Moral Education and Inner Tranquility: Toward a Psychospiritual Model of Islamic Pedagogy Based on Al-Tahliyah Wa Al-Targhib Fi Al-Tarbiyyah Wa Al-Tahdhib

Abstract

Concerns about student mental health and moral orientation have made the cultivation of psychological balance a central aim of contemporary education, yet secular well-being frameworks rarely engage the moral and spiritual formation that classical Islamic pedagogy places at the heart of a settled soul. Existing studies predominantly catalogue the moral values embedded in al-Ta?liyah wa al-Targh?b f? al-Tarbiyyah wa al-Tahdh?b a thirteen-chapter pesantren manual of adab while overlooking its underlying pedagogical architecture and the psychospiritual mechanisms through which it cultivates inner tranquility. Using qualitative library research and thematic content analysis, with initial coding conducted independently by two researchers and refined through iterative axial coding until theoretical consensus was reached, this study reconstructs the text as an integrated moral-educational system. The findings show that the thirteen chapters form four interdependent domains of discipline self, relations, civic life, and body environment that operate as a single regulatory architecture rather than a loose inventory of manners. On this basis the study advances the Pedagogical Tranquility Nexus, a conceptual model explaining how moral formation yields inner tranquility (sak?nah and ?uma?n?nah) through three convergent mechanisms self-regulation, relational security, and civic meaning grounded in the nafs-qalb-?aql dynamics of Islamic moral psychology. The contribution lies in moving beyond value-cataloguing toward a falsifiable, theory-building model that aligns the Islamic pedagogical heritage with contemporary affective science (emotion regulation, meaning in life, religious coping) without secularizing its substance.