The New Pakistani Middle Class

. Ammara Maqsood is ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Junior Research Fellow at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford

Pakistan’s presence in the outside world is dominated by images of religious extremism and violence. Recently, however, a more visibly religious, upwardly mobile social group has struggled to distinguish itself against this backdrop of conventional middle-class modernity, by embracing Islamic culture and values. For this traditional middle class, a Muslim identity is about being modern, global, and on the same footing as the West. Maqsood probes how the politics of modernity meets the practices of piety in the struggle among different middle-class groups for social recognition and legitimacy.. In The New Pakistani Middle Class, Ammara Maqsood focuses on life in contemporary Lahore, where she unravels these narratives to show how central they are for understanding competition and the quest for identity among middle-class groups.Lahore’s traditional middle class has asserted its position in the socioeconomic hierarchy

This is an intricate story of all the pleasures, tensions, and contradictions inherent in the construction of a modern Muslim self. (Amina Yaqin, co-author of Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11) . This intelligent book makes an invaluable contribution toward shifting our perception of Pakistan as a place of absolutes. (Faisal Devji, author of Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea)I couldn't put down Ammara Maqsood’s incisive and empathetic ethnography of Lahore’s rising middle classshe carefully constructs a varied picture of what it is to be modern, au