Watson Events

Asef Bayat -- Revisting Post-Islamism

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.

Visit the Religion and Internationalism Project for a link to the reading.

Colloquia are open to all graduate students and faculty.

Location: Kim Koo Library, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.