Mahmood Kooria is a postdoctoral fellow at the HERA project "Uses of the Past: Understanding Sharia". Earlier he was a joint research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and African Studies Centre (ASC), Leiden. His areas of specialisation are the global mobility of texts, Indian Ocean studies, and Islamic legal and intellectual history.

More information about Mahmood Kooriadathodi

Fields of interest

• Indian Ocean World
• Legal History
• Islamic History
• Intellectual History
• South and Southeast Asian Studies
• East African Studies

Research

My areas of specialization are the global mobility of texts, Indian Ocean studies, and Islamic legal and intellectual history.

In my doctoral dissertation, I explored the transmission of Islamic legal texts across the Indian Ocean and eastern Mediterranean worlds. Focusing on the books of the Shāfiʿī school of law from the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, I investigated the nuances of Islamic legal textual longue durée as jurists wrote commentaries, super-commentaries and abridgments over centuries. In the study, I utilized a number of different sources collected through extensive fieldworks from a number of languages varying from Arabic to Bahasa Indonesia, Dutch, Malay, Malayalam, Persian, Tamil and Urdu. Currently I am converting the dissertation into a book tentatively entitled Cosmopolis of Law: Islamic Legal Ideas and Texts across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean.

With regard to my broader research interests, I have written several articles, edited a journal issue and two volumes, and organised conferences. My first edited volume (with Michael Pearson) is Malabar in the Indian Ocean World: Cosmopolitanism in an Indian Ocean region (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). I and Sanne Ravensbergen just finished editing a special issue of the Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction (Cambridge University Press) and currently we are editing a volume on Islamic legal crossings in the Indian Ocean world, to be published in the series Leiden Studies in Islam and Society (Brill, Leiden). Both these collections emerge out of the conferences we organised in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

Together with Tom Hoogervorst, I am a coordinator of the Leiden Centre for Indian Ocean Studies, a global platform for scholars working on connections and comparisons across the Indian Ocean world.  

Curriculum vitae

Mahmood Kooria is a postdoctoral fellow at the HERA project "Uses of the Past: Understanding Sharia". Earlier he was a joint research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and African Studies Centre (ASC), Leiden. He finished his PhD at the Leiden University Institute for History, and pursued his undergraduate and post-graduate studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Darul Huda Islamic University and the University of Calicut. His recent publications include Malabar in the Indian Ocean World: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). 

Grants and awards

2016-2017 IIAS-ASC Joint Fellowship
2013-2016 IBIES-Erasmus Mundus Fellowship
2012-2013 Cosmopolis Fellowship, Leiden University
2011-2012 CHMK Chair Fellowship, University of Calicut

Publications