Why does Indonesia have pondok pesantren—religious boarding schools with almost no equivalent even in the lands where Islam first took root? And can an institution this old—centuries old—hold its ground as waves of change crash in from every direction, faster and fiercer than ever?
These questions feel especially urgent today, for two reasons. First, many now wonder whether the pesantren’s traditional model still speaks to an age defined by speed and sophistication. Second, there’s the question of adaptation: how can pesantren evolve without losing themselves? Looking back—really looking—might offer clues about where they’re headed next.
Islam and the Civilisation of the Archipelago
When Islam began to spread in 7th-century Arabia, the Indonesian archipelago was no blank slate. It wasn’t a wilderness waiting to be shaped. It was already alive with culture, trade, and power—arguably more advanced than much of Europe at the time, while the United States was still centuries from existence. As historian Dennys Lombard notes, this region stood at the crossroads of global civilisation.
Even in its earliest chapters, the archipelago had known great kingdoms—Kutai, Tarumanegara, Sriwijaya, Mataram, Singosari, Majapahit. These weren’t marginal polities; they were formidable powers, shaping a civilisation that was already sophisticated by the standards of the day.
Religiously, too, the region was no stranger to outside influence. Buddhism likely arrived as early as the 2nd century, followed by Hinduism around the 5th. Both became deeply woven into the social and political fabric. Before them, local belief systems—Sunda Wiwitan, Kapitayan, Kaharingan, Aluk Todolo, and others—had long taken root, leaving traces that still linger today.
As a trading hub, the archipelago welcomed visitors from across the world. Ideas travelled with goods. Buddhism and Hinduism entered quietly, without resistance, blending with existing traditions rather than replacing them outright. Islam would follow a similar path.
Scholars have long debated how Islam arrived. Some trace it to Gujarati traders, others to Persian merchants. A third view suggests direct contact from Mecca, carried by pilgrims and travellers. Yet another points to Muslim communities from China, arriving alongside broader migration flows into Southeast Asia. Figures like Hamka leaned toward the latter theories, suggesting Islam may have reached the archipelago as early as the 7th or 8th century.
Still, two things stand out across all these theories.
First, Islam arrived peacefully. Not by conquest, not by force. This stands in stark contrast to its expansion elsewhere—Damascus, Jerusalem, Egypt, Andalusia—where military campaigns played a role. In the archipelago, the story unfolded differently.
Second, even if Islam arrived early, its widespread adoption came much later—around the 13th century. Before that, it was a personal faith, practiced by individuals rather than shaping society at large. Hinduism and Buddhism still held sway. Then, slowly but decisively, the tide turned.
From Pecantrikan to Pesantren
So what changed? What made Islam spread so widely, eventually overtaking earlier traditions?
The answer lies, in part, with the pesantren.
There’s no universal agreement on when the first pesantren emerged. Some place it in the 14th century, others much earlier. Institutions like Ampel Denta in Surabaya are often cited, but so too is Dayah Cot Kala in Aceh, dating back to the 9th century.
Yet the roots go even deeper—long before Islam arrived.
During the eras of Sriwijaya, Mataram, and Majapahit, there were already religious learning centres known by various names: mandala, padepokan, pecantrikan. Different labels, same essence. These were places of spiritual and intellectual formation.
They had teachers—resis, priests, brahmins. They taught theology, literature, language, and social knowledge. Students lived alongside their teachers, forming tight-knit communities. There were no salaries. Instead, students contributed through service, helping sustain daily life. It was an education system grounded not just in knowledge, but in relationship.
Through these institutions, Buddhism and Hinduism spread across the archipelago. When Muslim scholars arrived, they didn’t start from scratch. They observed. They adapted. They followed a familiar pattern—embedding Islamic teachings within an already understood educational framework.
That’s where pesantren were born: from the soil of pecantrikan, shaped by new faith but rooted in older forms.
Pesantren: Holding Ground, Fighting Back
In his seminal work Bilik-bilik Pesantren, Nurcholish Madjid draws an intriguing parallel. Many of the world’s leading universities—University of Bologna, University of Oxford, Harvard University, Yale University—began as religious institutions. Over time, they evolved into global centres of knowledge.
Pesantren, he argued, could have followed a similar trajectory.
But history had other plans.
Colonialism intervened. Beginning in the 17th century, Dutch rule reshaped the landscape. Modern, Western-style schools were introduced, often in urban centres, designed to serve colonial administration. Pesantren were sidelined—dismissed as backward, even dangerous.
They adapted the only way they could. They moved inland, away from surveillance. They became sanctuaries—preserving culture, faith, and identity. And eventually, they became something more: centres of resistance.
Not just intellectual resistance, but political. Many independence fighters emerged from pesantren. Many paid the price. Arrested. Executed. Their schools burned. Yet they endured.
Pesantren didn’t just survive history—they helped shape it.
Layers of Transformation
The traces of colonialism, it turns out, did not simply vanish once the colonizers left this land behind. In the early years of independence, through the Old Order and well into the New Order, many people still looked at the pesantren through a colonial lens. It was treated with condescension, viewed with a kind of inherited cynicism. Old-fashioned. Traditional. Backward. The label kaum sarungan—literally, “the sarong-wearing crowd”—was not an innocent description but a sneer, a way of suggesting that people from the pesantren world were too rooted in tradition to move forward, too resistant to modernity. The sarong became the symbol of that stigma. Even the campaign against the so-called “disease” of TBC—takhayul, bid‘ah, and khurafat—was, in truth, aimed largely at the pesantren milieu.
