Asef Bayat

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.

Although non‑movements do not typically pursue outright regime change, they can merge with overt street activism—as witnessed during the Arab Spring—to form a potent counterforce against authoritarian governance. Bayat explains that these decentralized practices operate through a “logic of praxis” whereby individuals address everyday needs, from informal housing to personal autonomy, without relying on formal organizations or explicit ideologies. Over time, the cumulative effect of these actions compels authorities to adapt, granting marginalized groups a measure of de facto citizenship and challenging neoliberal economic constraints and state surveillance.

Bayat’s scholarship further illustrates that non‑movements, integral to his broader “life as politics” framework, have evolved from early studies of factory workers during the 1979 Iranian Revolution to contemporary analyses of urban poor, Muslim youth, and women. His research highlights how these everyday acts of resistance—not only disrupt entrenched power structures but also foster alternative norms and social solidarity that pave the way for broader societal transformation. Ultimately, by revealing how marginalized populations persistently reshape their societies through the ordinary domains of daily life, Bayat’s concept of non‑movements offers a nuanced understanding of resistance that challenges conventional models of collective activism.

Selected bibliography

Books 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.

Articles

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.

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