Middle East Studies

Revisiting Post-Islam

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

2:00pm – 4:00pm

Kim Koo Library, Watson Institute

Revisting Post-Islamism

In an earlier work Making Islam Democratic (2007), speaker Asef Bayat, Aga Khan Visiting Professor in Islamic Humanities, Faculty Fellow at the Watson Institute, tries to interrogate the infamous question of whether Islam was compatible with democracy. Bayat concluded that whereas Islamism (understood as deployment of Islam for the political project of establishing Islamic state) was unlikely to embrace democratic polity, ‘post-Islamism’ could and did. His early formulation of ‘post-Islamism’ was based primarily on the experience of Iran in the late 1990s. Bayat's current work tries to see how much this concept has a broader resonance, given that Islamist movements in the Muslim world have experienced significant changes in the past two decades or so. The talk will focus on revisiting the concept by addressing the questions that its application to other experiences of Islamist politics may raise, as well as the questions that critiques have raised since the concept’s inception.

Partner Events

Asef Bayat, Aga Khan Visiting Professor in Islamic Humanities, Faculty Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies, and also Professor of Sociology and MIddle Eats Studies at the Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be speaking on Religion and the Internationalism Project.