In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire by Robert Hoyland

 In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire 

By Robert Hoyland

Robert Hoyland was born on January 18, 1966. Professor Hoyland was a student of Patrica Crone from what I can tell during his time as a Leverhulme fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. He would in turn serve as Professor of Islamic History at Oxford and Professor of history at the University of St. Andrews and UCLA. He currently serves as Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Beyond that, not much is said about his private life and I assume he prefers it that way so I will respect his preference (As an educator I understand this, being in front of a class is like a performance and you need to keep some stuff back and be private about personal things. {Everyone, our guest editor Mr. Davis}).  Let's talk a little bit about Patrica Crone because another student of hers, Tom Holland has shown up repeatedly in this review series. Patrica Crone, a Danish historian, was known for leading a revisionist (in a lot of circles I know of saying revisionist is usually not a good thing, and often means “white washing” but I assume that is not the case here?{A revisionist in history is simply someone who challenges the established narrative, either with new evidence of events or as we’ll see by looking differently at existing evidence}) school of history, that is to say, a group of historians who question the established narrative of a historical event or events. In this case, using non-Islamic sources, she questioned the established narrative of the creation of the Arabic Empire and the establishment of Islamic civilization. The established line is that the armies of Arabs, either all Muslims or majority Muslims burst out of the deserts of Arabia and fell upon the weakened and depending on who you ask degenerate empires of Persia and Byzantine. The empire of Persia fell entirely and was swept away, while the Byzantines lost half the empire but were able to hold the heartlands of Anatolia and Greece until the coming of the Turks. Using the law written by the founder of Islam Muhammad the conquering Arabs represented a break from the past civilizations of antiquity and the creation of something utterly new. But... What if Islam wasn't fully formed at the time of the conquest? What if the armies of the Arabs were more mixed in their makeup? And what if Islamic civilization isn't as clean a break as many like to present it? (Sounds like a combination of painting the arabic armies as a powerful dangerous “other” along with framing the Byzantines/Persians as lax or degenerate.{which is rather common whenever an imperial society is destroyed or suffers heavy losses to a society seen as less advance beyond its borders}) 

In God's Path, published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014, Professor Hoyland uses Islamic, pre-Islamic Arabic sources and non-Islamic sources to paint a much more complex and messy picture of the rise and fall of the Arabic Empire and the Islamic Civilization that emerged from that process. To do this he draws from a staggeringly wide variety of sources, Christian monks and priests in conquered Egypt (an interesting group in their own right), the land deeds of Indian Kings, military orders from Chinese governors on the western edge of the Tang Empire, inscriptions from tombs and monuments, Persian accounts, the histories of varied people like the Armenians, Nubians, and Imazighen (for the record, this is the preferred name of the Berber people of North Africa, I will be using it for the review since this is what they call themselves(well that’s just common courtesy)). He also uses Arabic and Islamic sources, looking at things such as tax records (HA! Just ask Capone about the importance of tax records, fun fact the Social Security office had made a typo on my records that no one caught but the IRS when I started working.) and letters to get a grip on the debates that were raging inside Islamic/Arabic society at the time. Now Professor Hoyland isn't the only person to do this, Tom Holland did this earlier and more sensationally in his book In the Shadow of the Sword. In God's Path seems to have gotten less push back, in part because of the later publishing date but also I think because of the more academic presentation. There's also the fact that Tom Holland has a higher profile. Either way, let's turn to In God's Path and take a look at the arguments and how they're presented. 

