Dr Mohamad El-Merheb

Dr Mohamad El-Merheb is Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow at SOAS. His principal areas of research interest include the history of political thought, professional mobility in pre-modern Islamic societies and cross-cultural contacts in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Crusades.

Before joining SOAS in 2025, Mohamad was Assistant Professor of Medieval History at the University of Groningen. In 2020, he was Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow of History at New York University (NYU) -Shanghai and, before that, a Scouloudi Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) in London (2018-2019). He holds a PhD in History from SOAS.

Mohamad was awarded the NWO (Dutch Research Council) Veni grant in Jan 2024 to complete his research titled, "Sovereignty, Sanctity, Violence and Conversion in French Outremer: Louis IX’s Crusades in Arabic and Islamicate Thought". His current project brings the Eastern Mediterranean’s contact with medieval Latin Christianity into the history of pre-modern Islamic political thought. By examining the Arabic works of Muslim, Jewish and Christian authors, and the material culture produced in the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean, Mohamad’s research investigates how the ideological enterprise of Louis IX moulded novel Islamicate conceptions of sovereignty and legitimacy. His project uncovers fundamental transformations ensuing from this contact in Islamic views on sanctity, the justification and rules of war, and religious conversion.

Mohamad is author of "Political Thought in the Mamluk Period: The Unnecessary Caliphate" (EUP, 2022). His book covers the political thought produced in the Syro-Egyptian lands between 1250 and 1350 and proposes a taxonomy of its main themes and concerns under the three ideals of the rule of law, limited government and legitimate delegation of power. He is editor of "Professional Mobility in Islamic Societies (700-1750): New Concepts and Approaches" (Brill, 2021).

Academia profile