriculum analysis. The framework demonstrates how tabayyun can be systematically embedded into existing PAI subjects without additional curriculum load. Unlike secular digital literacy frameworks that treat verification as a procedural skill, the DTCF grounds it in Islamic moral obligation, communal accountability, and spiritual discipline, transforming verification from a technique into a religious practice. This paper argues that equipping students with DTCF competencies constitutes a contemporary form of hifz al-din, the preservation of religion, which is among the highest objectives of the Sharia.