Professor Hoyland first starts with careful mapping out the beginning of a unifying Arabic identity, which is primarily linguistic. By which I mean it's based on language, Arab according to many people is anyone whose native language is Arabic or an Arabic derived language. I should note that not everyone agrees with that definition, especially in places like Egypt and Lebanon but it's a definition that has old and deep roots going back to the Roman Empire (that is a pretty long shared history). In fact, one of the birthplaces of Arabic identity according to Professor Hoyland is the Roman established province of Arabia. A large semi-autonomous border province that was mainly used by the Empire to raise men for the Roman war machine, because of this we have plenty of tomb inscriptions that read here lies such and such a proud Arab Roman soldier. Going even further these Romanized Arabs, who held on to their native tongue even while learning Latin and later Greek, also identified as kin with the desert nomads called Saracens by the Romans. More importantly, these Saracen tribes also saw Arab-speaking inhabitants as kin. As did the Arabic-speaking people of Yemen. All the Arabic-speaking groups at the time would be increasingly influenced by contact with older and more organized states. The Arabs of the west and north by contact with Rome/Byzantine and Persia and the Yemeni by contact with Axum or what we call today Ethiopia. By the time of the 5th century the Arabs were forming into rather sophisticated states on their own, what we call secondary states, states that grow up on the contact points between organized, centralized urban controlled societies and tribal, less centralized societies. Prolonged contact tends to lead to the tribal societies adopting organizational methods and technology that improves their capabilities. Keep this in mind, it'll be important later. 

Professor Hoyland also makes a point of giving us a tour of the 6th century, which might be one of the worst centuries in history. This starts around 536 when some unexplained event caused a shroud of dust that dimmed the sun across the northern hemisphere. This caused massive crop failures for years, with some sources from time claiming that harvests flat out failed from 536 to 539AD(Hey I know about this one, there may have actually been two separate volcanic eruptions, the first in South America in 535 AD and then a second in Iceland around 539-541AD which literally put enough sulfur and particulate matter into the upper atmosphere to lower light levels  This was a pretty serious combination that might have lead to a whole number of changes to the global climate.). In addition to this temperatures plummeted with snow falling in China as late as August (Something similar happened in 1816 when snow fell in boston in June, yep that's also because of a volcanic eruption). War followed on the heels of famine, as did plague, and the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire locked horns for the final time in a series of wars of near-apocalyptic dimensions. At points, the Persians occupied Egypt, the Levant, and Syria, while at others the forces of Rome struck deep into the Iranian Plateau taking the holiest sites in Iran and the Imperial capital. At the end of the wars, Persia was almost shattered due to internal uprisings and civil war, with the Persian Emperor only able to stay on his throne due to Byzantine blades. Meanwhile Byzantine was a hollowed-out wreck of itself, with entire provinces reduced to near-wilderness, the treasury empty and exhaustion felt at every level of society. This is when drums began to beat in the desert. The Arabs had increasingly been used as foot-soldiers and enforcers by both sides in this conflict and expected to be paid for their sweat and blood. Only there wasn't any money to pay them with and well, that just wasn't going to do. On top of that in the east, many of the Arabs had been unified under the rule of a new movement, one that promised that anyone who fought for it would have a share in the spoils.  So the probing armies of the eastern Arabs met disgruntled western Arabs, who knew where all the money was being kept and just how weak and undermanned the armies guarding that money were.  The combination was too much to resist. (I feel that after a few years of reading both your fiction and nonfiction reviews one of the biggest rules I can take away from them is always pay your army/mercenaries.{It’s certainly in the top 5})

Professor Hoyland makes the case that Arab armies didn't just erupt fully formed from the deserts but were in large part made up of Arab veterans of the Persian and Byzantine Armies. These Arabs would have been Christian or Jewish but the vast majority would have been some sort of monotheistic believer and all of them would have been hungry for loot. Loot that was there to be had. While the imperial governments of Persia and Byzantium were drained nearly dry, the great cities of Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran, and more still had plenty of money in their economies. From the Arabs own writing it's very clear that many of them were as motivated by loot as they were by God. The Persian empire would shatter under their assault and the Byzantines would be rocked back on their heels. Another thing that would strengthen the Arabs immensely would be their willingness to cut deals in exchange for surrender and their acceptance of new recruits.  For example, entire Persian military units would change sides for the promise of a share in the loot and not having to pay taxes to the Arabs. Marginalized peoples in both empires would happily jump ship in exchange for an upgrade in status. Local leaders and princes would submit, pay large tributes in exchange for maintaining their own privileges and control. Most of the time conversation wasn't required, in fact, many Arabs prefer to encourage conquered peoples not to convert to Islam as it wasn't even required for Arab soldiers. Plus at the time of the early Arabic empire, Muslims, including civilian ones, didn't pay taxes.(I can see why they didn’t encourage conversion, too much and you don’t have a sufficient tax base and you are back to not paying your army.{At first if you took part in military campaigns, you not only got loot but a life long stipend even if you quit. The Arabs switched to a salaried army after half a century due to the sheer expense})  The Arabs themselves were settled in large fortified garrison towns among the conquered peoples and while the process of being conquered was terrifying for decades afterward it was a case of “meet the new boss, the same as the old boss”. However, the Arabs needed some sort of administrative structure and commonality beyond speaking Arabic to maintain and keep the empire they had conquered for themselves. Because the Byzantine Emperors, while working on the barest of resources and sometimes rather shaky in their authority, were still the heirs of Rome and they weren't letting anything go without a fight. Insurrection, rebellion, espionage  and direct military responses would gnaw at Arabic strength and demand increasingly complex and multi-layer responses to hold what they had, never mind expand.

