AI Governance Vacuum in Indonesian Islamic Higher Education: Structural Drivers and Epistemic Consequences<b></b>

Indonesian Islamic higher education institutions (Perguruan Tinggi Keagamaan Islam, PTKI) are absorbing generative AI into academic practice while operating without any institution-wide governance framework to regulate its use. This article investigates why institutional-level AI governance has failed to materialise across more than 800 PTKI, and what the epistemic consequences of that failure are. Drawing on a Critical Integrative Review of 45 sources across AI governance, Islamic epistemology, and Indonesian education policy, the study identifies three mutually reinforcing structural drivers: the jurisdictional separation between the Ministry of Religious Affairs and the national AI policy architecture; the unresolved tension between AI's probabilistic epistemology and the sanad- and ijazah-grounded Islamic knowledge tradition, which induces normative paralysis in institutional leadership; and the complete absence of binding AI regulation from the responsible ministry. Together, these factors produce a self-sustaining collective action failure in which no institutional actor exercises governance initiative. The consequences are severe: ulama authority in Islamic knowledge production faces structural erosion, the legitimacy of PTKI scholarly output is placed in question, and Indonesia is displaced from the global conversation in which Islamic universities elsewhere are actively constructing Islamic AI ethics frameworks. The article proposes a governance framework grounded in maslahah, amanah, 'adl, and 'ilm, and introduces the Three-Dimensional Governance Gap Framework as a transferable analytical instrument for AI governance studies in Islamic higher education across Muslim-majority contexts.