Translating Prophetic Values into Bureaucratic Ethics: A Content-Analytic Study of the 40-Hadith Document for Civil Servants

Abstract

This article examines the construction of prophetic ethics for Indonesian civil servants in the KORPRI Forty Hadith document prepared for the 2026 National KORPRI Qur’anic Recitation Competition. It pursues three objectives: (1) to identify the categories of prophetic ethics constructed in the document; (2) to explain the translational mechanisms through which hadith values are contextualised within civil service duties; and (3) to assess the relevance of that construction to integrity and public service, measured against three indicators, namely its capacity to reach discretionary spaces beyond administrative supervision, its convergence with the legally binding BerAKHLAK core values, and its operability as ethical guidance in day-to-day service delivery. The study employs a descriptive qualitative approach and qualitative content analysis combining directed and conventional coding. The primary data consist of hadith texts and translations, thematic titles, explanatory discussions, statements of practical relevance for civil servants, and moral lessons, analysed through reduction, thematic coding, categorisation, interpretation, and conclusion drawing, with an audit trail maintained throughout. The findings show that the document constructs eight interrelated categories of prophetic ethics, namely personal integrity and sincerity, trustworthiness and accountability, honesty, justice and non-discrimination, anti-corruption and anti-gratification, public service orientation, professionalism, and moral caution. These categories are organised into two mutually reinforcing layers, an inward-personal layer and an institutional-relational layer, bridged by three connective concepts drawn from the hadith texts themselves, namely amānah, iḥsān, and itqān. On this basis the article proposes the Prophetic-Bureaucratic Ethics Translation (PBET) model, which formalises the four-step movement from devotional text to administrative norm. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first systematic content-analytic study to treat a thematic hadith compilation as a corpus for reconstructing bureaucratic ethics in Indonesia, thereby extending scholarship on hadith studies, Islamic work ethics, and religion in public administration beyond its predominantly quantitative and conceptual orientation.