Qur'anic Dramatic Stylistics and Narrative Pedagogy: Operationalizing Local Wisdom in the Story of Prophet Moses in Tafsir Al-Azhar
Abstract
Qur'anic narratives convey ethical and theological meaning through shifts in voice, visual scene construction, dialogue, and strategic omission. Yet educational applications often lack a traceable link among textual form, exegesis, and culturally situated interpretation. This gap has become more pressing as religious and general education increasingly emphasize culturally responsive teaching that remains accountable to the text rather than impressionistic. This study examines how dramatic stylistics function in selected Moses narratives and how Hamka's Tafsir Al-Azhar mediates their ethical significance through Indonesian historical experience. Using a qualitative textual design, the analysis covered Qur'an 20:9-24, 26:52-68, and 28:3-14 together with Hamka's commentary in volumes 6 and 7. The passages were purposively selected because they form coherent narrative episodes, contain discourse shift (iltifat), artistic depiction (taswir), or narrative ellipsis, and receive rhetorical or socio-historical elaboration in the exegesis. The analysis combined structural-stylistic coding, directed qualitative content analysis, and two-stage hermeneutic interpretation. Results indicate that Qur'an 20 moves from narrated inquiry to direct divine address, creating immediacy and responsibility; Qur'an 26 combines accelerated action, dialogue, spatial contrast, and omission in ways that invite inferential participation; and Qur'an 28 compresses oppression, rescue, and return into a moral trajectory that Hamka relates to Dutch colonial divide-and-rule practices. The study's novelty lies in an evidence-constrained model connecting verse-level form, exegetical mediation, local historical memory, and pedagogical proposition. The analysis further indicates that truth, beauty, and explication function as mutually regulating dimensions of culturally responsive Qur'anic narrative pedagogy. The model contributes to local-wisdom education by treating culture as a resource for disciplined interpretation rather than as decorative supplementation, while leaving claims about learning effectiveness to subsequent classroom research across diverse Islamic educational settings.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Muhammad Isya, Fahrunnisa (Author)

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