Mahmood Kooria

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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]

Contents

He is originally from Panangangara near Perinthalmanna in Malappuram district. 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 on 18th March 2024 [6] in Malappuram, Kerala, South India. After preliminary education, he studied at Darul Huda Islamic University and Calicut University, both in Kerala. Later, he went to Delhi to pursue PG 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.

Career

He has worked in various countries and institutions, including the University of Bergen (Norway), Ashoka University (India), and the National Islamic University Jakarta (Indonesia). He also worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL), and the Dutch Institute in Morocco (NIMAR).

Awards and Honours

Books and Papers

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. [11]

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." [12] 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." [13]

Kooria also has written one book in Malayalam (Mrigakalapangal, “Animal Rebellions”), 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):

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References

  1. ↑ "How maritime Islam connects the Indian Ocean: From East Africa to India and Malaysia".
  2. ↑ "Infosys Prize - Laureates 2024 - Mahmood Kooria". www.infosysprize.org.
  3. ↑ "Infosys Prize 2024 honours 6 researchers under 40 for breakthroughs in quantum physics, development economics and more". The Indian Express. 2024-11-14. Retrieved 2024-11-15.
  4. ↑ "Malayali scholar Mahmood Kooria wins Rs 84 lakh Infosys Science Prize for research excellence". English.Mathrubhumi. 2024-11-15. Retrieved 2024-11-15.
  5. ↑ Kr, Rajeev. "Animal Farm". The Times of India.
  6. ↑ "Mahmood Kooriadathodi | African Studies Centre Leiden".
  7. ↑ "Malayali scholar Mahmood Kooria wins Rs 84 lakh Infosys Science Prize for research excellence". English.Mathrubhumi. November 15, 2024.
  8. ↑ "How maritime Islam connects the Indian Ocean: From East Africa to India and Malaysia". indianexpress.com/. Indian Express. Retrieved 12 December 2024.
  9. ↑ "Veni grant for Mahmood Kooriadathodi: Can Islam be Matriarchal?". 29 July 2019.
  10. ↑ "Congratulations! - SSRC Grant Awarded to Mahmood Kooria - Uses of the past".
  11. ↑ 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. ISBN   978-1-009-10682-5.
  12. ↑ 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.
  13. ↑ 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.
  14. ↑ Kooria, Mahmood; Kūria, Mahmūd; Pearson, Michael Naylor (2018). Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-948032-6.
  15. ↑ 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. ISBN   978-1-032-02909-2.
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