Dr. Muhammed Niyas Ashraf is an FWO post-doctoral fellow (2025–2027) at Ghent University, Belgium, and an Assistant Professor of History at GITAM (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru, India, currently on sabbatical. He earned his Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, where his dissertation explored nineteenth-century Arabic-Malayalam devotional poetry among Kerala’s Mappila Muslims, shedding light on Indian Ocean print cultures, Islamic intellectual history and the interplay of regional identity and religious reform.
Ashraf’s scholarship bridges literary analysis and historical inquiry, notably in his recent publication Malayāḷa Islam and Modernity: Being ‘Muslim’ and Being ‘Modern’ in Colonial Kerala, South-West Indian Ocean (Brill, 2025), which examines how Islamic reformist movements intersected with vernacular literary traditions to reshape communal identities. His research underscores the role of Arabic-Malayalam—a hybrid scripto-linguistic tradition—as a medium for theological discourse and anticolonial resistance. Currently, his work expands to map cultural and intellectual exchanges across the Indian Ocean, emphasizing how language, translation, and textual practices forged transregional Islamic networks. Ashraf challenges Eurocentric and elitist historiographies by recovering marginalized vernacular narratives and advocating for inclusive frameworks in understanding global Islam. His contributions advance debates on decolonizing knowledge production and the dynamic interplay between faith, literature, and identity in South Asia and beyond.
