Dayah as one of the pillars of modern Islamic education, is having a challenge that must be able to answer the various problems of occurred in the society.
That is why Dayah, which has been stigmatized as a conservative and anti-modern educational institution, should immediately make improvements. It is intended that the steps of Dayah can be absorbed with progress, while remaining a bastion of religious values.
According to the book written by Nurcholish Madjid about the main problems that Dayah face in Indonesia. These problems according to Nurcholish makes Dayah difficult to find solutions to the problems of the society.
One of the key issues that Nurcholish discloses is the lack of vision and purpose of establishing Dayah. According to him, many pesantren who failed to formulate the purpose and vision clearly. This is coupled with the failure to pour the vision into the stages of the work plan or program.
As a result, a pesantren only develops in accordance with the personality of its founder, assisted by the kiai maupuin his assistants. Not surprisingly, the spirit of pesantren is the spirit of its founder.
For Nurcholish, the physical and mental limitations of the founding boarder can make pesantren less responsive to the developments in society.
If this does not solve, then, pesantren will be considered unable to face the challenges brought by the advancement of the times and modernization. It is this shortcoming that makes the gap between pesantren and the "outside world".
Therefore change must be made, in the sense of catching up. However, Nurcholish reminded a number of things about this, for example the change should start from the "inside" of the pesantren itself.
Second, change often can not be done radically. Consequently, the change is done slowly. This can start from curriculum changes in pesantren, which not only carry religious functions but also scholarship.
This is what Nurcholish termed the double mandate of pesantren, namely the religious mandate and the scientific commission. Both must be done simultaneously and proportionally so as to achieve the expected balance.
That is why this book, as written by Prof Malik Fajar in this book, offers a synthesis between universities and pesantren (p.123). Both syntheses are expected to address the needs of the two types of education, namely rational but poor spiritual depths, and strong pesantren with religious traditions, but limp in the field of scholarship.
By reading this book, readers can be invited to re-think and improve pesantren. With this effort, pesantren is no longer considered a pillar of education that "number two", but instead became the spearhead of community empowerment.
Thus pesantren can be expected to provide solutions to problems that do not seem to stop raining the nation of Indonesia.
