In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (Ancient Warfare and Civilization) Paperback – 22 June 2017

Very well written and gives a comprehensive and balanced account of the Islamic conquest.Hoyland mentions all the sources, Islamic, Christian and others and while covering a topic as contentious as this gives the reader a good idea about the authenticity of the references.The multiple maps of the islamic empire and photograps make this account extremely vivid for the lay reader.

Well written and as such an amazing read. This is not the book to give you intimate and detailed knowledge of every campaign and person involved, but you gain a good general understanding of an important development in history and have fun doing so.

I found this book to be very interesting, informative and well written. It covers the Arab Conquest of the Sasanian Persian Empire and part of the Byzantine Empire, covering the 7th and 8th centuries AD. It covers :· The military aspects of the invasion and some of the principal battles, with an emphasis on the idea that the conquest was not instantaneous, but rather took decades.· The Arab invasion is portrayed as not being motivated by religious factors, but more for plunder than for converting people. There was no initial impetus for converting the defeated people; in fact the opposite was the case, with a resistance to conversion.· The book discusses the nature of the Arab army and the fact that it was not solely composed of Moslems, but also contained Christian and Jewish tribes.· The book discusses the nature of the Islamic society that the invasion produced and the influence of Persia on the nature of Islam.I liked the book and found that is provided an interesting interpretation of this critical aspect of the history of the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucuses and the West in general.

Hoyland is even handed with this exciting read. This book will make you question everything you thought you knew about the rise of Islam and the early arab conquest.

This is a book that I have been looking for. After reading a number of books on how the Arabs managed to create their empire and the spread of Islam I was still looking for the answer to some fundamental questions. This book,short as it is, manages to describe this world changing process perfectly and in doing so addresses these questions probably as far as is possible today.Professor Hoyland has taken a different approach than most other writers in that he uses non-Muslim sources from the time that this expansion took place and up until the break-up of the Empire combined with available Muslim sources. This is necessary since there are almost no Muslim sources from the seventh century and most of them are from two hundred years after events took place. By bringing together information from all available sources the picture that emerges is far more complex than what is usually presented.He starts the book by describing the situation in the Middle East before the Arab expansion. It is clear that the Arabs did not burst out of the desert but were well established in all border areas and in contact with surrounding empires. It is quite surprising to read about Christian and Jewish Arabs (!) living in these border zones.When the expansion really starts it is also quite clear that what drove it was the ambition to conquer and create an empire like any other state. The spread if Islam came after this first wave of armed forces.Professor Hoyland also manages to explain how it was possible to conquer such a vast territory when the Arabs were outnumbered at least 50 to 1. The Capture of Egypt was a particular interesting story. By reading this one has to give credit to the Arabs for using a tactics that probably made their expansion far easier and also less costly for both them and the people they conquered.Finally the spread of Islam took far longer than at least I had been aware of. Egypt as an example did not have a majority of Muslims until four hundred years after the Arab invasion.While the text is excellent the book itself would have been worth a higher production quality. Maps and photos are all in black and white and the text itself has a font size that is from my point of view to small.But what I learned from this book was a great deal. Also a reflection that the people trying to spread Islam 1400 years ago were far less aggressive than some of those trying to do the same today. Remember that the Arab aggression was about creating an empire and not spreading Islam. This is an excellent book to put even today's events into perspective.

Es bietet einen ersten guten Überblick über die Eroberungsfeldzüge der Araber.Der Einband fühlt sich etwas schmierig an. Inhaltlich fehlt mir ein (Teil-)Kapitel zur Militärorganisation und -technik. Aus dem historisch-politischen Blickwinkel aber durchaus gelungen.