From Kitab Discipline to Digital Practice: Santri Empowerment at Sukamiskin Pesantren, Bandung, 1993–2022

Abstract

This article examines how Sukamiskin Pesantren in Bandung reconfigured santri empowerment between 1993 and 2022 while retaining the religious disciplines and authority relations associated with a Sundanese salafiyah institution. Rather than treating empowerment as a collection of recent extracurricular programs, it proposes a retrospective historical sequence in which formal schooling, ritual habituation, delegated student government, community service, vocational training, and internal economic practice were progressively connected. The study applies the historical method used in the original research: heuristics, external and internal source criticism, interpretation, and historiography.. The charter records establishment since 1992 and an administrative decision dates from 1993; the precise opening date remains unverified. Institutional history places postwar reconstruction in 1948, but its availability before the cutoff is unverified. Subject to temporal verification of claims dependent on post-cutoff testimony, the findings identify continuity in kitab kuning, congregational worship, wirid, and the kyai’s ultimate authority, alongside changes in pedagogical form. The retrospective accounts describe changes from role simulation to multilingual public performance, from corporal sanctions toward educational and social sanctions, and from typewriting and manual bookkeeping toward digital administration and media production; they also describe more organized arts and economic practice. The timing and extent of these changes remain unverified against pre-cutoff evidence. The article argues that Sukamiskin’s distinctive contribution lay in converting participation into graduated responsibility. The provisional interpretation is that empowerment remained morally supervised while participating santri exercised delegated operational roles, mediated between pesantren and society, and gained practical experience.