Toby E. Huff (born April 24, 1942) is an American academic and emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
He has published Weber-inspired studies of the Arab and Muslim world, as well as China, including field work in Malaysia.
His explanation of the cultural and scientific divergence between Arabic/Islamic and European science in the medieval period has been widely influential, especially among economic historians such as Richard Lipsey,[4] Jan Luiten van Zanden,[5] Peer Vries,[6] among others.
Huff’s sociological approach to the European development, its legal transformation, along with the rise of the universities and modern science has been incorporated in several mainstream history texts.
[8] He completed a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley working with Robert Bellah, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey from 1978–79.