Event Details
Tue, November 04, 2025
18:00 – 19:30
VILLA SASSETTI
Villa La Pietra
Via Bolognese, 120
50139 Florence (Italy)
A talk by Mohamad El-Merheb, Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow at SOAS, University of London.
The depiction of angels in representations of Muslim sultans across Arabic illuminated manuscripts, metalwork, and coinage coincided with a flourishing production of Islamic political thought in the Eastern Mediterranean during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This paper traces the emergence of new Islamic visual expressions of just and legitimate power, shaped by the central concerns of contemporary political thought and by the adaptation of specific symbols of authority from Egypt, Syria and Iraq, Islamic Iberia, and Arabo-Norman and Staufen Sicily.
Featured Biographies
Mohamad El-Merheb
VISITING LECTURER AND RESEARCH FELLOW AT S0AS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
Mohamad El-Merheb is a Visiting Lecturer and Research Fellow at SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on the history of Islamic political thought, professional mobility in pre-modern Islamic societies, and the Crusades of Louis IX.
From 2021 to 2025, he served as an Assistant Professor of Medieval History at the University of Groningen. In January 2024, he was awarded a three-year NWO research grant. Mohamad is the author of Political Thought in the Mamluk Period: The Unnecessary Caliphate (EUP, 2022) and co-editor of Professional Mobility in Islamic Societies (700–1750): New Concepts and Approaches (Brill, 2021).