Muhamed Riyaz Chenganakkattil is a junior Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Langauges and Cultures at Ghent University. He received his PhD in Literature (2024) with a specialization in South Asian culture and history from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, where he was an Early Doc Fellow. His dissertation, Sailing to the Hijaz: Narrativization of Hajj in the Literary Indian Ocean, explored the intersection of Indian Ocean mobilities and Hajj literature. His research examined historical archives and narratives in Arabic, Malayalam, Arabi-Malayalam, Urdu, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and English, documenting long-term processes of migration, transoceanic movements, and global Muslim networks in the context of the pilgrimage to Mecca from South Asia, particularly in regions such as Malabar, Madras, and Hyderabad.
His research interests include Islam in South Asia and the Middle East, history of Muslim mobilities, Islamic expressive and material cultures, transoceanic networks, and Hajj literature. He has published works on a range of subjects, including Hajj narratives and Indian Ocean Muslim literature; "we-formation" in pilgrims’ memoirs; invisible sacred space and Jinn mosques; and rebellion and the politics of built environments in the early Islamic period. Currently, he is working on a postdoctoral research titled Little Houses of God in the Indian Ocean: Muslim Mobilities, Material Entanglements, and Mosque Life-worlds in and beyond Malabar. This research is part of the FWO funded project The Mosques of Kerala: Artistic Vocabularies in the Identity-Building of Muslim Communities, led by Prof. Dr. Sara Mondini.
