Mahmood Kooria is a social scientist and historian from Kerala, India. He is a professor of Indian Ocean history at the Department of History University of Edinburgh in Scotland and since the early 2010s, he emerged "as a pioneer in the scholarship of Islam in the Indian Ocean."[1]
He is originally from Panangangara near Perinthalmanna in Kerala, India. His research areas include Indian Ocean studies, global legal history, Afro-Asian relations, and the intellectual history of Islam. In 2024, he was awarded the Infosys Prize.[2][3] Previously, he received a National Research Fellowship from the Dutch government, valued at approximately Rs 2 crore. His studies on the role of animals, such as elephants, horses, and donkeys, during the Malabar rebellion have received attention.[4][5]
Life
Mahmood was born in Malappuram, Kerala, South India.[6] After preliminary education, he studied at Darul Huda Islamic University and Calicut University, both in Kerala. Later, he went to Delhi to pursue MA and MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.[7] Since his days as a Masters student of history in Delhi, he developed an interest in the Indian Ocean world. "Although his specialisation was in ancient Indian history, being from Kerala he found himself more drawn towards subjects like trade in the Indian Ocean and the cultural exchanges that followed."[8] He earned his PhD in Global History from the Leiden University Institute for History in the Netherlands.
Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi'i Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean is the major work by Kooria. Published in the book series "Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization" by Cambridge University Press, the book focuses on the evolution of Shafi'i school of Islamic law in the Middle East, and its later expansion to East Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia.[12]
The book has attracted many positive reviews. One reviewer in Heidelberg's International Quarterly for Asian Studies vol. 54 (2) wrote: "Kooria’s book is a tour-de-force through the history of one particular family of shāfiʿī legal texts. On every page, the reader is surprised by the breadth and depth of Kooria’s scholarship," and it "is a wonderful and important book that should be read not only by scholars of Islam, but by anyone interested in Indian Ocean studies and in the methodology of global legal and intellectual history."[13]
Another review in the Oxford Journal of Islamic Studies writes: "this highly innovative study presents a series of concepts that can inspire future studies on Islamic law in areas relatively neglected by most experts of the Muslim civilization. Utilizing a fresh approach christened as ‘textual longue durée’, Mahmood Kooria examines the canonization and globalization of Shāfiʿī law within the Indian Ocean region from the thirteenth century till the present."[14]
Kooria also has written one book in Malayalam titled Mrigakalapangal (“Animal Rebellions”) on six different animals participated in the Malabar rebellions between the 1790s and the 1920s. The book attracted wide attention in Kerala, and was shortlisted for the Federal Bank Literary Award in 2023.[15] He also has edited three books in English and two books in Malayalam, and guest-edited special issues of various academic journals. He also published more than sixty peer-reviewed articles in international journals and edited volumes. Some of his edited volumes are (incomplete):
Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (Oxford University Press), co-edited with Michael Pearson.[16]
↑ Kooria, Mahmood (2022-03-31). Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi'i Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009106825. ISBN978-1-009-10682-5.
↑ Tschacher, Torsten (2023-08-07). "Mahmood Kooria: Islamic Law in Circulation: Shāfiʿī Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean". International Quarterly for Asian Studies. 54 (2): 201–203. doi:10.11588/IQAS.2023.2.22461.
↑ Aljunied, Khairudin (2024). "Islamic Law in Circulation: Shāfiʿī Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean by Mahmood Kooria". Journal of Islamic Studies. 35: 94–97. doi:10.1093/jis/etad033.
↑ Kooria, Mahmood; Ravensbergen, Sanne (2022). Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean World: Texts, Ideas and Practices. London New York, NY: Routledge Series on the Indian Ocean and Trans-Asia. ISBN978-1-032-02909-2.
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