Robert G. Hoyland

Robert G. Hoyland (* 1966) ist ein Historiker. Er hat sich auf die Geschichte des Vorderen Orients in der Spätantike und im Frühmittelalter spezialisiert, mit dem Schwerpunkt Geschichte des frühen Islam.

Hoyland studierte an der Universität Oxford und wurde 1994 promoviert. Er hat an der Universität St. Andrews und in Oxford[1] gelehrt, bevor er eine Professur an der Universität New York angenommen hat. Dort lehrt er zurzeit als Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History.

Hoyland gilt als Experte für die spätantike Geschichte im Vorderen Orient und den Übergang zur frühislamischen Zeit. Er befasst sich unter anderem mit den wechselseitigen Beziehungen zwischen Christen, Juden und Muslimen sowie dem Wissenstransfer von der antiken in die frühislamische Welt. Sein 1997 publiziertes Werk Seeing Islam as others saw it gilt inzwischen als Standardwerk, in dem alle relevanten nicht-islamischen Quellen zur frühislamischen Zeit aufgeführt und zusammenfassend analysiert worden sind. 2011 hat er eine umfassende Untersuchung zum verlorenen Geschichtswerk des Theophilos von Edessa vorgelegt, einschließlich einer englischen Übersetzung der möglichen Fragmente.

Hoyland zog die Aufmerksamkeit der Fachwelt auch mit seinem Werk In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (2015) auf sich, in dem er die traditionelle Islamische Sicht auf die Islamische Expansion hinterfragt. Hoyland bezieht eine moderate Position hinsichtlich einer revisionistischen Islamwissenschaft, wobei er nicht nur die islamische Überlieferung kritisch prüft, sondern auch nichtmuslimische Quellen einbezieht und diese in den geschichtlichen Kontext einbettet.[2]

Hoylands Forschung setzt die Forschungstradition seiner Lehrerin Patricia Crone fort, nichtislamischen Quellen zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Islams einzubeziehen. Er hinterfragt die islamische Frühgeschichte historisch-kritisch und kommt zwar nicht zu radikal anderen, aber doch zu teilweise anderen Ergebnissen als die traditionelle Erzählung von den Anfängen des Islam. Die revisionistischen Thesen zur Entstehung des Koran hält er nicht für widerlegt.[3]

Publikationen

(Auswahl)

Seeing Islam as others saw it. A survey and analysis of the Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian writings on Islam. Princeton 1997.[4]
Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam. London/New York 2001.
Muslims and Others in early Islamic society. Aldershot 2004 (als Hrsg.).
Islamic Reflections and Arabic Musings. Oxford 2004 (Hrsg. zusammen mit Philip Kennedy).
From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East. Cambridge/New York 2009 (Hrsg. zusammen mit Hannah M. Cotton, Jonathan J. Price und David J. Wasserstein).
Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Translated Texts for Historians 57). Liverpool 2011.[5]
In God’s Path. The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Oxford 2015.[6]

Weblinks

Homepage an der Universität von New York

Anmerkungen

Profil an der Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford (Memento vom 7. Juli 2011 im Internet Archive)
Robert Hoyland, In God’s Path. The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Oxford 2015, S. 232: In this situation scholars have tended to take either a guilty until proven innocent approach or an innocent until proven guilty approach, which means that they end up rejecting most of the Islamic tradition or accepting most of it. This has had the effect of polarizing Islamic historians into skeptics/revisionists and traditionists. The former were in the ascendant in the 1970s–80s, but the massively increased public profile of Islam since then has made many academics, who are usually left-leaning liberals, shy of criticizing Islam and this has favored the traditionalist approach while pushing skeptics/revisionists to become more extreme. I have tried to promote in this book another approach, which might help diminish the problem, namely, to situate Islamic history in a broader historical framework. [...] And their complaint that we have no seventh- and eighth-century testimonies could be answered by engaging more with the large number of Christian and Jewish writings produced in that period. If Islamic history is to mean the study of the lands and peoples under Muslim rule, and not just the study of Muslims, then Islamicists who deal with the early part of this history will have to be more open in their attitude toward sources.
Vgl. die Rezension Robert Hoylands zu The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an (2008). Zitat: This perhaps also accounts for the authors’ unwillingness to tackle (as oppose to summarise) alternative theories of the Qur'an's development and significance to the extent that one of them simply avers, without clarification, that "the theories of the so-called sceptic or revisionist scholars. . .have by now been discarded" (100), which is news to most of us who work in the field.
Fachbesprechung unter anderem in: International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (1999), S. 452f.
Fachbesprechung in: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64 (2013), S. 583–585.
Fachbesprechung von Fred Donner

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[1] Profil an der Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford (Memento vom 7. Juli 2011 im Internet Archive)

[2] Robert Hoyland, In God’s Path. The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Oxford 2015, S. 232: In this situation scholars have tended to take either a guilty until proven innocent approach or an innocent until proven guilty approach, which means that they end up rejecting most of the Islamic tradition or accepting most of it. This has had the effect of polarizing Islamic historians into skeptics/revisionists and traditionists. The former were in the ascendant in the 1970s–80s, but the massively increased public profile of Islam since then has made many academics, who are usually left-leaning liberals, shy of criticizing Islam and this has favored the traditionalist approach while pushing skeptics/revisionists to become more extreme. I have tried to promote in this book another approach, which might help diminish the problem, namely, to situate Islamic history in a broader historical framework. [...] And their complaint that we have no seventh- and eighth-century testimonies could be answered by engaging more with the large number of Christian and Jewish writings produced in that period. If Islamic history is to mean the study of the lands and peoples under Muslim rule, and not just the study of Muslims, then Islamicists who deal with the early part of this history will have to be more open in their attitude toward sources.

[3] Vgl. die Rezension Robert Hoylands zu The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an (2008). Zitat: This perhaps also accounts for the authors’ unwillingness to tackle (as oppose to summarise) alternative theories of the Qur'an's development and significance to the extent that one of them simply avers, without clarification, that "the theories of the so-called sceptic or revisionist scholars. . .have by now been discarded" (100), which is news to most of us who work in the field.

[4] Fachbesprechung unter anderem in: International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (1999), S. 452f.

[5] Fachbesprechung in: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64 (2013), S. 583–585.

[6] Fachbesprechung von Fred Donner