Mahmood Kooria

Mahmood Kooria is Assistant Professor of the History Department of Ashoka University. Earlier he was a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL), and the Dutch Institute in Morocco (NIMAR). He did his PhD at the Leiden University Institute for history on the circulation of Islamic legal ideas and texts across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean worlds. With Michael N. Pearson he has edited Malabar in the Indian Ocean World: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (Oxford University Press, 2018). His research specialisations are premodern Indian Ocean world, Afro-Asian connections, matrilineal Muslims, and Islamic legal history, and the areas of broader research interests include the premodern interactions between Abrahamic and Indic religions, global mobility of law, and Islamic intellectual history.


A selected list of his edited volumes are -

  • Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region, edited with Michael Pearson (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  • Ocean of Law: Islamic Legal Crossings in the Indian Ocean, edited with Sanne Ravensbergen (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

  • “An Indian Ocean of Law: Spaces and Hybridity”, special issue of the Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction, edited with Sanne Ravensbergen, vol. 42, no. 2 (2018).

A selected list of his articles are -

  • “Politics, Economy and Islam in 'Dutch Ponnāni', Malabar Coast”. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 62, no. 1 (2019): 1-35.

  • “Uses and Abuses of the Past: An Ethno-History of Islamic Legal Texts”. Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, vol. 7, no. 2 (2018): 313-338, Oxford University Press.

  • “Dutch Mogharaer, Arabic al-Muḥarrar and Javanese Law-Book: VOC’s Experiments with Muslim Law in Java, 1747-1767”. Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction vol. 41, no. 2 (2018): 202-219, Cambridge University Press.

  • “Using the Past and Bridging the Gap: Premodern Islamic Legal Texts in New Media”. Law and History Review, vol. 36, no. 4 (2018): 725-752, Cambridge University Press.

  • “Texts as Objects of Value and Veneration: Islamic Law Books in the Indian Ocean Littoral”. Sociology of Islam, vol. 6, no. 1 (2018): 60-83, Brill.

  • “Early Dutch Encounters with Islamic Law: The Text and Translation of Mogharaer Code or Semarang Compendium” Indonesia, vol. 106 (2018): 45-87, Cornell University Press.

  • “An Abode of Islam with a Hindu King: Circuitous Imagination of Kingdoms in Sixteenth Century Malabar”. Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, McGill University Press, vol. 1, no. 1 (2017): 89-109.

  • “Words of ʿAjam in the World of Arab: Translation and Translator in Early Islamic Judicial Procedure.” Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts, eds. Intisar Rabb and Abigail Balbale (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018): 71-90.

  • “In Between Many Worlds of One Law: Arab, Malay and Filipino Legal Intermixtures of Shāfiʿīsm”. In Philippine Crossings: Entangled Voices between Oceans, eds. Jos Gommans, Jorge Flores and Ariel Lopez (Leiden: Leiden University Press, in press).

  • “An Indian Ocean Ribāṭ: War and Religion in Sixteenth-Century Ponnāni, Malabar Coast”, Imagining Asia: Networks, Agents, Sites, eds. Andrea Acri, Kashshaf Ghani, Murari K Jha, Sraman Mukherjee (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2019).


Photograph Courtesy: Ashoka Website