Beyond Restraint: Mapping Akhlakul Karimah and Its Implications for Moral Education in Madrasah Aliyah
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37812/fikroh.v19i3.2535Keywords:
Akhlakul Karimah; Akidah Akhlak; Madrasah Aliyah; Empathy; Academic HonestyAbstract
Moral education in madrasahs is commonly assessed through a single global score, so the specific behaviours in which students are strong or weak remain unmapped. This study used a cross-sectional descriptive-comparative survey to map the akhlakul karimah (noble character) profile reported by Madrasah Aliyah students across four domains of Islamic ethics: devotion to parents (birr al-w?lidayn), care for orphans, honesty and the refusal of corruption, and discipline in prayer. A 23-item Likert-type questionnaire was completed by 126 students; every record met the pre-specified data-quality criteria and all were analysed using descriptive statistics, the Friedman test, the Kruskal–Wallis test, and three sensitivity analyses. Students reported a high level of akhlakul karimah (M = 4.14; 82.9%), and the four domains did not differ significantly, ?²(3) = 7.71, p = .052, W = .02. The variation lay at indicator level: restraint from prohibited acts and ritual worship were endorsed most strongly, whereas empathic help for orphans (M = 3.59) and moral judgement when a parental order conflicts with religious teaching (M = 3.48) were the weakest; grade X students reported higher scores than grades XI and XII (?² = .18). Theoretically, the findings locate the gap between moral knowledge and moral action in a specific region of moral life: restraint is internalised earlier and more uniformly than active care and practical wisdom, so aggregate moral scores systematically conceal this asymmetry. Practically, Akidah Akhlak learning and its assessment should move from prohibition-centred content toward empathic experience, dilemma-based reasoning, and indicator-level evaluation. The findings rest on self-reports from a single madrasah and on an instrument of limited reliability.
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