In God's Path

In an engaging and challenging new look at the early Arab Islamic conquests, historian Robert G. Hoyland builds upon his previous groundbreaking research on pre-Islamic Arab communities and the views of non-Muslims who were contemporaries of the Arab Islamic tribal conquerors of the seventh and eighth centuries. As he did in those works, the book under review draws upon a wealth of primary sources in many languages including Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Latin, Greek, Persian, and Chinese, seeking to place the early Arab Islamic conquests and construction of a new Islamic polity within the broader scope of late antiquity. Like his former teacher, the late Patricia Crone, Hoyland is profoundly skeptical and source critical of the Arabic-Islamic primary sources on the conquests because most were compiled in the ninth and tenth centuries, long after the events they describe took place. He therefore argues that it is necessary to treat them more as secondary rather than primary sources. Hoyland’s book, therefore, is best read alongside standard historical studies of the conquests that are less skeptical of the Arabic primary sources, such as Fred Donner’s classic The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).