This article analyses the role of fun and freedom in the moral learning of young women students in two Indonesian Islamic boarding schools. Recent debates about Islam and ethical subject formation have centred on the assumed tension between Islam and freedom. I examine decisions about television viewing and dress to illustrate both the flexibility and fixity of moral values and evaluation in girls' lives. I argue that anthropologists of morality and Islam should take seriously moments of fun as important instances for 'moral ludus' or 'moral play' -the testing, shifting, and reshaping of the boundaries of moral behaviours that involve balancing the demands of various social fields and the larger ethical community in which a person is embedded. I suggest that these moments be viewed not as ruptures or instances of hypocrisy but as everyday occurrences of embedded agency in the lives of piety-minded individuals.
Indonesian Islamic boarding schoolsIndonesia has some 25,000 Islamic boarding schools (pesantren). Pesantren and Islamic day schools (known locally as madrasa) educate around 15 per cent of the country's school-age population. Most Islamic boarding schools are located in rural areas -set apart from cities and towns, and often situated great distances from students' friends and families (Dhofier 1999(Dhofier [1982; Lukens-Bull 2005; Srimulyani 2012). Pesantren students, called santri, are restricted to school grounds year round with just a brief respite to return home for the fasting month of Ramadan. Santri are allowed only limited access to cell phones, the Internet, and the media, regulations that are intended to insulate them from the distractions and temptations of popular culture. Islamic boarding schools in urban settings are less common; they most often take the form of gated facilities that are otherwise removed from the surrounding neighbourhoods by fences or walls. In order to keep students on the pious path, they are allowed only limited time off of school grounds and are given explicit moral instruction on the dangers of 'empty time' (waktu yang kosong) in general and of modern life in particular.In their textbooks and in teachers' lectures, cities and the urban landscape are depicted as morally distracting and potentially even perilous -the pesantren, in contrast, appears as an oasis of piety and order within the unprincipled tumult. However, it is important to note that the schools position themselves not as oppositional to the non-pesantren