Contested Local Wisdom: Moderate Character Education and Intra-Muslim Boundaries in Lombok Pesantren

Abstract

Pesantren in Lombok teach character through a repertoire of Sasak customs (begawe feasts, merariq, maulid, proverbs of shame and restraint) that other Muslims on the island treat as legitimate heritage or as innovation to be removed. Two bodies of research describe this setting, and they rarely speak to each other. Studies of local wisdom in Islamic education usually present Sasak values as a consensual resource for moderate character. Studies of religious contestation document purification campaigns, rival claims to tuan guru authority and violence against Ahmadiyya, but seldom ask what happens inside the curriculum. This article asks how moderate character education operates when the local wisdom it draws on is itself contested between Muslim groups. Using a critical interpretive synthesis of a bounded case, we coded 31 Lombok studies and read 73 further sources on pesantren elsewhere, state moderation policy, boundary theory and method. Seven studies document contestation or exclusion and ten address character formation; only one does both. We argue that local wisdom reaches pupils through three gates: authority (whose tuan guru network certifies a practice), legitimation (which fiqh, ’urf or minority opinion supports it) and moderation (whether state and school indicators accept it). We name this the Boundary-Filtered Character Formation (BFCF) model and derive six propositions, four school-level patterns and a field protocol. The synthesis shows that the state’s fourth indicator of moderation, accommodation of local culture, is itself a position in an intra-Muslim dispute, which has consequences for how pesantren management and Law 18/2019 are read.