This led to several responses. First off, the Arab Empire began identifying itself by its opposition to Byzantium. The Romans were respected, feared and their possessions and knowledge desired but they were also increasingly seen as the great other, or the opposing team if you will, that was blocking the Arabs from the great final victory. This didn't mean rejecting everything from Roman civilization but if the Romans are your great nemesis becoming a Roman copycat is kinda riddled with problems (especially if you are the new boss and same as the old boss). The second thing was the increasing privileged and central position of the religion of Islam, which help provide the empire a guiding framework and ideology that wasn't inherited from the Byzantines, as Christianity was increasingly seen as a Roman religion and part of the Roman identity. Islam provided a separate religious identity and justification for imperial authority. Third, the influx of Persian thought, as the Persian empire was subsumed entirely but on the eastern edges of the Arabic Empire and in the Iranian Plateau, the Arabs had had to make a lot of deals that preserved centers of Persian ideas and identity. On top of this many of the slaves that took over, administrative tasks were Persian and when they converted and were freed, they became a class of religious scholars that hammered together the great body of Islamic religious law usually claiming to be using sayings of the prophet Muhammad. This was however a protracted and long process of compromise and debate. 

In the end, what Professor Hoyland suggests is that Islamic civilization isn't nearly the clean break with the past it presents itself to be. (Isn’t that a lot of history? We like to pretend that these big events in history happen then all of a sudden a new country or idea has sprung fully formed into existence.  Like the declaration of independence was signed and BAM you got yourself ‘murica the revolutionary war was just a formality cause now everyone is ‘murican.  Not the actual truth of slowly developing and evolving cultural identities and political structures that themselves change over time.)  Much of pre-Islamic law and practice (cutting off a thief's hand to use a famous one) pre-exist Islam for example(was that a Persian or Roman thing?{middle eastern, so cross cultural}) and strains of Persian mysticism would emerge in Islam itself. As would Greek thought and education. This isn't to say that the Arabs didn't bring anything new to the table, their own ideas of community, law, and more would play a huge role in things but in the end, Islam according to Professor Hoyland would adopt and modify traditions and thought processes from the ancient world making it more of evolution than a revolution in religious and legal practice and thought. It's an interesting and thoughtful read and I don't get the feeling of trying to pull Islam down for political purposes here. If anything a clearer understanding of the origins of Islam helps everyone, even Muslims have a greater appreciation for the events in question. I did like how the book spends a considerable amount of time in central Asia (Central Asia seems to often get ignored during this period in time but yeah I can see the importance) as well showing us the reactions of the Indians and Chinese to this new Imperial state on the edge of their sphere of influence which helps pull us away from a Eurocentric narrative that can sometimes dominate these discussions. In addition, at the back of the book, you have great supporting material like a timeline, a list of important figures and who they were exactly, a discussion on his sources, and a fairly nice Appendix. Which makes this a really good reference book. All in all, I'm giving In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire By Robert Hoyland an A and a stamp of recommended. Go give it a read if this period of time at all interests you. 

So this book was chosen by our ever-wise patrons, if you would like a voice and a vote in the process consider joining us https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads for as little as a dollar a month.  Next week starts our World War II month with Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal by Ben Macintyre.  Until then stay safe and keep reading!

Blue text is your guest editor Mr. Davis

Black text is reviewer Garvin Anders