a modern and respectable middle-class suburb outside Kuala Lumpur, the overtness of cars evokes intense speculation about the nature of the make-up of covert middle-class homes and the formation of Malay Muslim identities more generally. I argue that the more ‘Islamic’ cultures of consumption assert themselves in modern Malaysia, the more the growing Malay Muslim middle class is split between desiring cars as positional commodities, on the one hand, and claims for piety through