Biography
Presentation and academic background
Mehdi Berriah has been a researcher in Islamic studies and the history of the Muslim world at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo) since September 2023.
Alongside his research, he serves as regional head of the Islamic studies cluster for Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. In this role, he is responsible for scientific coordination (designing and steering projects), developing and running research networks (seminars, conferences, partnerships), academic monitoring, and supporting early-career researchers and local institutions.
Before joining Ifpo, he taught at the Faculty of Religion and Theology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2020–2023) as a tenured Assistant Professor, as well as at Université Grenoble-Alpes (2017–2019) and Université Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis (2015–2017). From 2020 to 2023, he also taught Arabic at Sciences Po Paris (Reims campus).
Scholarly orientation and research approach
His work sets the classical corpus in dialogue with contemporary issues, with particular attention to Islamic epistemologies and paradigms. It examines the mechanisms through which medieval Islamic thought – concepts, epistemological frameworks, legal categories, theological patterns and forms of authority – is reinterpreted, transmitted and mobilised today, and studies both its doctrinal effects (normative reconfigurations, uses of tradition) and its sociological impact (practices, institutions, public debates, transnational circulations).
By combining philological analysis, intellectual history and tools drawn from critical Islamic studies, his research seeks to understand how texts and actors construct continuities, ruptures or transfers between the medieval period and the present. A rigorous command of the medieval corpus is not treated as a simple backdrop, but as a key instrument for shedding light on contemporary Islam, its trends, its debates and its forms of legitimation.
Research areas
His main areas of research include:
– Muslim thought and the history of Islamic doctrines (kalām, fiqh, uṣūl) and their contemporary influence;
– Islamic epistemologies and paradigms;
– the theorisation and ideology of jihād, historical forms of radicalism and processes of radicalisation;
– the transmission of knowledge and figures of religious authority;
– Muslim minorities in the West;
– the political, social and military history of the Muslim world.
A substantial part of his work is devoted to the study of Ibn Taymiyya’s corpus, its reception, and the influence of his concepts on contemporary Islamic thought.
International experience and collaborations
Mehdi Berriah has developed an in-depth knowledge of the Arab-Muslim world through numerous research stays and field missions. He works regularly with researchers and institutions in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait.
Very involved in academic life and in the circulation of knowledge, he has organised or co-organised around fifteen scholarly events in Europe, the Near and Middle East, the United States and Japan, helping to strengthen international and interdisciplinary networks.
He has led or taken part in several research projects in Islamic studies, some of them funded by the French Central Bureau of Religious Affairs (Bureau central des cultes), and he is involved in various international and multidisciplinary programmes.
He is actively engaged in collective research and serves on editorial and advisory boards of recognised academic journals in the fields of Islamic studies and the study of the Muslim world.
Publications and books
His publications reflect the range of his work at the crossroads of intellectual history, Islamic thought and studies on the medieval and contemporary Muslim world.
He is the author of more than forty publications in leading journals and collective volumes. His monograph L’art de la guerre chez les Mamelouks (1250–1375) : stratégies et tactiques (Brill, 2024) received the Verbruggen Prize 2024, awarded by the De Re Militari Society for Medieval Military History.
His book Les Mamelouks : les cavaliers de l’Islam (Héritage, 2022) brings together several of his previously published articles in specialised journals on the military and political history of the Mamluk sultanate.
He has also co-edited several collective volumes, among them:
– Professional Mobility in Islamic Societies (700–1750): New Concepts and Approaches (Brill, 2021);
– Jihad and Fitna : penser et concevoir la guerre dans le Mašriq médiéval (VIIe–XVIe siècles) (Annales Islamologiques 56, 2022);
– The Medieval Jihad: Texts, Theories and Practices (Ifao, 2025);
– Discours et imaginaires eschatologiques de l’islam (VIIe–XXIe siècle) (De Gruyter, 2026);
– Ibn Taymiyya’s Thought: Corpus, Reception and Legacy (Leuven University Press, 2026).