Mustafa Akyol
A Turkish journalist and author, Mustafa Akyol studied political science and history at Bogazici University. Since the early 2000s, he has been writing regular opinion columns for Turkish publications like Hurriyet Daily News, and recently for the Middle-East focused Al-Monitor.com. Since fall 2013, he is also a regular contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He has published six books in Turkish, including “Rethinking the Kurdish Question: What Went Wrong, What Next?” (2005). His 2011 book, “Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty” an argument for Islamic liberalism, was published in the W.W. Norton. The book was long-listed for the Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary prize awarded by the University of Toronto for the best nonfiction book in English that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues, and praised by The Financial Times as “a forthright and elegant Muslim defense of freedom.” The book has been published also in Turkish, Malay, and Indonesian. (It was later banned in Malaysia, in fall 2017, after Akyol’s short arrest by the country’s “religion police” merely for giving a lecture that defends religious freedom.)
