Robert G. Hoyland

Robert G. Hoyland (* 1966 ) is a historian . He has specialized in the history of the Near East in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages , with a focus on the history of early Islam .

Hoyland graduated from Oxford University and received his PhD in 1994. He taught at St. Andrews University and Oxford before accepting a professorship at New York University . There he is currently teaching as Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History .

Hoyland is an expert on late ancient history in the Middle East and the transition to the early Islamic period. Among other things, he deals with the mutual relationships between Christians, Jews and Muslims as well as the transfer of knowledge from the ancient to the early Islamic world. His work Seeing Islam as others saw it , published in 1997, is now considered a standard work in which all relevant non-Islamic sources from the early Islamic period are listed and summarized. In 2011 he presented a comprehensive study of the lost historical work of Theophilos of Edessa , including an English translation of the possible fragments.

Hoyland also drew the attention of the professional world with his work In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (2015), in which he questions the traditional Islamic view of Islamic expansion . Hoyland takes a moderate position with regard to revisionist Islamic studies , whereby he not only critically examines the Islamic tradition, but also includes non-Muslim sources and embeds them in the historical context.

Hoyland's research continues the research tradition of his teacher Patricia Crone of using non-Islamic sources to study the history of Islam . He questions the early Islamic history historically and critically and does not come to radically different, but in some cases different results than the traditional narrative of the beginnings of Islam. He does not consider the revisionist theses on the origin of the Koran to be refuted.

Publications

(Selection)

• Seeing Islam as others saw it. A survey and analysis of the Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian writings on Islam . Princeton 1997.
• Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam . London / New York 2001.
• Muslims and Others in early Islamic society . Aldershot 2004 (as ed.).
• Islamic Reflections and Arabic Musings . Oxford 2004 (Ed. With Philip Kennedy).
• From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East . Cambridge / New York 2009 (Ed. Together with Hannah M. Cotton, Jonathan J. Price and David J. Wasserstein).
• Theophilus of Edessa's Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam ( Translated Texts for Historians 57). Liverpool 2011.
• In God's Path. The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Oxford 2015.

Web links

• Homepage at the University of New York

Remarks

1. ^ Profile at the Faculty of Oriental Studies , Oxford ( Memento of July 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
2. ↑ Robert Hoyland, In God's Path. The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Oxford 2015, p. 232: In this situation scholars have tended to take either a guilty until proven innocent approach or an innocent until proven guilty approach, which means that they end up rejecting most of the Islamic tradition or accepting most of it. This has had the effect of polarizing Islamic historians into skeptics / revisionists and traditionists. The former were in the ascendant in the 1970s – 80s, but the massively increased public profile of Islam since then has made many academics, who are usually left-leaning liberals, shy of criticizing Islam and this has favored the traditionalist approach while pushing skeptics / revisionists to become more extreme. I have tried to promote in this book another approach, which might help diminish the problem, namely, to situate Islamic history in a broader historical framework. [...] And their complaint that we have no seventh- and eighth-century testimonies could be answered by engaging more with the large number of Christian and Jewish writings produced in that period. If Islamic history is to mean the study of the lands and peoples under Muslim rule, and not just the study of Muslims, then Islamicists who deal with the early part of this history will have to be more open in their attitude toward sources.
3. ↑ See Robert Hoyland's review of The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an (2008). Citation: This perhaps also accounts for the authors' unwillingness to tackle (as oppose to summarize) alternative theories of the Qur'an's development and significance to the extent that one of them simply avers, without clarification, that "the theories of the so- called skeptic or revisionist scholars... have by now been discarded "(100), which is news to most of us who work in the field.
4. ↑ Discussion among others in: International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (1999), pp. 452f.
5. ↑ specialist meeting in: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64 (2013), pp 583-585.
6. ^ Technical discussion by Fred Donner