Robert G. Hoyland (born 1966) is a historian, specializing in the medieval history of the Middle East. He was a 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 University of Oxford's Faculty of Oriental Studies and a professor of history at the University of St. Andrews and UCLA.

Research

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 eyewitness accounts of that period. Hoyland also authored 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 Arab rather than Islamic conquests.

Publications

Books

Selected chapters and articles