In just over a hundred years-from the death of the Mohammed in 632
to the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750-the followers of
the Prophet swept across the whole of the Middle East, North
Africa, and Spain. The conquered territory was larger than the
Roman Empire at its greatest expansion, and it was claimed for the
Arabs in roughly half the time. How they were able to engulf so
many empires, states, and armies in such a short period of time is
a question which has engaged historians since at least the ninth
century. Most recent popular accounts have been based almost solely
on the early Muslim sources, which were, in short, salvation
history, composed for the purpose of demonstrating that God had
chosen the Arabs as his vehicle for spreading Islam throughout the
world. While exploiting the rich biographical and geographical
information of the early Muslim sources, this groundbreaking work
delivers a fresh account of the Arab conquests and the
establishment of an Islamic Empire by incorporating different
approaches and different bodies of evidence. Robert G. Hoyland, a
leading Late Antique scholar, accomplishes this by first examining
the wider world from which Mohammed and his followers emerged. For
Muslim sources, the revelation of Islam to Muhammad is the starting
point for their history, and modern university departments have
tended to reinforce this approach. Late Antique studies have done
us the service of shedding much needed light on the 4th to 6th
centuries, thus giving us a better view of the nature of Middle
Eastern society in the decades before the Arab conquests. In
particular, Hoyland narrates the emergence of a distinct Arab
identity in the region of the Roman province Arabia and western
(Saudi) Arabia, which is at least as important for explaining the
Arab conquests as Muhammad's revelation. The Arabs are the
principal, almost sole, focus of the Muslim conquest narratives,
and this is the norm for modern works on this subject. Yet, in the
same period the Khazars, Bulgars, Avars and Turks established
polities on the edges of the superpowers of Byzantium and Iran; in
fact, the Khazars and Turks continued to be major rivals of the
Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries. The role of these
peripheral states in the Arab success story is underscored in the
narrative. Innovative and accessible, In God's Path is a welcome
account of a transformative period in ancient history.
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