This literature review synthesizes English‑language scholarship on the legal, regulatory, and dispute‑resolution issues that attend the incorporation of Islamic boarding schools (commonly referred to in Southeast Asia as “pesantren” or more generally as madrasahs/Islamic boarding institutions) into national education systems. The corpus surveyed foregrounds three recurring clusters of legal tension: (1) the friction between state demands for curricular standardization and religious institutions’ claims to pedagogical and doctrinal autonomy; (2) conflicts over qualifications and teacher‑recognition regimes that pit formal pedagogical certification against tradition‑based religious authority; and (3) fiscal and governance disputes arising from public subsidies, charitable endowments, and accountability regimes. Dispute resolution appears dispersed across judicial review and administrative litigation, non‑litigation mediation and ombudsman interventions, and internally authoritative religious instruments (scholarly opinions and fatwas), each forum producing distinct legal logics and policy consequences. Comparative and policy literatures emphasize three regulatory models—full integration, negotiated accommodation, and parallel pluralism—as analytical tools for comparing state responses across Muslim‑majority and minority contexts, while recent studies underscore emergent regulatory challenges posed by curricular globalization, transnational funding flows, and the digital delivery of religious instruction. The review concludes with a policy agenda that prioritizes context‑sensitive hybrid governance, calibrated accreditation and teacher‑recognition pathways, and multi‑forum dispute architecture to reconcile religious freedom, educational equity, and institutional viability.

Index Terms- Islamic boarding schools; pesantren; religious education; curriculum integration; legal pluralism; teacher certification; public funding; dispute resolution; comparative education; digitalization