Mustafa Akyol is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, where he focuses on the intersection of public policy, Islam, and modernity. He is the author of Why, As A Muslim, I Defend Liberty; The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims, and Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. He also has been a frequent opinion writer for The New York Times, covering politics and religion in the Muslim world. In Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance (St. Martin’s Essentials), Akyol diagnoses “the crisis of Islam” in the modern world and offers a way forward. Diving deeply into Islamic theology while sharing lessons from his own life story, he explores how Muslims lost the universalism that once made them a great civilization. He argues that values often associated with Western Enlightenment – freedom, reason, tolerance, and an appreciation of science – had Islamic counterparts, which sadly were cast aside in favor of more dogmatic views, often for political ends. Here, he offers a new Muslim worldview on a range of sensitive issues from human rights and equality for women to freedom from religion.
