“The book is the product not only of immense learning, philological breadth, and industry but real generosity too: I know of no more useful a book than this, bringing together as it does a quite massive amount of secondary scholarship from a wide variety of disciplines. Who, besides the author, possesses the skills and energy required to pull off such a project?”

– Professor Chase Robinson
Director, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian

This seminal work continues to shape the thought of specialists studying the Late Antique crossroads at which Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Islamic histories met, by offering the field a new approach to the vexing question of how to write the early history of Islam. The new edition of the study produces the original text with the addition of a substantial forward in which Hoyland discusses how the field has developed over the two decades that proceeded with the book’s first publication. Hoyland also shares some personal reflections on how his thinking has since developed and the potential impact of this on the findings of the original study. The book also includes new appendices that detail the later publications of the author.

The first part of the book discusses the nature of the Muslim and non-Muslim source material for the seventh and eighth century the Middle East, arguing that by lessening the divide between these two traditions, which has largely been erected by modern scholarship, we can come to a better appreciation of this crucial period. The second part provides a detailed survey of sources and an analysis of some 120 non-Muslim texts, all of which provide information about the first century and a half of Islam (roughly A.D. 620-780). The third part furnishes examples, according to the approach suggested in the first part and with the material presented in the second part, of how one might write the history of this time. The fourth part takes the form of excurses on various topics, such as the process of Islamization, the phenomenon of conversion to Islam, the development of techniques for determining the direction of prayer, and the conquest of Egypt. Because this work views Islamic history with the aid of non-Muslim texts and assesses the latter in the light of Muslim writings, it will be essential reading for historians of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Zoroastrianism – indeed, for all those with an interest in cultures of the eastern Mediterranean in its traditional phase from Late Antiquity to medieval times.
In Robert Hoyland’s own words…
“The seeds of my book were already sown in my first year as an undergraduate reading Oriental Studies at Oxford University in the late 1980s. The introductory Islamic history course was taught by Patricia Crone and, even though we knew virtually nothing about the Middle East, she fed us a heavy diet of such historiographical conundra as “the nature of Meccan trade”, “the evidence of the earliest qiblas”, “the religious authority of the first caliphs” and “the pulverizing effects of oral tradition”, all issues familiar from her own writings. In our reading list was Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge, 1977), the book that she and Michael Cook wrote to present an alternative vision for the rise of Islam. To my relatively unread and untraveled eighteen-year-old self it was intellectual dynamite. I remember struggling to make sense of such sentences as “the elegant concepts of the impersonal universe were reduced to anticonceptual occasionalism, a bizarre fusion of theistic voluntarism and atheistic atomism in defense of the sovereignty of a Hebraic God against the wiles of Hellenic causality” (p. 128). After many months plowing through its dense and challenging pages, I was left wondering at the radically different picture of Islamic origins that the non-Muslim sources apparently offered and wanting to know whether this picture was True or not (True with a capital t, because my young self was sure that it was possible to ascertain such a thing). The obvious way to find out was to subject the non-Muslim sources themselves to thorough scrutiny. And thus my Ph.D. question was born. After my BA I had a go at trying to be an international banker, but my research question never left me, and so, after a year, I was back in Oxford knocking at Patricia Crone’s door and begging her to be my doctoral supervisor. She warned me that I might not get a job as no one was interested in early Islamic history (9-11 had not yet happened), but she nevertheless agreed and so I embarked upon my quest. Crucial to my formation, however, was a visiting year spent at Princeton University. As well as benefiting enormously from the sharp mind and astute criticisms of Michael Cook, I was also fortunate enough to be able to spend time with Abraham Udovitch, who taught me to appreciate the material dimension of human history, and Peter Brown, who brought me to understand in a deep and meaningful way the point made in the preface of Hagarism that “the formation of Islamic civilization took place in the world of late antiquity”. The last building block in my preparation was a year spent in Groningen with Gerrit Reinink and Han Drijvers, who together gave me an intense grounding in Syriac, in which the most important non-Muslim sources on Islamic history are written.  With these two years of formation under my belt, I was ready to start writing, and after two intensive years buried in my room in Oxford, punctuated with hikes around archaeological sites in the Middle East, I had completed my thesis. It did not provide the Truth that I had originally sought, and perhaps tarnished the idea that non-Muslim texts offered a dramatically different story of Islam’s birth and early development, but I like to think that my book showed new ways in which these texts could shed light on what I would prefer to call the early medieval history of the Middle East (just because numerous religious and ethnic communities participated in the making of Islamic civilization rather than anyone denomination) and provided the basic tools to do it.”