The process of attaining middle-class status represents a pivotal transition for households seeking upward mobility and economic progress.

According to Maqsood, pinpointing exactly when this transition occurs can identify the old middle class from the new and reveal insightful shifts in access to opportunity and intergenerational mobility. In Pakistan, the “old middle class” draws continuity from upper-class families during colonial rule who acquired education and progressed into state employment and urban professions. After independence in 1947, this group retained its privileged status and Westernized progressive cultural outlook, nostalgic for the heyday of the 1960s.

While still influential, this established middle class now coexists with an emerging “new middle class” that has attained similar income levels but contrasts sharply in its more recent rural origins and greater religious orientation. As Mahmood elucidates, the new middle class emerged from families who urbanized from the 1980s onward through public sector jobs and enterprises. Despite vulnerability to economic setbacks, this newly mobile demographic exhibits its own aspirations for modernity and middle-class respectability.

For women, in particular, which my chapter focused on, conflating the values of old and new middle classes could prove to be a struggle. The chapter examines the increasing popularity of Quran schools and religious study groups (Dars) run by new middle-class women in Lahore. Among them is Amina Baji, a doctor, and mother of three school-age children who hosts a weekly Dars at her home; and Nina, also a young mother living in the same neighborhood who started attending Dars to give more purpose to her busy domestic life focused on material concerns. Among the many conversations these women engage in is their defiance of the false idea that being modern means imitating the West indiscriminately as seen in the conversations between Leena and Seema, two regular attendees who discuss how they’re perceived to be “backward” by the elite liberal families (old middle class).

These pivot points between old privilege and newly attained mobility reframe identities and tensions for middle-class women in relation to piety and purpose. The rising popularity of Quran schools among new middle-class women in Lahore and their engagements with Islamic ethics counter feelings of isolation and purposelessness amidst busy lifestyles. Local anxieties about backwardness also conflate with negative Muslim perceptions in the West. Reconciling Islamic devotion and its globally circulating discourses with local expectations therefore generates complex negotiations for women balancing old and new middle-class values.

Another concept that the chapter addresses is that while the cultivation of Islamic knowledge encourages some rationalization, it cannot be seen as an uncomplicated religious rationalization. Rather, these personalized spiritual pursuits intermittently engage and disengage with discourses of rationality and science amidst efforts to assert compatibility with modern life. Ultimately for pioneer middle-class women, those crossing over earliest from rural roots, such religious turnings reveal the promises and limits encountered in their navigation of social mobility and its intersections with shifting class identities.

Conclusively, identifying the breakthrough moment when class transition occurs, whether single-generation or intergenerational, reveals the momentum, barriers, and contests underpinning mobility within developing societies. While both groups constitute Pakistan’s contemporary middle class, denoting their divergent historical trajectories is pivotal to understanding the fault lines over cultural values and lifestyles. It also helps in understanding the intersecting class tensions, patronage politics, challenges for female empowerment, and the appeals of Islamic reform movements amongst the new arrivals seeking greater empowerment.