Mahmood Kooria

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

Profile

Prof. Mahmood Kooria is one of the world’s leading scholars of Indian Ocean Islam, or Maritime Islam generally, particularly in the pre-modern and early modern periods. He is an expert in Arabic and Malayalam texts of many kinds, with a special interest in the corpus of Shafi‘i legal thought produced in or for scholars and readers in Kerala.
Prof. Kooria completed his B.A. in History and Islamic Studies at Darul Huda Islamic Academy and the University of Calicut. He did his M.A. in Ancient History at Jawaharlal University in Delhi and his M. Phil. in history and landscape archaeology. He completed his Ph.D. in global history at Leiden University, Institute for History in 2016.
Kooria is the author of many published essays and book chapters; the pathbreaking volume Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi‘i Texts Across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean (2022); three edited volumes, Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region, with Michael N. Pearson (2018) and Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean: Texts, Ideas and Practices, with Sanne Ravensbergen (2022); and Narrating Africa in South Asia (New York: Routledge, 2023). Mahmood Kooria teaches at Edinburgh University and has also taught at the Ashoka University, Leiden University, University of Bergen, and the National Islamic University Jakarta.