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 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. 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.