Asef Bayat is an Iranian-American professor of sociology. 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. 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.
Personal life
Asef Bayat was born in 1954 in an Azerbaijani family
Academic career
Bayat completed his B.A. in politics from the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences in 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 postdoctoral research fellowship at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. Drawing on extensive field research among marginalized groups in the Middle East, Bayat emphasizes the transformative capacity of ordinary people—acting both individually and collectively—to reshape political and moral orders.
Bayat further challenges Western social movement theories for their overemphasis on democratic contexts, arguing instead for an analytical framework that more accurately captures the dynamics of popular agency in the mostly undemocratic Middle Eastern settings.
Post-Islamism
Bayat coined the term “Post-Islamism” in the essay “The Coming of a Post-Islamist Society” in 1995. The concept evolved in Bayat’s subsequent works. Post-Islamism is a theoretical framework that seeks to reconcile Islamic values with democratic principles, individual freedoms, and civil rights. Introduced prominently in works such as Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (2007) and Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (2013), Bayat argues that post-Islamism emerged in response to the shortcomings of the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the declining influence of radical Islamist movements—an evolution made especially evident by the Arab Spring. He posits that post-Islamism manifests both as a social “condition” and a political “project”, emphasizing a “religious democracy” that upholds cultural plurality and personal liberties.
Bayat further challenges prevailing assumptions by asserting that subaltern populations in the Middle East actively mobilize through diverse traditions of activism—including those of leftists, unionists, women, Islamists, and post-Islamists—rather than passively enduring adverse conditions. He contends that for the Muslim Brotherhood to emerge as a dominant force in civil and political society, revolutionary forces must support post-Islamist factions that expand democratic space while rejecting exclusivist, opportunistic, or populist practices. His analysis of post-Islamist reform projects in Iran (1997–2004) illustrates efforts to bolster human rights, free-market ideas, and religious freedoms, even though these initiatives ultimately collided with entrenched anti-democratic structures, thereby reducing traditional Islamism’s political legitimacy. Furthermore, Bayat explores shifts in societal practices—such as the emergence of “post-Islamist piety” among Egypt’s upper classes and the rise of post-Islamist feminism in Iran, which merges civil and religious rights to transform gender power relations. and his analysis of youth activism that redefines religious expression in Iran and Egypt,
Street politics
Bayat’s work on street politics conceptualizes urban public spaces as vital arenas for political engagement, particularly for marginalized communities excluded from formal political institutions. He defines street politics as a process whereby ordinary citizens mobilize through everyday acts of resistance—transforming urban streets into “stages for political confrontation” that articulate collective grievances and demands for reform. By critiquing conventional models of political activism that prioritize formal institutional mobilization, Bayat champions the legitimacy of non-movements and the subtle, persistent forms of dissent emerging in everyday life.
Quiet encroachment
Bayat’s concept of “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” describes the gradual and informal strategies through which marginalized urban groups secure their basic needs and assert their presence in the city. Rather than organized mobilizations, these actions—ranging from illegal land occupations and street vending to informal networks among youth, women, and migrants—produce what Bayat terms a “quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” gradually reshaping urban norms and dispelling assumptions of an unchanging social order.