<![CDATA[This qualitative case study critically examines the daily short surah recitation programme at an Indonesian pesantren through the lens of Bourdieu's habitus, Foucault's disciplinary power, and the ethical subject debates of Asad and Mahmood. Drawing on interviews, non-participant observation, and documentation across thirty-five informants—including students, teachers, alumni, and parents—the study moves beyond descriptive accounts of Living Qur'an praxis to interrogate the mechanisms and limits of ritualised character formation. The findings confirm that the programme successfully institutionalises ritual time and bodily discipline, producing synchronised, durable behavioural regularities across cohorts. However, the data also reveal a structural fragility in this disciplinary apparatus: teacher absenteeism occurred in seventeen percent of observed sessions, authority was redistributed to senior students, and micro-resistance—performative reading, covert whispering, and physical fatigue—appeared systematically rather than exceptionally. Compliance and ethical internalisation therefore diverge, and the programme operates as a contested social field rather than a monolithic success. The study advances Living Qur'an scholarship by proposing the concept of contested habitus, which reframes ritual habituation as a negotiated, cohort-specific, and continuously reproduced dispositional field rather than an automatic pathway to moral transformation. It offers a critically grounded framework for understanding what ritualised pedagogy can and cannot accomplish in contemporary pesantren education.]]>
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