Dr. Mehdi Berriah is Assistant Professor of Classical Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Religion and Theology of the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. He is a member of the Centre for Islamic Theology (CIT) at VU Amsterdam. He also teaches Modern Standard Arabic at Sciences Po Paris University.
Before joining VU Amsterdam, Mehdi Berriah has taught at Paris 8 University (2015-2017) and Grenoble-Alpes University (2017-2019). He has also been a Fellow at IRSEM (the Institute for Strategic Research in Paris) (2015-2018).
Berriah’s scholarly interests include Islamic military history, Islamic law and ideology of jihād, furūsiyya, Islamic thought, Islamic law of Muslim minorities in Western societies and ulamaology. He is currently leading a research project entitled “The taymiyyan corpus on jihad: reception, decontextualization and use by contemporary jihadist movements” funded by the French Ministry of the Interior, Central Office of Worship (call for projects 2020 “Islam, religion and society”).
Mehdi Berriah is editor of Professional Mobility in Islamic Societies (700-1750), New Concepts and Approaches (Brill, 2021) and has several other articles.
He is an Associate Researcher at the UMR-CNRS “Orient et Méditerranée 8167” (team “Islam médiéval”), the CEFREPA (French Research Centre for the Arabian Peninsula) based in Kuwait and the IFAO (French Institute for Oriental Archaeology) in Cairo.
Mehdi Berriah holds an M.A. in Arabic Language from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) of Paris and an M.A. in Medieval Islamic History from Paris-Sorbonne University. In 2019, he received his Ph.D. in Islamic History from Paris Sorbonne University under a joint supervision arrangement with SOAS.