Mahmoud Al-Zayed is a researcher in the fields of comparative literature, literary and critical theory and intellectual history, with a special focus on decolonial approaches. He teaches a wide range of subjects, such as postcolonial and critical theory and modern fiction, with a transregional focus on the Arabic and Islamic worlds, Africa, and South Asia. Al-Zayed is an Enishtein Fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies, Department of History and Cultural Studies, Freie Universitat Berlin. Al-Zayed studied and worked in Syria and India. Before joining Freie Universitat Berlin, he was a research associate at Jamia Millia Islamia, a central university in New Delhi.

Al-Zayed’s OCRID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2952-5102

Employment

2023 - present: Einstein Guest Researcher, Institute of Islamic Studies, Department of History and Cultural Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

2022-23: Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer, Institute of Islamic Studies, Department of History and Cultural Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

2020-22: Postdoctoral researcher, Critical Thinking program, Freie Universität Berlin

2017-19: Research Associate, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India.

Project: “A Study of the Muslim Question in Malayalam and Bengali Cinema of the Indian Subcontinent” (Funded by Indian Council for Social Sciences, ICSSR)       

2013: Academic Coordinator, Saudi Cultural Attaché, New Delhi, India.

Education

2019       PhD, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India.

2013       MA (English), Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India.

2012       Diploma in United Nations and International Understanding. Institute of UN Studies, New Delhi, India.

2010       BA English Language and Literature, Al-Baath University, Homs, Syria.

Academic Organisation (selection)

2023  Co-organiser. The lecture series “Interrogating Coloniality: Post and Decolonial Thought and Practice” was  organized in the framework of Beyond Social Cohesion – Global Repertoires of Living Together (RePLITO), Berlin University Alliance, Berlin. 07-04 to 13-07.

2022 Organiser. Two-day international workshop on “What is it to be human? Engaging the possibilities of living       together” organised in Beyond Social Cohesion – Global Repertoires of Living Together (RePLITO), Berlin University Alliance, Berlin. 07-08.07.2022

2022 Co-organiser: One-day international workshop on “How to think Concepts from the Global South”, 2. 09. 2022.

2017 Coordinator. One-Day International Colloquium on Translating/Transcreating Travel and Life ‘Writings’ from the Arab World, organized by Department of English and India Arab Cultural Centre, 08.03.2017

2017 Programme Coordinator: One-Day International Colloquium on Translating/Transcreating Travel and Life ‘Writings’ from the Arab World, organized by the Department of English and India Arab Cultural Centre, on 8th March 2017.

2017 Member of Organizing Team: One Day National Seminar on Understanding Partitions(s) in/of the Indian Subcontinent through Literary and Cinematic Re/presentations with Special Focus on Sindh, organized by DRS Phase III, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia.

Wintersemester 21/22

Translating Difference: Travel Narratives from and about the Middle East (18th to 20th centuries)

Sommersemester 2023

Befreiende Ästhetik auf Arabisch

 (S) Interrogating Coloniality: Post- and Decolonial Thought and Practice

(Ü) Interrogating Coloniality: Post- and Decolonial Thought and Practice

Research Projects

 Al-Zayed has a keen interest in mapping the affinities between Arab, Islamic and Black intellectuals as well as in tracing the intellectual and literary connections between the Arab, Islamic worlds and the Indian Subcontinent. His project titled “Engaging with Paradigm(s) of Decoloniality/De-colonisability: Constructing a Dialogic Encounter between Frantz Fanon and Malek Bennabi” traces the connections between the two intellectuals Malek Bennabi (1905-1973) and Franz Fanon (1925-1961), both thinking against the French colonial empire. Though there may appear to be apparent differences between the thoughts of Bennabi and Fanon, the project attempts to construct a dialogic encounter between the two in order to understand and engage with the paradigm of decoloniality/de-colonisability. This paradigm connects the thoughts of both thinkers in their vision for a new man, civilisation and humanity. The project establishes parallel/intersecting ideational flows in cross-disciplinary terms, which is a necessary step to imagine both the past and future differently to better understand the complexities of the present.

 His current project, “Islam, Afro-Asianism and the Question of the Human,” takes as its point of departure the intellectual productions of decolonisation in the aftermath of the Bandung Conference in 1955 (the 1950s and 1960s), to map out and trace intellectual connections between Arab thinkers and their counterparts in the Indian subcontinent, with a special focus on Muslim Algerian philosopher Malek Bennabi.   The project deploys a South-South comparative textual reading and archival research to re-visit the notions of solidarity and ecumenical humanism and trace the early conception of planetary humanism while examining the interconnections between Islam and Afro-Asianism and the textual and ideational flows that shaped them. The project reexamines the meanings of Afro-Asianism, anticolonialism, decolonisation, and world-making beyond the West.

Other projects:

 – South-South Comparativism:

– The Lives of M. K. Gandhi in Arabic.

Some of the outcomes of these projects will appear in a forthcoming article titled “Decolonisation as Transformation: Malek Bennabi’s Philosophy of Liberation,” forthcoming in Anticolonialism and Social Theory, Cambridge University Press, and another one article titled “Anticolonialism and the Coloniality/Secularity of Being” forthcoming in the journal Philosophy and Global Affairs.

