The New Pakistani Middle Class

The New Pakistani Middle Class PDF Author: Ammara Maqsood
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674981510
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pakistan’s presence in the outside world is dominated by images of religious extremism and violence. These images—and the narratives that interpret them—inform events in the international realm, but they also twist back around to shape local class politics. 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 by wielding significant social capital and dominating the politics and economics of urban life. For this traditional middle class, a Muslim identity is about being modern, global, and on the same footing as the West. 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. The religious sensibilities of this new middle-class group are often portrayed as Saudi-inspired and Wahhabi. Through a focus on religious study gatherings and also on consumption in middle-class circles—ranging from the choice of religious music and home décor to debit cards and the cut of a woman’s burkha—The New Pakistani Middle Class untangles current trends in piety that both aspire toward, and contest, prevailing ideas of modernity. 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.

The New Pakistani Middle Class

The New Pakistani Middle Class PDF Author: Ammara Maqsood
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674981510
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pakistan’s presence in the outside world is dominated by images of religious extremism and violence. These images—and the narratives that interpret them—inform events in the international realm, but they also twist back around to shape local class politics. 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 by wielding significant social capital and dominating the politics and economics of urban life. For this traditional middle class, a Muslim identity is about being modern, global, and on the same footing as the West. 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. The religious sensibilities of this new middle-class group are often portrayed as Saudi-inspired and Wahhabi. Through a focus on religious study gatherings and also on consumption in middle-class circles—ranging from the choice of religious music and home décor to debit cards and the cut of a woman’s burkha—The New Pakistani Middle Class untangles current trends in piety that both aspire toward, and contest, prevailing ideas of modernity. 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.

The New Pakistani Middle Class

The New Pakistani Middle Class PDF Author: Ammara Maqsood
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780674985636
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description


Big Capital in an Unequal World

Big Capital in an Unequal World PDF Author: Rosita Armytage
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789206170
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book Here

Book Description
Inside the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of Pakistan’s elite. Benefitting from rare access and keen analytical insight, Rosita Armytage’s rich study reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterizes the modern world. Operating in a rapidly developing economic environment, the experience of Pakistan’s wealthiest and most powerful members contradicts widely held assumptions that economic growth is leading to increasingly impersonalized and globally standardized economic and political structures.

New Perspectives on Pakistan's Political Economy

New Perspectives on Pakistan's Political Economy PDF Author: Matthew McCartney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110876309X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume makes a major intervention in the debates around the nature of the political economy of Pakistan, focusing on its contemporary social dynamics. This is the first comprehensive academic analysis of Pakistan's political economy after thirty-five years, and addresses issues of state, class and society, examining gender, the middle classes, the media, the bazaar economy, urban spaces and the new elite. The book goes beyond the contemporary obsession with terrorism and extremism, political Islam, and simple 'civilian–military relations', and looks at modern-day Pakistan through the lens of varied academic disciplines. It not only brings together new work by some emerging scholars but also formulates a new political economy for the country, reflecting the contemporary reality and diversification in the social sciences in Pakistan. The chapters dynamically and dialectically capture emergent processes and trends in framing Pakistan's political economy and invite scholars to engage with and move beyond these concerns and issues.

Family Upheaval

Family Upheaval PDF Author: Mikkel Rytter
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857459406
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pakistani migrant families in Denmark find themselves in a specific ethno-national, post-9/11 environment where Muslim immigrants are subjected to processes of non-recognition, exclusion and securitization. This ethnographic study explores how, why, and at what costs notions of relatedness, identity, and belonging are being renegotiated within local families and transnational kinship networks. Each entry point concerns the destructive–productive constitution of family life, where neglected responsibilities, obligations, and trust lead not only to broken relationships, but also, and inevitably, to the innovative creation of new ones. By connecting the micro-politics of the migrant family with the macro-politics of the nation state and global conjunctures in general, the book argues that securitization and suspicion—launched in the name of “integration”—escalate internal community dynamics and processes of family upheaval in unpredicted ways.

