Asef Bayat

[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.

[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.

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.

[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.

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.