Robert G. 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, having previously been Professor of Islamic history at the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford and a Professor of history at the University of St. Andrews and UCLA.

Hoyland's 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. 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.

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