Siddiqi Lecture: Andalusi Peregrinations and Scholarly Circulations in the Late Medieval Islamic World

This year's Siddiqi Lecture seeks to invite broader conversations about how intellectual and religious networks can provide a fruitful model for thinking about connectedness, the formation of identity, and the circulation of ideas. It examines how migration shaped the scholarly networks of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Mediterranean, with a particular focus on Andalusi émigrés. These individuals would reshape and redefine the political institutions, intellectual culture and social developments across the late medieval Islamic world, from Granada to Damascus. The emergence of new scholarly and political networks of Andalusis across the Mediterranean provides significant insight into the entangled histories of the individuals, groups, institutions, and political entities active in the late medieval Islamic world. This talk closely examines one particular case-study—the Maliki jurist Abū l-Walīd Muhammad b. al- Ḥājj al-Tujībī (d. 718/1318) —to illustrate the importance of migration and mobility in the transformation of a family’s fortunes within the dynamic context of the thirteenth-century Islamic world.

Mohamad Ballan, who is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Stony Brook University in New York, studies the intellectual, cultural and political history of late medieval Iberia and North Africa. He received his PhD from the Department of History at the University of Chicago in 2019, and has previously held appointments as a Junior Fellow at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows (2018–2019) and as a Mellon Faculty Fellow at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame (2021–2022). In both his writing and his teaching, Ballan highlights the interconnected histories of Europe, Africa and Asia through a close examination of social, intellectual and political networks. In his first manuscript, The Politics of Sovereignty in the Medieval Islamic West: The World of Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib (forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2026), Ballan explores the phenomenon of the “scholar-statesman” – figures who ascended to the highest offices of state – through the life and works of Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib (1313–1374), the most prominent Spanish Muslim historian, chancellor and philosopher of the fourteenth century. His book situates this figure within a broader “community of letters,” a network of Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars that extended from Seville to Damascus, in order to illustrate how these scholar-officials played a major role in reshaping the political culture, social hierarchies and conceptions of sovereignty in Nasrid Granada and beyond.