His Birth

In Leiden, the debates of Modern Theology had been under way for well over a decade, and the material evoked in the previous article, the material of Scholten’s systematics and Kuenen’s historical-critical method, had by now entered the very air of Dutch Reformed life. Not as a cloud above Leiden, but as a gradually changing climate. When, on 8 February 1857, a child was born in the North Brabant town of Oosterhout, in the parsonage of a Dutch Reformed minister, the world being built in the lecture halls was already his world before he would come to know it. The child was named Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje. He would receive that inheritance, deepen it and pass it on, in ways no one could foresee and of which the testators might well not have approved.

The father and his world

The father was named Jan Snouck Hurgronje and was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, settled in the congregation of Oosterhout. He served a modest North Brabant community, surrounded by farmland and woods, far from the university world but by no means untouched by its debates. The Reformed Church was deeply divided in the 1850s. Modern Theology had made its entry into ecclesiastical discussion, and the clergy faced a choice that was weighed in the silence of studies and fought out in consistory meetings. Go along with the liberal current that Scholten and his followers propagated. Hold fast to the orthodox Calvinist confession of the fathers. There was hardly a third way.

Jan Snouck Hurgronje belonged to the liberal wing of the church. He was no radical freethinker and no polemicist, but a man of his time and his milieu. Protestant, lettered, convinced of the value of civilisation and enlightenment, prepared to regard the methods of historical criticism as a useful instrument for a more honest engagement with the Bible. In his household reigned the atmosphere of the enlightened Protestant bourgeoisie: books, discipline, earnestness, the conviction that knowledge and virtue went together and that a well-spent life put reading and thinking first. It was a milieu in which the dinner bell seldom rang before an argument had been finished.

For the children in such a household, this meant that faith and intellect formed no opposition but a whole. The father who guided his congregation through birth, baptism, marriage and death was the same man who kept up with his theological journals, corresponded with fellow ministers about the latest publications of the Leiden School and maintained his library with care. Believing was also thinking. Thinking was a duty towards God and towards the community. The earnestness was characteristic of the generation, but the combination of earnestness and gentleness was characteristic of the house.

The name and its weight

The name Snouck Hurgronje was a double family name, a custom among the distinguished Dutch bourgeoisie, which made its genealogical identity and social position known through the name. The Snoucks were a respectable lineage, and the addition of Hurgronje connected the family to kinships in Leiden academic circles. The combination created a name that, in the world of ministers, jurists and colonial officials, was immediately recognised as belonging to the respectable Protestant bourgeoisie. Not nobility. The layer just beneath it, which in the nineteenth century regarded itself as the true bearer of Dutch civilisation, and which in its self-image often laid even greater claim to rectitude than the nobility itself.

That bourgeoisie was the backbone of nineteenth-century Netherlands in all its facets. It sent its sons to the gymnasium and the university, its daughters to boarding schools or educational institutes, its ministers to the congregations and its jurists to the judiciary and the colonial service. It read De Gids, debated the Schoolstrijd, paid taxes for the administration of the Dutch East Indies and saw the colony as a God-given mission and a source of national prosperity at once. It believed sincerely in civilisation and progress, in the calling of the Netherlands to bring order and welfare to the tropics as well, and it saw in science the instrument of that civilisation. It was a world that held itself to be universal without ever having sounded its own limits.

The mother and her origins

The mother of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje bore the name Anna Maria de Visser. Her position in the family was more complicated than that of her husband, at least by the standards of the society in which she lived. Jan Snouck Hurgronje had been married before, and it was after this first marriage that he remarried. The circumstances of this second marriage were, by the strict norms of the nineteenth-century Protestant milieu, not without shadow, and that shadow carried over onto the social position of the mother and thereby onto that of her children. In such an environment, rumours spread more easily than forgiveness.

On the precise details of those complications, the historical record, and also the biographer Wim van den Doel, is reticent. What is certain is that she was a woman of some education, that she raised her children with care and that her influence on Christiaan was substantial. In a household led by a minister, the mother was the guardian of daily faith. The morning prayer, the catechism, the Bible reading at table, the Sunday churchgoing as the anchor point of the week. The ritual of devotion passed through her hands.

