Islamic Religious Educators in Society 5.0: Challenges and Strategies for Digital Character Formation in Smart Classrooms

This article examines how Islamic religious education cultivates digital character within Society 5.0 smart classrooms. Using a library-based study with a descriptive-analytical approach, the review maps the literature onto internal factors (competence and pedagogical paradigm) and external curricular factors (infrastructure, content, and design), and then derives operational strategies. The findings indicate that the challenges are multidimensional. Internally, teachers face uneven information and communication technology competencies, a persistent teacher-centered paradigm, and cultural resistance. Externally, infrastructural disparities, curated digital Islamic religious education content scarcity, and curricula that rarely tether technology to Islamic values weaken classroom practice. This configuration heightens students’ exposure to disinformation, cyberbullying, and soft radicalization; risks dehumanization; and reduces Islamic education teachers to mere device operators. The study proposes reorienting teachers as moral navigators and humanizers of technology, alongside implementing project-based learning and blended–flipped learning methods that explicitly integrate Islamic values into digital practice, so that technology consistently serves the formative aims of Islamic education.