In the context of the post-9/11 Bush government’s War on Terror, anthropologists paid much attention to the politics of religious education and growing extremism in Islamic seminaries (madrasas). However, the simplistic association of the subjectivities created through Islamic schooling with religious fundamentalism has somehow obscured anthropologists from the emergent and increasingly popular phenomenon of private Islamic schools (PIS) as alternative institutions of Islamic learning and the kinds of religious and social subjectivities they create. In this paper, I will base my discussion on PIS examples from Egypt and Pakistan. I will discuss the colonial legacies in the educational system of the countries and the ways in which various post-independence governments have defined Islamic practice and education to highlight how the PIS blend of modern secular and Islamic traditional education is responding to these factors. So far, Linda Herrera’s study is the primary resource on the contemporary private Islamic schooling trend in Egypt and will guide my discussion. With regard to Pakistan, the data on PIS for this paper will be extracted from my own participant-observation based long-term field research in Pakistan. Through my comparative study, I will stress the need for two approaches in ethnographic studies on Islamic schools: first, I will highlight how Islamic tradition and modern education is defined differently in every PIS in the two countries depending on the aspirations of the entrepreneurs and the pedagogical dynamic between the teachers and the students and their parents, and how this shows that different kinds of religious schooling create different kinds of subjectivities; second, I will discuss the social, economic and political reasons why middle and upper class citizens are opting for this form of religious education to argue that these schools are a conscious educational choice for their patrons because madrasa education does not satisfy all ideological, societal and professional demands. The popularity and dissemination of the private Islamic form of schooling in countries such as Egypt and Pakistan has set a new, alternative tradition of Islamic schooling that is allowing people to become active and modern citizens and to redefine and maintain continuity with their own traditions of Islamic education in the post-9/11 political environment. By doing a comparative discussion of the reasons for its popularity and its implications, I will point toward new avenues and manners of examining Islamic education and its resultant subjectivities.