Mustafa Akyol

Mustafa Akyol is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, where he focuses on the intersection of public policy, Islam, and modernity. He is the author of books such as The Islamic Moses: How the Prophet Inspired Jews and Muslims to Flourish Together and Change the World (2024), Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance (2021), Why, as a Muslim, I Defend Liberty (2021), The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims (2017), and Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (2011), all of which have been translated into various languages.

The Thinking Muslim, a popular podcast, defined Akyol as “probably the most notable Muslim modernist and reformer.” In July 2021, the UK magazine Prospect listed him among “The World’s Top 50 Thinkers.”

In addition to his work at Cato, Akyol is a senior lecturer at the Islamic Civilization and Societies program at Boston College and the director of the Islam and the Muslim World course at the Foreign Service Institute.

Akyol has also had a long career in journalism. From 2013 to 2021, he was a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, covering religion and politics in the Muslim world. Before joining the Cato Institute in 2018, he worked for more than a decade as an opinion columnist for two Turkish newspapers, Hürriyet Daily News and Star—until they were co‐​opted and transformed into pro‐​government propaganda outlets. His articles have appeared in many other publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, First Things, the Financial Times, The Times (UK), The Guardian, El País (Spain), the Times of India, and The Dawn (Pakistan). He has appeared frequently on CNN, BBC, NPR, and Al Jazeera English and on prominent TV shows, including Fareed Zakaria GPS and HARDtalk. His 2011 TED talk on “Faith versus Tradition in Islam” has been watched by more than 1.3 million viewers.

Akyol’s seminal book, Reopening Muslim Minds, has been excerpted or reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, the Los Angeles Book Review, Friday Times (Pakistan), and various other publications across the Muslim world. The Islamic Jesus also received praise from the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Economist, National Catholic Reporter, and America: The Jesuit Review and has been published in Turkish and Croatian. His 2011 book, Islam without Extremes, which was then featured by the Cato Institute, was praised by the Wall Street Journal, acclaimed by the Financial Times as “a forthright and elegant Muslim defense of freedom,” and longlisted for the 2012 Lionel Gelber Prize, an award for the world’s best English-language non​fiction book on foreign affairs. It has been published in Turkish, Malay, Indonesian, and unofficially in Urdu. (It was subsequently banned in Malaysia in 2017 after Akyol’s short arrest by the country’s “religion police” merely because Akyol delivered a public lecture defending religious freedom. The book’s Malay edition is now freely available on the Cato Institute website.)

Akyol is also the author of six books originally written in Turkish, including Rethinking the Kurdish Question (2006) and the coauthored Ethical Capitalism (2012). He has a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in Ottoman history from the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. Throughout the past decade he has given regular lectures at the Nato Defense College and Acton University, in addition to many talks on campuses and public venues in the United States and around the world. In 2017, he was a senior visiting fellow at the Freedom Project at Wellesley College.