At its peak, almost throughout the New Order era, the pesantren remained a marginalized community—pushed to the edges, treated as second-class, and still regarded with suspicion much as it had been under colonial rule. While modern educational institutions were pampered with budgets, facilities, and development programs, pesantren were left to fend for themselves, to survive on their own strength. That long neglect shaped them. It made them deeply self-reliant, fiercely independent, and instinctively wary of the centers of power. Very few pesantren accepted government assistance. Many, in fact, chose to turn it down.
And yet pesantren were never frozen in time. They were not rigid relics. Even as they struggled to endure, they also opened themselves—carefully, selectively—to the currents of the age. Their responsiveness became, in its own way, a strategy of survival. If one traces their path from the late nineteenth century or the early twentieth century up to the present, it becomes clear that many pesantren have undergone significant transformation. Tebuireng in Jombang, for instance, had already adopted a classroom-based system by 1919, much like modern schools. By 1929, general subjects had entered its curriculum. Sidogiri in Pasuruan and Lirboyo in Kediri made similar moves in the early twentieth century. In time, many other major pesantren followed suit.
That said, the transformations unfolding across the pesantren world have been anything but uniform. Diversity, not sameness, is the rule. Every pesantren has its own temperament, its own history, its own internal logic. No two are ever exactly alike. That is why the changes taking place within pesantren come in layers, ranging from institutions that remain deeply salaf and traditional in the old sense, all the way to those that could fairly be called ultra-modern.
Official data puts the number of pesantren in Indonesia today at around 42,000. These are generally grouped into three broad categories: salafiyah (traditional), khalafiyah (modern), and those that combine the two. Even so, the real number is likely higher than the official count, and the reality on the ground is certainly more intricate than any three-part classification can capture.
Even now, there are pesantren that still resemble the old padepokan of earlier centuries. One of them lies deep in the interior of Cirebon, far from the noise of populated centers, with no proper road leading to it. To get there, people must cross a river, stepping from stone to stone. No electricity reaches the place, let alone electronic devices. Its educational system, too, remains thoroughly salafiyah—much as it would have been in earlier times. It feels almost as though the pesantren has chosen to hide itself from the clamor of modern life.
Then again, the contrast is striking when one looks at pesantren that have become modern, even hyper-modern. At Tebuireng, for example, there is now a science-focused pesantren designed to equip students with mastery in science and technology, alongside the religious learning that remains the institution’s backbone. At Amanatul Ummah in Mojokerto, international classes are offered in English. As a result, many of its graduates go on to leading universities in the United States and Europe. And more and more pesantren are developing educational models along the lines pioneered by Tebuireng and Amanatul Ummah.
Between those two opposing poles lies a wide and fascinating spectrum of other transformations. Some pesantren still preserve their salafiyah character, including the sorogan and bandongan methods of teaching classical Islamic texts, while at the same time adopting modern instruments and institutions. Some run both madrasah programs and general schools, from elementary to high school level. Some already have full-fledged general universities while also maintaining a ma’had aly with its own specialized focus. Others, alongside religious instruction, train their students in practical skills—from applied technologies to digital tools. Some operate businesses to support their own day-to-day expenses. Others build grassroots economic initiatives together with the surrounding community. Some pesantren have only dozens of students; others house hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands. These are only fragments of a much broader and richer landscape.
Thanks to that responsiveness, and to the transformations they have been willing to undertake, pesantren have evolved in ways far more varied than many people ever imagined—far beyond the dismissive refrain, “Why won’t these pesantren just die out?” From one angle, some may still seem out of step with the times. From another, many have adjusted themselves, quite capably, to the demands and realities of the present age. Because each pesantren carries its own distinct character, its development is bound to take different paths. Visit many of them, and you will find as many differences as there are institutions you step into.
Still, one must note that there are certain things that keep a pesantren a pesantren—things that set it apart from every other kind of educational institution. It is not merely the visible elements: a kiai, students, dormitories, a place of study, a curriculum rooted in the classical texts, a mosque or prayer hall. A pesantren offers more than knowledge. It also teaches character. It plants adab—right conduct, cultivated manners, moral discipline. In fact, adab is often held to stand even above knowledge itself. That is why the relationship between teacher and student is built on deep respect and reverence, and why that ethos has become such a powerful and enduring tradition. Just as important is the abiding belief in barakah—the spiritual blessing believed to flow from the kiai or teacher. A pesantren may transform and grow in countless ways, but if it loses those things, it also loses something essential of its pesantren-ness. Those are the qualities that make it what it is. Those are the qualities that distinguish it from any other school.
Quo Vadis, Pesantren?
No institution is perfect. Pesantren are no exception. There are real challenges—bullying, safety issues, infrastructure gaps, struggles to keep pace with change.
And yet, criticism today sometimes echoes old colonial attitudes. The language may be different, but the tone feels familiar: dismissive, reductive. Calls emerge to replace pesantren with sleek “Islamic boarding schools,” polished in name but different in spirit.
Will pesantren fade away?
History suggests otherwise.
Time and again, they’ve adapted—quietly, steadily—without losing their core. They bend, but they don’t break. Their future won’t look like their past. It never has.
What lies ahead? More diversity. More reinvention. More tension between tradition and change.
But one thing seems certain: pesantren will continue to evolve on their own terms—rooted in history, yet always reaching forward.