Yahya Birt is Trustee to Oxford Research Group (ORG). He currently works as Commissioning Editor at Kube Publishing, which publishes books on Muslim history, current affairs, biography, poetry, books for young people as well as on religious topics. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Markfield Institute of Higher Education in Leicestershire, and he holds an M.Phil. in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. He has written over a dozen academic articles on aspects of Muslim life in Britain. He recently co-edited British Secularism and Religion: Islam, Society and the State (Markfield: Kube, 2011).

Yahya Birt  has been involved in Muslim community activism since the early 1990s, and has volunteered or worked with a number of Muslim community organisations over the years including the City Circle, serving for a year as its Director, the Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism, and the Islamic Foundation. Since 2000, he has written for both the Muslim press and the national press on British Muslim affairs. Since 2001, he has been involved in policy work relating to issues like Islamophobia and radicalisation. He has been part of a number of government consultations on Muslim community affairs, including as a member of the Preventing Extremism Together taskforce in 2005.

Yahya was the lead researcher for the UK in-country report on the beliefs, narratives and ideologies of violent radicalisation for the Justice, Freedom and Security Directorate of the European Commission (2008) and a member of the European Network of Experts on Radicalisation (2008-10) that acts as an expert resource for the Directorate. He has taken part in the Contextualising Islam in Britain project led by the Universities of Cambridge, Exeter and Westminster (2009-11). He is currently a Trustee of the Cambridge Muslim College and the City Circle. He has maintained a blog and an archive of his writing and research since 2006 at www.yahyabirt.com.