For Christiaan this meant that he grew up with two faces of Protestant Christianity. The intellectual face that his father represented: liberal, scientifically oriented, averse to superstition and orthodox constraint. And the devotional face that his mother embodied: personal piety, the rhythm of prayer and Bible reading, faith as a daily practice that required not reasoning in the first place but surrender. He learned, presumably without knowing it, that religion can be inhabited on two levels at once: as a system one understands and as a habit one undergoes.

That this field of tension would also colour his own attitude towards religion is only to be expected. How exactly it would work out in his later life is a question his biographers have posed but not answered conclusively. What is certain is that Snouck Hurgronje developed an exceptional capacity both to understand the internal logic of a faith and to look at it from the outside. Whether that capacity was a gift or a deficiency depended on who asked the question. In Leiden it would be praised as talent. In Mecca it would become the precondition for a deception that to this day sets the tone for what Europe believes it knows about Islam.

Oosterhout and its confessional landscape

Oosterhout was, in 1857, a municipality of modest size in the province of North Brabant. Brabant had been Catholic territory from of old. The Reformation had gained a foothold there in the seventeenth century, but the Catholic community still formed a majority there in the nineteenth century. The Netherlands above the great rivers were predominantly Protestant. The south, Brabant and Limburg, remained predominantly Roman Catholic. For anyone who could read a map of souls, the boundary of the Maas told a story that was centuries old and that in 1857 still held in full force.

For a Dutch Reformed minister like Jan Snouck Hurgronje, this meant that he served his congregation in surroundings that were confessionally foreign. His congregation was a minority in a predominantly Catholic town. The church towers, the monasteries, the processions on Catholic feast days dominated public life. The Protestant church was there, but it stood on the periphery, both geographically and culturally. A minister’s family in such surroundings always lives somewhat turned inward. It develops a closeness that would have been less necessary in a wholly Protestant milieu.

This inevitably had consequences for the upbringing of the children. Christiaan grew up with a sharp awareness of confessional difference. He knew that his family belonged to a minority, that his faith had different foundations than that of his neighbours, that the church to which he belonged was internally divided over the foundations of its own faith, and that religion in general was a complex and many-sided reality that did not fit into a single answer. Religious diversity was for him no abstraction but a daily given. He learned from an early age to see religions as perspectives, side by side, each with its internal coherence. It was, in hindsight, the training ground of a future orientalist.

The climate of the region

North Brabant also had another face. It was a region of trade, agriculture and a certain rural sobriety. The farmers on the Brabant sandy soils had little use for theological debate. Life there was determined by seasons, harvests and church attendance on Sunday. The great questions that occupied Scholten and Kuenen did not come up in the villages of Brabant. Not because the people there were stupid, but because the practical reality of farming life imposed a different horizon than that of the Leiden lecture hall.

For a minister’s son growing up in this milieu, the world was at once larger and smaller than the university town. Larger, because the diversity of human life was tangible, because the neighbour was Catholic and the housekeeper perhaps illiterate and the market trader spoke in dialect. Smaller, because the universal debates of modernity seemed far away here. But the parsonage was a domain apart. It was an intellectual milieu that existed in the midst of rural Brabant without being fully absorbed into it. The books, the correspondence, the journal subscriptions: they created an inner chamber that mirrored the outside world and at the same time transcended it.

The Protestant intellectual milieu as formation

The milieu in which Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje grew up had three characteristics that were of decisive importance for his later development. In the first place: a sacred earnestness towards knowledge. Reading, writing, reasoning and debating were, for the Protestant minister’s family of the nineteenth century, not professional skills but moral obligations. The minister who wished to reach his congregants had to know his craft, master his texts, order his thoughts. An unlettered minister was a contradiction. A half-lettered one was a danger.

