In the 1980s, Zia-ul-Haq justified his martial law by embarking upon the Islamization of laws, educational institutions, and the society. Politically, the policy translated into the production of Jihadis for the anti-Soviet fight in Afghanistan in support for the Reagan regime’s Cold War policy. However, the simultaneous privatization boom in Pakistan allowed the middle and upper class urbanites to resist their transformed educational and political environment by patronizing private secular schools, where quality education with minimal religious education often delivered through the prestigious British O-level system, guaranteed professional success and allowed for the construction of moderate religious and social subjectivities. Under Musharraf, the scenario in 2007 was much different. The government was ignoring the “Go Musharraf Go!” demonstrations of lawyers, liberals and conservatives justifying the prolonged martial law as a means to crack down on madrasas to control religious extremism—the Enlightened Moderation policy—thus finding support with the Bush regime by supporting its War on Terror. This was the environment in which I saw the emergence of a new form of private schooling in the country, the private Islamic schools. Private Islamic schools combine the traditional curricula of the madrasas with the secular curricula of the private secular schools. Using data from my long-term, participant-observation based anthropological fieldwork conducted from 2007-2008 with students, teachers, administrators, and parent patrons inside the schools in Pakistan’s most professionally competitive and ethno-religiously diverse city, Karachi, and borrowing from the post-9/11 ongoing theoretical debates in anthropology on Islamic education and practice, in this paper, I will examine the extent to which private Islamic schools reflect the educational response of middle and upper class urban Pakistanis to state’s fluctuating domestic policy toward Islamic education, practice, and institutions and to the country’s association with religious extremism in the post-9/11 international environment. Questions central to my paper will be: How have the Zia’s Cold War support to Musharraf’s support for America’s War on Terror transformed the political environment in which middle and upper class urban Pakistanis make professional and religious educational choices for their children? If private secular schools were the intellectual response to the politico-ideological and educational environment under Zia’s Islamization, to what extent are the private Islamic schools a response to the political, ideological and educational environment under Musharraf’s Enlightened Moderation policy?