Asef Bayat

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Asef Bayat is an Iranian-American Professor of Sociology.^[1] He currently holds the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Chair in Global and Transnational Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Bayat's works focuses on social movements and social change, religion and public life, and urban space and politics and contemporary Middle Eastern societies.^[2][3] Prior to his tenure at Illinois, Bayat was a faculty member at the American University in Cairo and served as the Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) at Leiden University, The Netherlands, where he also held the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East. Additionally, he has held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University; the University of Oxford; and Brown University.^[4]

Asef Bayat was born in 1954 in an Azerbaijani family^[5] in a small village near Tehran, where he attended a makeshift school in a warehouse with minimal instruction. 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.^[6] 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. He is married to social anthropologist Linda Herrera.^[7]

Bayat completed his B.A. in Politics from the University of Tehran in 1977 and earned his Ph.D. in Sociology and Politics from the University of Kent between 1978 and 1984. Following his doctorate, he held a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985.^[1][2]

In 1986, Bayat moved to Egypt to teach at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Throughout his academic career, Bayat has taught Sociology at the American University in Cairo for approximately 17 years. During this time, he studied labor movements and informal politics in Egypt and Iran, leading to the publication of his books Street Politics and Work, Politics, and Power.^[7]

Bayat served as the director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) holding the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University in the Netherlands from 2003 to 2010.^[3] Since 2010, he has been a Sociology and Middle East Studies Professor at University of Illinois. He has held the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Chair of Global and Transnational Studies since 2012.^[4]

• Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (Harvard University Press, 2021)
• Global Middle East: Into the 21st Century, ed. with Linda Herrera (University of California Press, 2021)
• Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring Stanford University Press, 2017
• Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam. Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North. (co-edited with Linda Herrera.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, 2nd Edition 2013.
• Islam and Democracy: What Is the Real Question? Amsterdam University Press, 2007.
• Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
• Street Politics: Poor Peoples Movements in Iran. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Work, Politics and Power. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991.
• Workers and Revolution in Iran. London: Zed Books, 1987.

• Bayat, Asef "Is Iran on the Verge of another Revolution?”, Journal of Democracy, vol. 34, no. 2, April 2023.
• Bayat, Asef (October 2015) "Plebeians of the Arab Spring", Current Anthropology, vol. 56, no. 11.
• Bayat, Asef (2013) "The Making of Post-Islamist Iran", in A. Bayat, ed., Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam, New York, Oxford University Press.
• Bayat, Asef (2013) "Egypt and Its Unsettled Islamism", in A. Bayat, ed., Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam", New York, Oxford University Press.
• Bayat, Asef (2012) "Islamic Movements", in David Snow, et al. (eds.) Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, Oxford and New York, Blackwell.
• Bayat, Asef (April 26, 2011) "The Post-Islamist Revolutions", Foreign Affairs.
• Bayat, Asef (2011) "Marginality: Curse or Cure?", in Ray Bush and Habib Ayeb (eds.) Marginality and Exclusion in Egypt, London, Zed Books.
• Bayat, Asef (October 2007). "Islamism and the Politics of Fun". Public Culture. 19 (3): 433–459. doi:10.1215/08992363-2007-004.
• Bayat, Asef (September 2007). "Radical Religion and the Habitus of the Dispossessed: Does Islamic Militancy Have an Urban Ecology?". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 31 (3): 579–590. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2007.00746.x.
• Bayat, Asef (September 2005). "Islamism and Social Movement Theory". Third World Quarterly. 26 (6): 891–908. doi:10.1080/01436590500089240. JSTOR 4017816. S2CID 143656715. Pdf.
• Bayat, Asef (February 2002). "Activism and Social Development in the Middle East". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 34 (1): 1–28. doi:10.1017/S0020743802001010. hdl:1887/9803. S2CID 36218868.
• Bayat, Asef (Winter 2001). "Studying Middle Eastern Societies: Imperatives and Modalities of Thinking Comparatively". Middle East Studies Association Bulletin. 35 (2): 151–158. doi:10.1017/S0026318400043315. hdl:1887/9802. JSTOR 23063462. S2CID 153290973.
• Bayat, Asef (September 2000). "From 'Dangerous Classes' to 'Quiet Rebels': Politics of Urban Subaltern in the Global South". International Sociology. 15 (3): 533–557. doi:10.1177/026858000015003005. S2CID 41053273.
• Bayat, Asef (January 1998). "Revolution without Movement, Movement without Revolution: Comparing Islamist Activism in Iran and Egypt". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 40 (1): 136–169. doi:10.1017/S0010417598980057. JSTOR 179392. S2CID 54197847.
• Bayat, Asef (March 1997). "Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the 'Informal People'". Third World Quarterly. 18 (1): 53–72. doi:10.1080/01436599715055. hdl:1887/9769. Pdf.
• Bayat, Asef (1992). "Work Ethics in Islam: A Comparison with Protestantism". The Islamic Quarterly. 36 (2): 5–27.
• Bayat, Asef (April 1990). "Shari'ati and Marx: A Critique of an "Islamic" Critique of Marxism". Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. 10 (10): 19–41. doi:10.2307/521715. JSTOR 521715. Available online.

• Asef Bayat personal Website, https://www.asefbayatwebsite.com/
• University of Illinois Website, https://sociology.illinois.edu/directory/profile/abayat