In the second place: a respect for science that was compatible with faith. Modern Theology had established, in liberal clerical circles, the conviction that faith and science were not in conflict but complementary, that the historical-critical method did not destroy the Bible but purified it of false claims. This gave faith an intellectual dignity that, so it was believed, made it proof against the attacks of rationalists and atheists. Christiaan grew up with the conviction that science and religion could live in the same house, provided one applied the correct method. That the method might in time ask which of the two was still allowed to stay, was a question not yet posed in the parsonage of Oosterhout.

In the third place: a taken-for-grantedness about the Dutch colonial enterprise. The VOC had admittedly been dissolved a century earlier, but colonial rule over the Dutch East Indies was an uncontested reality. The tax revenues from the colonies contributed to the prosperity of the mother country. The officials who went to Batavia were in many cases sons of the same bourgeoisie as Jan Snouck Hurgronje. The colony was far away, but it was not absent from the conversation at table. It was the horizon within which the Dutch self-image took shape.

The Schoolstrijd as background

In the years in which Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje grew up, Dutch society was shaken by the Schoolstrijd. The political struggle over education. Who was allowed to found schools, who had to finance them, on what foundation education was to be given. The liberals, supported by the liberal Protestants and the progressive wing of the Dutch Reformed Church, fought for a public education that was religiously neutral and grounded in reason. The confessionals, both the strict Calvinist Protestants under Kuyper and the Roman Catholics under the leadership of their bishops, fought for denominational education on a religious foundation, with state financing.

The Schoolstrijd was more than a debate about education. It was a struggle over the question of who the Netherlands was and what the Netherlands was to become. The liberals believed in the separation of church and state, in the primacy of reason over revelation, in a national identity that rose above the confessional divides. The confessionals believed that God was the foundation of all authority, that education without religion robbed the child of its roots, and that the state had no right to force parents to send their children to schools that undermined their faith. Both parties believed they were fighting for the future. Both were right in what they feared from the other.

Jan Snouck Hurgronje stood on the side of the liberals in this debate. His liberal sympathies, his respect for Modern Theology, his conviction that faith and science were reconcilable provided the correct method was followed: all this positioned him on the side of those who pursued an enlightened, rational Netherlands. His son Christiaan grew up with this political awareness as a self-evident background. The conviction that reason was superior to tradition. That science stood higher than dogma. That the future belonged to whoever knew how to connect the two.

A child in his time

Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje was sixteen years old when, in Ghent in September 1873, eleven European jurists gathered to codify the foundations of international law. He was at that moment a gymnasium pupil, busy with his classical languages and his national history, unacquainted with the meetings of international jurists in Belgian cities. But the world that was being constructed in Ghent and the world that was being thought by the Leiden School were the world of his father and his teachers. It was the world he would inherit, deepen and pass on, in ways none of them could foresee. That is the theme of the next article.

Whether he knew what awaited him is a question no historian can answer. Children do not know that. They grow up in their milieu, absorb its values, learn its language and breathe its air. Only later, when they leave that world or when the world forces them to view it from the outside, does awareness begin to take shape of what its content truly was. The boy in the parsonage of Oosterhout had no reason to suspect that the content of his world would one day be unpacked in a tent before the Ka’bah, and used there for purposes of which his father would never have dreamed.

For Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, the moment of awakening would come in Leiden, where he would begin his studies in 1874. There awaited him teachers who had refined the methods of Kuenen, and an orientalism that stood ready to train the historical-critical gaze on the texts and the societies of the Islamic world. The world of Oosterhout, of his father the minister and his mother the guardian of the household faith, he would take with him to Leiden. What he would do with it would surpass Oosterhout for good.

Sources

• Wim van den Doel, Snouck, Boom (2021)
• P.S. van Koningsveld, Snouck Hurgronje en de islam, Biesheuvel (1987)
• J.J. Witkam, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje: een bibliografische inleiding, Leiden (2007)
• H.W. van den Doel, Het rijk van Insulinde: opkomst en ondergang van een Nederlandse kolonie, Amsterdam (1996)
• Jan de Bruijn, Het leven van Abraham Kuyper, Boom (2008)