Book projects 

His co-edited book titled Mahasweta Devi in Defence of the Human: The Poetics of Translating Resistance (Routledge, forthcoming) re-thinks the literary and social worlds of Mahasweta Devi in connection to her activism, taking her discourses on the question of the human that informs her poetics of translating resistance. The book examines the multilayered politics and poetics of translating resistance in textual, visual, and cinematic modalities.

His book project, tentatively titled Against Co-colonialism: Literary Representations of Resistance in the Global South,traces the legacy of the post-independent resistance movements in India and Kenya against state violence conducted in the ‘democratic’ and dictatorial polity. The book advances a south-south comparative approach through close readings of select writings of the Indian writer-activist Mahasweta Devi and the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiongo’. The book argues to reconfigure neocolonialism as co-colonialism to lay bare more forcefully the complicity of postcolonial state actors in facilitating the system of oppression inherited and carried out - though in different means - in post-independent times.

Al-Zayed is currently editing a special issue tentatively entitled “Contra Mannormality: Praxes of Being Human from the Global South” to be published in Philosophy and Global Affair (Fall 2025). This special issue takes the critical and decolonial discourse on humanism as its point of departure to offer ethical and critical insights into the praxis of being human beyond the prisons of Euro-modern and colonial conceptions of what it means to be human.

Publications

2025 Mahasweta Devi in Defence of the Human: the Poetics of Translating Resistance.Co-editor, Routledge, Forthcoming.

Research report

2019 A Study of the Muslim Question in Malayalam and Bengali Cinema of the Indian Subcontinent.Co-authored. (ICSSR, New Delhi)

Articles (selection)

2025 “Anticolonialism and Coloniality/Secularity of Being” in Philosophy and Global Affair. (Under review). Winter 2025.

2025 “Ethical Literary Experiments: Thinking with Devi about Aesthet(h)ics of Liberation” in Mahasweta Devi in Defence of the Human: the Poetics of Translating Resistance. Edited by Anuradha Ghosh and Mahmoud Al-Zayed. Forthcoming.

2025 “Decolonization as Transformation: Malek Bennabi’s Philosophy of Liberation,” in Anticolonialism and Social Theory, Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.

2024 ‘Coloniality: a Short story of a concept’, Concepts and Repertoires. replito.de, https://doi.org/10.21428/f4c6e600.e5b05001.

2024 “The Many Lives of Bashai Tudu, the Many Acts of (Re)Framing Devi.” Articulations: Framing Narratives, edited by Simon Godart, Johannes Stephan, and Beatrice Gründler (May 2024). https://articulations.temporal-communities.de/contributions/lives-of-bashai-tudu/.

2024 Al-Zayed, Mahmoud.‘Decolonialities and the Exilic Consciousness: Thinking from the Global South,’ in Displacing Theory Through the Global South, ed. by Iracema Dulley and Özgün Eylül İşcen, Cultural Inquiry, 29 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), PP. 29-41. https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-29/al-zayed_decolonialities-and-exilic-consciousness.pdf

2023 Al-Zayed, Mahmoud. ‘Words and Their Worlds: A Conversation with Dilip M. Menon’. Philological Encounters 8 (4): 375–402. 2024. https://doi.org/10.1163/24519197-12340087

2022 Al-Zayed, Mahmoud. ‘Endogenizing Epistemologies: Thinking with Syed Hussein Alatas about Decoloniality and Autonomous Knowledge’. Philippine Sociological Review, vol. 70, 2022, pp. 89–110.

2016 “Matigari: A Call to Speak Truth to Power” in Gnosis, Special Issue -1 (African Literature) September – 2016, 53-64.

Translations

English to Arabic of B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, Other Books. In progress.

Other publication

2018 Cartographies of Absence. New Delhi and Kathmandu: Adriot, 2018.

2018 “On the Map of Death” and “The Obstinate Absence,” two poems translated from Arabic by the author and to Mandarin by the esteemed Taiwanese poet Kuei-shien Lee, in Poetry Feeling in Sea and Land (2018), edited and translated by Kuei-shien Lee.

Papers and Invited Lectures (selections)

2022       “The Social Theory of Malek Bennabi,” the University of Chicago Paris Centre. 01.06. 2022.

2022       “Malek Bennabi: His Life and Thought,” Seminar für Semitistik u. Arabistik, Freie Universität Berlin. 02.05. 2022.

2022       “Decolonizing/Re-Locating Theory: Notes from Frantz Fanon and Malek Bennabi,” Institute of Cultural Inquiry Berlin, 11.03.2022.

2022       “Re-Framing Narratives and the Promises of Reading” Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik. Freie Universität Berlin. 23.02.2022.

2022       “Sylvia Wynter: “Human Being and Being Human”” Lateinamerika-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin. 26.01.2022

2021       “Malek Bennabi at Large” Education and International Development, University College of London. 13.05.2021.

2021       “Temporalities of Revolution,” panel discussion on “Democratisation, Counterrevolution, War: Tunisia, Egypt, Syria.” Hamburg University. 22.04.2021

2019       “What does it mean to resist? Bennabi and Fanon”. ACSS, Beirut, as part of the School on “Theorizing from the Global South: African and Arab Imaginaries and Circulations”. 25.10.2019.