Andragogic Drift in a Rural Madrasah Diniyah: Fadā’il al-A’māl Literature as Religious Coping among Working Youth

Abstract

Indonesian Madrasah Diniyah Takmiliyah (MDT) are legally defined as supplementary religious schools for formally educated children. This rigid regulatory mandate has increasingly become a significant liability. As rural demographics shift and children’s schedules become saturated, many MDTs lose their clientele and become dormant despite intact physical infrastructure. This article examines one such dormant MDT in Nagreg Kendan, West Java, arguing its successful reactivation required abandoning its statutory mandate. Through a participatory action research cycle over with 25 working youth aged, we document the institution's revival via evening classes and a curriculum centered on Nawawī al-Bantanī’s Tanqīḥ al-Qawl al-Ḥathīth. We advance two central claims. First, the MDT survived through 'andragogic drift': shifting from child to adult learners, preserving the institution while voiding its regulatory category. Second, utilizing fadā’il al-a’māl literature was constitutive of this drift, as the genre validates participants' existing actions rather than prescribing new obligations. By engaging in a reassessed religious coping framework and recent empirical studies on the lives of informal workers, we argue that this reception directly inverts the Weberian vector. Finally, we confront the objection that consolatory religiosity inherently reproduces the precarity it makes bearable, specifying the exact evidence needed to adjudicate this critical tension