Mahmood Kooria

Mahmood Kooria, in full Mahmood Kooriadathodi, (born 8 April 1988) is an Indian historian and academic known for his studies on Indian Ocean culture, and Islamic legal and intellectual histories. He is generally considered as one of the reputed historians of Kerala. He currently lives in Leiden, the Netherlands.

Kooria is best known as the co-editor of Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region, published in 2017 by Oxford University Press.

Kooria was born on 8 April 1988 in Puzhakkattiri, near Perinthalmanna in Kerala. He completed his initial studies from Darul Huda Islamic University, Chemmad (Kerala) and University of Calicut (Kerala) and M.A. and M.Phil. in Ancient Indian History (2009-12) at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Kooria finished his doctoral studies at Institute for History, Leiden University on the circulation of Islamic legal texts across the Indian Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean worlds. He was a joint research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and African Studies Centre (ASC), Leidenand a postdoctoral fellow at the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) project "Uses of the Past: Understanding Sharia". He was also affiliated to the Dutch Institute in Rabat, Morocco between 2016 and 2018.

• Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for the project ‘Matriarchal Islam: Gendering Sharia in the Indian Ocean World’.
• Transregional Junior Research Scholar Fellowship of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), New York, USA for his project "Afro-Asia-Arab Triangle: Indian Ocean Muslims and the ‘Peripheral Histories’ of Islamic Law".
• Fellowships from the European Union's Erasmus Programme, and the Cosmopolis Program of Leiden University and the National Archive, the Hague.

As co-editor

• With Michael N. Pearson, Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• With Sanne Ravensbergen, "The Indian Ocean of Law: Hybridity and Space." Special Issue: Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions

Articles

• Politics, Economy and Islam in ‘Dutch Ponnāni’, Malabar Coast, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 62 (1), 1-34.
• Languages of Law: Legal Cosmopolis and its Arabic and Malay Microcosms, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 29 (4),
• Using the Past and Bridging the Gap: Premodern Islamic Legal Texts in New Media, Law and History Review 36 (4), 993-1019.
• Does the Pagan King Reply? Malayalam Palm-leaf Documents on the Portuguese Arrival in India, Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions 43 (3), .
• Early Dutch Encounters with Islamic Law: The Text and Translation of Mogharaer Code or Semarang Compendium, Indonesia, 53-87
• The Dutch Mogharaer, Arabic Muḥarrar, and Javanese Law Books: A VOC Experiment with Muslim Law in Java, 1747–1767. Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions 42 (2), 202-219.
• Uses and Abuses of the Past: An Ethno-History of Islamic Legal Texts, Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 7(2): 313–338.
• Words of ʿAjam in the World of Arab: Translation and Translator in Early Islamic Judicial Procedure.
  • In: Intisar Rabb and Abigail Balbale (Eds.) Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• A Malayalam War-Song on the Portuguese-Dutch Battle, 1663.
  • In: Mahmood Kooria and Michael Pearson (Eds.) Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 141-171.
• Texts as Objects of Value and Veneration, Sociology of Islam 6(1): 60–83.
• An Abode of Islam under a Hindu King: Circuitous Imagination of Kingdoms among Muslims of Sixteenth-Century Malabar, The Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies 1(1): 89-109.
• Two ‘Cultural Translators’ of Islamic Law and German East Africa, Rechtsgeshichte: Journal of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History 24(2), 190-214.