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

Abstract

Robert Hoyland’s In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire is the most recent attempt to make sense of the worldchanging developments associated with the rise of Islam. It offers an attractive, well-informed, and readily comprehensible account of the geopolitical background in the Near East, the conquests, and the rise of the first Islamic empire up to the fall of the Umayyad dynasty in 750.