The Pakistan Paradox

The Pakistan Paradox PDF Author: Christophe Jaffrelot
Publisher: Random House India
ISBN: 8184007078
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 525

Get Book Here

Book Description
The idea of Pakistan stands riddled with tensions. Initiated by a small group of select Urdu-speaking Muslims who envisioned a unified Islamic state, today Pakistan suffers the divisive forces of various separatist movements and religious fundamentalism. A small entrenched elite continue to dominate the country’s corridors of power, and democratic forces and legal institutions remain weak. But despite these seemingly insurmountable problems, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan continues to endure. The Pakistan Paradox is the definitive history of democracy in Pakistan, and its survival despite ethnic strife, Islamism and deepseated elitism. This edition focuses on three kinds of tensions that are as old as Pakistan itself. The tension between the unitary definition of the nation inherited from Jinnah and centrifugal ethnic forces; between civilians and army officers who are not always in favour of or against democracy; and between the Islamists and those who define Islam only as a cultural identity marker.

My Enemy's Enemy

My Enemy's Enemy PDF Author: Avinash Paliwal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190911581
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book Here

Book Description
The archetype of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend', India's political and economic presence in Afghanistan is often viewed as a Machiavellian ploy aimed against Pakistan. The first of its kind, this book interrogates that simplistic yet powerful geopolitical narrative and asks what truly drives India's Afghanistan policy.

Moth Smoke

Moth Smoke PDF Author: Mohsin Hamid
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN: 9780140297041
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Year Is 1998, The Summer Of Pakistan S Nuclear Tests, And Darashikoh Shezad Has Just Managed To Lose His Job In Lahore. As The Economy Crumbles Around Him, His Electricity Is Cut Off, And The Jet Set Parties Behind High Walls, Daru Takes The Bright Steps Of Falling For His Best Friend S Wife And Giving Heroin A Try. This Is The Story Of His Decline.

Pakistan on the Brink

Pakistan on the Brink PDF Author: Ahmed Rashid
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143122835
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
An urgent, on-the-ground report from Pakistan—from the bestselling author of Descent Into Chaos and Taliban Ahmed Rashid, one of the world's leading experts on the social and political situations in Pakistan and Afghanistan, offers a highly anticipated update on the possibilities—and hazards—facing the United States after the death of Osama bin Laden and as Operation Enduring Freedom winds down. With the characteristic professionalism that has made him the preeminent independent journalist in Pakistan for three decades, Rashid asks the important questions and delivers informed insights about the future of U.S. relations with the troubled region. His most urgent book to date, Pakistan on the Brink is the third volume in a comprehensive series that is a call to action to our nation's leaders and an exposition of this conflict's impact on the security of the world.

Islam in Pakistan

Islam in Pakistan PDF Author: Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069121073X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first book to explore the modern history of Islam in South Asia The first modern state to be founded in the name of Islam, Pakistan was the largest Muslim country in the world at the time of its establishment in 1947. Today it is the second-most populous, after Indonesia. Islam in Pakistan is the first comprehensive book to explore Islam's evolution in this region over the past century and a half, from the British colonial era to the present day. Muhammad Qasim Zaman presents a rich historical account of this major Muslim nation, insights into the rise and gradual decline of Islamic modernist thought in the South Asian region, and an understanding of how Islam has fared in the contemporary world. Much attention has been given to Pakistan's role in sustaining the Afghan struggle against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, in the growth of the Taliban in the 1990s, and in the War on Terror after 9/11. But as Zaman shows, the nation's significance in matters relating to Islam has much deeper roots. Since the late nineteenth century, South Asia has witnessed important initiatives toward rethinking core Islamic texts and traditions in the interest of their compatibility with the imperatives of modern life. Traditionalist scholars and their institutions, too, have had a prominent presence in the region, as have Islamism and Sufism. Pakistan did not merely inherit these and other aspects of Islam. Rather, it has been and remains a site of intense contestation over Islam's public place, meaning, and interpretation. Examining how facets of Islam have been pivotal in Pakistani history, Islam in Pakistan offers sweeping perspectives on what constitutes an Islamic state.