Mustafa Akyol is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and his central research interest is Islam and modernity. Since 2013, he has been a regular columnist for The New York Times , where he writes about religion and politics in the Muslim world. His earlier books, Islam without Extremes (2011) and Islamic Jesus (2017), received highly commended reviews and reviews in leading world newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , Financial Times and The Economist. In 2021, the British magazine Prospect included him among the "50 thinkers who will renew the world."