Asef Bayat

Asef Bayat is an Iranian-American scholar.

He is currently the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, Sociology, and Middle Eastern studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He was previously a Professor of Sociology and Middle Eastern studies and held the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

He has conducted extensive studies on the Iranian Islamic Revolution, Islamist movements in comparative perspective since the 1970s, the non-movements of the urban poor, Muslim youth, and women, the politics of fun, and the Arab Spring revolutions.

Asef Bayat was born in a small village located approximately sixty miles west of Tehran in an Azerbaijani family.

Later, his family moved to the capital city, where his first schooling experience was with an Islamic institution.

He obtained a diploma in a state-run high school, which was located close to the Hosseiniyeh Ershad, where many of Ali Shariati’s followers were gathering.

He attended Shariati’s popular lectures in the Hosseiniyeh Ershad in his last high school years.

However, by this time, he had become an entirely secular teenager, moving into leftist campus politics that he maintained throughout his higher education in the United Kingdom.

After completing his B.A. in Politics from the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences in Tehran (1977), Asef Bayat received his Ph.D. in Social Sciences – Sociology and Politics from the University of Kent from 1978 to 1984.

He held a Post Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley (1985).

Since 1986, he has taught Sociology at the American University in Cairo for some 17 years in the course of which he also held positions at the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, and was Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford University(2000-1) and Brown University (2012).

Bayat coined the term "post-Islamism" in a 1996 essay titled, "The Coming of the Post-Islamist Society."

He served as Academic Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and ISIM Chair of Islam and the Modern World at Leiden University (2003- 2009).

Bayat has published widely on issues of political sociology, social movements, urban space and politics, the everyday of politics and religiosity, contemporary Islam, and the Muslim Middle East.

He was the Professor of Sociology and Middle Eastern Studies and held the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands, from 2003-2010.

He further developed the idea in a subsequent book, 'Making Islam Democratic: Social Movement and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford University Press, 2007).

Since 2010, he has been a Sociology and Middle East Studies Professor at University of Illinois.

His understanding of the Arab Uprisings of 2010/2011, and the introduction of the concept, "Refolution," are presented in his recent book, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford University Press, 2017) and Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (Harvard University Press, 2021).

Asef Bayat is fluent in English, Persian, Arabic, and Azeri.

He has held the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Chair of Global and Transnational Studies since 2012.

Bayat receives prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Ford and MacArthur foundations.

He further refined the concept in a collection with scholars of political Islam throughout the Muslim world titled, Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam(Oxford University Press, 2012).

This idea has instigated intellectual and political debates in many Muslim-majority countries, particularly Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco and Iran.

Bayat has also contributed to social movement theory with his concepts of "quiet encroachment," "social non-movements," and the "politics of presence."

These ideas have developed through the years and have culminated in his book, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2013).