Robert G. Hoyland

For the Neighbours character, see Bobby Hoyland.

Robert G. Hoyland is a scholar and historian, specializing in the medieval history of the Middle East. He is a former student of historian Patricia Crone and was a Leverhulme Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. He is currently Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World,[1] having previously been Professor of Islamic history at the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford[2] and a Professor of history at the University of St. Andrews and UCLA.

His research interests include: relations between Muslims, Jews and Christians in the pre-modern Midde East; the links between identity, religion and ethnicity (in particular, the forging of an Arab identity) in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic period; the transmission of knowledge from the Ancient world to the Islamic world and the reforging of that knowledge by Muslim scholars; the change in material culture from the Ancient world to the Islamic world and the emergence of an Islamic style of art and architecture; and the use of Arabic inscriptions for understanding Islamic history and culture.

Hoyland's best-known academic work Seeing Islam As Others Saw It is a contribution to early Islamic historiography, being a survey of non-Muslim eye witness accounts of that period.[3] Hoyland also received much attention with his work In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (2014) in which he questions the traditional Islamic view of the Early Muslim conquests. According to Hoyland, Islam still had to evolve, so he prefers to call the conquests Arabic rather than Islamic conquests.[4]

Hoyland's research continues the research tradition of his teacher Patricia Crone to look for non-Islamic sources. He questions the history of early Islam applying the historical-critical method, concluding not radical but anyway different results than the classical account. He does not think that the revisionist theses about the development of the Quran are debunked. Thus, Hoyland is a moderate representative of the so-called Revisionist School of Islamic Studies.[5] [6]

Publications

Books

Selected chapters and articles

References

  1. ↑ "Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University". Retrieved 21 January 2015.
  2. ↑ "Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford". Retrieved May 27, 2011.
  3. ↑ Hoyland, Robert G. (1997). Seeing Islam as others saw it: A survey and evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian writings on early Islam. Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press. ISBN 0-87850-125-8. Retrieved May 27, 2011.
  4. ↑ Dr Youssef Choueiri, Review of In God’s Path Reviews in History No. 1780
  5. ↑ Cf. e.g. Hoyland, Review of: The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an, 2008. Citation: „This perhaps also accounts for the authors' unwillingness to tackle (as oppose to summarise) 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 sceptic or revisionist scholars. . .have by now been discarded" (100), which is news to most of us who work in the field.“
  6. ↑ Roberg G. Hoyland: Early Islam as a Late Antique Religion, book chapter in: The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, S. 1053-1077


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