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]
Academic career
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]
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 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. JSTOR521715. Available online.
