Yet twinned with the desire for consumption is anxiety about such exhibition and how to sustain it. Most homes possess microwaves and mixer-grinders, but their owners use them sparingly and store them in their original packaging. They buy sofas to match what they see in soap operas and advertisements, but protect them with plain sheets that are removed only on special occasions.

Families on the poorer end of the new middle class visit malls and shopping spaces for recreational experiences. They rarely make purchases from such places and prefer to look for the same or similar goods in cheaper bazaars and wholesale markets. Their ability to find more economical deals becomes a way to distinguish themselves from the presumed decadent and self-indulgent upper classes.

Members of the new middle class covet government employment, which still remains a mark of status, but such work does not provide sufficient income to sustain their idealized level of middle-class consumption. Many in this group augment their state income through investment in real estate.

Many families in new middle-class circles have acquired their current status through money made by a relative in a semiskilled job in the Gulf countries or North America. The most significant waves of semiskilled labor migration from Pakistan over the past half-century have been for industrial work in Britain in the 1960s, construction labor in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf in the 1970s and 1980s and, since the 1980s, taxi driving, construction and restaurant employment in the United States. Pakistan received $20 billion in remittances in 2016, according to the World Bank.

The visible religiosity of the new middle class is often identified as the Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia. However, it is not Wahhabi Islam but the globalized Islam practiced by Muslims in the West that better explains contemporary religious trends. Made familiar with Muslim practices abroad through relatives living abroad and returning migrants, many members of the new middle class have started incorporating them in their own lives.

For instance, Quran schools and religious study circles, where the Quran is studied with translation and interpretation, were introduced in Lahore in the early 2000s by returnees from the United States. Similarly, many women have replaced dupattas and chadors — the traditional ways of showing modesty in public — with head scarves and cloaks similar to those worn by relatives in the West, Saudi Arabia or the Gulf.

It is not so much the desire to be closer to the heartland of Islam that prompts these changes, but the desire to display a modern Muslim identity, a shift commensurate with their economic progress.

Denied the status of modernity in the local class hierarchy, these groups look for it through a familiarity with a global Muslim community. Just as the old middle class gains its modern status through a narrative that is used to explain Pakistan to the outside world, so the new middle class attempts to use its own connections to the West to assert its modernity.