In December 2002, on a plane from Aleppo, Syria, I happened to be sitting next to a twenty-year-old Syrian cleric on his way to Cairo to spend some time in Al-Azhar. He asked if he could borrow my Syrian newspaper, which he quickly skimmed through until he reached the sports pages. Only after the young cleric had thoroughly observed the entire section did I open a conversation with him. He said he loved soccer and prayed that his favorite teams, Bayern Munich and Barcelona, would win in their national tournaments. Music was his other interest, and not only that of Um Kulthoum and Fairouz but also of the Egyptian pop star Amr Diab. Young mullahs also need to have fun, it occurred to me. Observing this man of religion taking such pleasure in temporal diversions, I could not help wondering why puritan Islamists express such hostility toward fun and joy.

One of the ironies of “fundamentalist” Islamism is that it has tenaciously withstood waves of political challenges but has felt powerless before simple displays of spontaneity and joy and the pursuit of everyday pleasures. It seems as though every occasion of mundane festivity, private parties, and gatherings at bustling street corners, teahouses, shopping malls, and secular celebrations becomes a matter of profound doctrinal anxiety and delegitimation. It is as if these ordinary pursuits would enfeeble the Islamist moral paradigm just as the erotic taste of chocolate perturbed the tranquillité of the French village in Joanne Harris’s novel Chocolat.

Drawing mainly on the experience of Muslim states, notably postrevolution Iran, I explore why Islamists are so distinctly apprehensive of the expression of “fun” — a preoccupation most people in the world seem to take for granted. I take fun to refer to an array of ad hoc, nonroutine, and joyful conducts — ranging from playing games, joking, dancing, and social drinking, to involvement in playful art, music, sex, and sport, to particular ways of speaking, laughing, appearing, or carrying oneself — where individuals break free temporarily from the disciplined constraints of daily life, normative obligations, and organized power. Fun is a metaphor for the expression of individuality, spontaneity, and lightness, in which joy is the central element. While joy is neither an equivalent nor a definition of fun, it remains a key component of it. Not everything joyful is fun, such as routine ways of having meals, even though one can make food fun by injecting joyful creativity in preparing or consuming it. Thus fun often points to usually improvised, spontaneous, free-form, changeable, and thus unpredictable expressions and practices. There is a strong tendency in modern times to structure and institutionalize fun in the form of, for instance, participating in organized leisure activities; going to bars, discos, concerts; and the like. However, the inevitable drive for spontaneity and invention renders organized fun a tenuous entity.

Fun may be expressed by individuals or collectives, in private or public, and take traditional or commoditized forms. Fashion, for instance, represents a collective, commoditized, and systematic expression of fun, yet one that is constantly in flux because it deems to respond to the carefree and shifting spirit of fun. Fun appeals to almost all social groups (the rich and poor, old and young, modern and traditional, men and women), yet youths are the prime practitioners of fun and the main target of anti-fun politics, because youth habitus is characterized by a greater tendency for experimentation, adventurism, idealism, drive for autonomy, mobility, and change. Perhaps that is why fun is often conflated with and identified by “youth culture.” However, fun in fact constitutes only one, although significant, component of youth culture, in the same way that lower-class festivities, such as the activities celebrating the birthdays of saints (mulids) in Egypt, are but one aspect of folk culture and the creations of avant-garde artists one element of a counterculture. But the differential habitus of these social groups tends to orient them more or less to different fun practices and therefore subject them to different degrees of prohibitions and regulations that can be subsumed under the rhetoric of “anti-fun.” For instance, whereas the elderly poor can afford simple, traditional, and contained diversions, the globalized and affluent youth tend to embrace more spontaneous, erotically charged, and commodified pleasures. This might help explain why globalizing youngsters more than others cause fear and fury among Islamist anti-fun adversaries, especially when much of what these youths practice is informed by Western technologies of fun and is framed in terms of “Western cultural import.”

I suggest that the fear of fun is not restricted to Islamists and Islam but extends to most religions. It is not even a merely religious concern; secularists, whether revolutionary or conservative, have also expressed apprehension of and animosity toward fun. I argue that rather than simply a doctrinal question, anti-fun-damentalism is a historical matter, one that has to do significantly with the preservation of power. In other words, at stake is not necessarily the disruption of the moral order, as often claimed, but rather the undermining of the hegemony, the regime of power on which certain strands of moral and political authority rest. By “moralpolitical authority,” I refer not only to states or governmental power but also to the authority of individuals (for instance, sheikhs or cult leaders) and social-political movements — those whose legitimacy lies in deploying a particular doctrinal paradigm. The adversaries’ fear of fun, I conclude, revolves ultimately around the fear of exit from the paradigm that frames their mastery; it is about anxiety over loss of their “paradigm power.”