Mohamud Awil Mohamed is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in Islamic thought and social memory in the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian Ocean world. He holds a diploma in Islamic Studies from Abubakar As-Siddique Islamic Institute, a BA in History from Augsburg University, and an MA in Heritage Studies and Public History from the University of Minnesota.

At Penn his research has been supported by the Ibn Sina Fund for the Advancement of Islamic Studies and the Janet Lee Stevens Award in Arabic and Islamic Studies. He is a Fontaine Fellow and a researcher with the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, focusing on Islamicate manuscripts and material culture of the Muslim world.

His work examines the intersection of sharīʿah and customary law (xeer) in Bilād al-Ṣūmāl, a historical region encompassing present-day Somalia, Djibouti, Eastern Ethiopia, and northern Kenya. He explores anathematization, creedal contestation, the evolution of Salafism, and the politics of sacred space as key sites for negotiating religious authority. His research draws on classical Islamic texts, oral traditions, and transnational archival sources to map the intellectual and institutional networks shaping Islam in the region.

He has previously served as a Graduate Fellow with the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML), where he cataloged East African Islamic manuscripts, and as a Digital Humanities and Oral Histories Fellow with the University of Minnesota Libraries’ MN Transform project. His research on COVID-era fatāwā was conducted as an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow under the mentorship of Dr. Hassan Abdelsalam.

Trained in traditional Islamic seminaries across Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, he specializes in legal theory, ḥadīth studies, and Islamic historiography. Outside academia, he is a translator of classical Islamic texts and Somali poetry.