His Studies

While the eleven men of Ghent described in the previous article had founded their institute and international law was beginning to acquire its juridical architecture, the boy from Oosterhout passed his gymnasium examinations in 1874 and travelled to Leiden. He enrolled to study theology, the logical choice for a minister’s son who had grown up in the liberal Protestant milieu of his father. Leiden was the university where Modern Theology had its home, where Scholten and Kuenen taught, and where the historical-critical method was not a peripheral phenomenon but the very heart of the curriculum. He went to the place toward which his milieu was tending, and there, in keeping with the rule of such milieus, he would first learn to master what he would later transcend.

Leiden in 1874

The University of Leiden in 1874 was an impressive institution whose reputation reached far beyond the borders of the Netherlands. Founded in 1575, it had over three centuries built up a tradition in theology, law, medicine and oriental letters that made it one of the leading universities of Europe. The library held priceless manuscript collections in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, acquired during the centuries of Dutch East India Company trade and diplomatic contacts with the Ottoman Empire. The orientalist tradition in Leiden was an old one, for as early as the seventeenth century Jacob Golius had taught Arabic there and gathered manuscripts. What was preserved in Leiden was not only text but history, the history of what Europe had taken from the Islamic world, bought, borrowed or stolen, and had stored away with great care.

In 1874 the theological faculty stood strongly under the influence of Modern Theology. Scholten’s position had reached its zenith in the 1860s; in 1874 he was still a professor and his influence remained undiminished within the liberal circle. Abraham Kuenen taught Old Testament there, and his historical-critical method had by then become the norm by which students were shaped and tested. A student who set out to study theology in Leiden in 1874 was not choosing orthodoxy, but rather the science of religion: empirical, critical, and prepared to subject every claim to absolute truth to historical analysis. For anyone coming from a liberal parsonage, the choice was no longer a choice at all. It was the natural extension of the parental home.

The city and the student

For a boy from Oosterhout, Leiden was a revelation. The city was compact, old and steeped in academic culture in a way that the province of Brabant did not know. The medieval Burcht upon its hill, the seventeenth-century façades along the Rapenburg, the canals on which students rowed, the library halls where the manuscripts lay waiting: this was a world that differed fundamentally from the quiet parsonage milieu of his youth. The distance between Oosterhout and Leiden was not primarily geographical but cultural. In Oosterhout his father read theological journals, while in Leiden lived the men who wrote them.

Snouck Hurgronje was a diligent student. The biographical material that Wim van den Doel has assembled in his biography Snouck (2021) paints the picture of a young man who was serious, intellectually driven, and prepared to invest his energy in the studies that had been opened before him. Theology was his starting point, but it would not prove to be his final destination. The intellectual dynamism of Leiden drew him in a direction that his father may perhaps have sensed but could not have foreseen. The carriages of modernity rarely run on the track that their passengers have bought.

Abraham Kuenen

The most important teacher of Snouck’s student years was Abraham Kuenen. In 1874 Kuenen was fifty-three years old and at the height of his scholarly reputation. His De Profeten en de Profetie onder Israël would appear in two volumes in 1875. His international fame had already been established through correspondence and publications that linked him with the finest biblical scholars of his generation: Julius Wellhausen in Greifswald, William Robertson Smith in Aberdeen, and the Berlin rabbi Abraham Geiger. He was no local figure but a scholar of European stature, and his lectures drew students who knew they ought to sit at his feet if they wished to make anything of themselves.

Kuenen’s method was rigorous and inspiring for students who were receptive to it. He taught them how to dismantle a text, which layers were to be distinguished within it, which stylistic features pointed to which period, and which political interest had driven which redactor to steer the text in a particular direction. He taught them that honesty toward the text took priority over piety, and that historical truth, however uncomfortable at times, was no threat to a deeper and purer faith. That it simultaneously created a new form of piety, namely piety toward the method itself, was an irony that his students seldom noticed.

For a student such as Snouck Hurgronje, this teaching offered a method that seemed universally applicable, for it was formal rather than substantive in character. If the historical-critical approach could penetrate the Bible, then why not other sacred texts as well? If the Torah could be dissected into its constituent documents, could the Qur’an not likewise be analysed for its historical stratification, its sources, its editorial structure? The method that Kuenen imparted to him was in principle bound neither to Judaism nor to Christianity. It was a general science of religious texts, applied to the texts that happened to lie most readily at hand. In its own understanding of itself, it was a key that fitted every lock, because it passed judgement over all locks.

Yet every method carries its reader along with it. Whoever treats Scripture as the sediment of its time teaches himself to see revelation as sediment. A method that cannot place its own gaze beneath the microscope does not know itself. The insight that the method was itself historical, that it was a product of European Protestantism and carried that origin with it wherever it was applied, was an insight that was not taught in the lecture halls of Leiden. Here this history touches upon something that the Islamic tradition has always understood and that the modern method has precisely wished to forget: whoever reads is himself read, and whoever judges is judged by what he judges. For the Muslim who recites the Qur’an, the text is not merely object but witness; the believer is weighed on the hour in which he weighs. The Leiden method, by contrast, placed its reader unreachably above his object, and what it thereby took from its reader was not the text but the possibility of being touched by the text.

The turn to Arabic

It is in this light that Snouck’s transition from theology to oriental studies must be understood. It was no abrupt turn but a gradual shift, the logical extension of a method to a new object. Historical-critical biblical scholarship and orientalist Islamic scholarship shared the same epistemic presupposition: that religious texts could be fully understood and judged from the outside, with the instruments of philology and historical criticism. Whoever accepted the method thereby also accepted its applicability to the Qur’an.

Kuenen’s lectures in the Old Testament also led Snouck toward Hebrew and toward the Semitic language family. The Hebrew of the Bible and the Arabic of the Qur’an are related languages, and whoever knew one held an advantage in learning the other. The orientalist faculty and the theological faculty in Leiden were not strictly separated; students moved between the two and attended lectures in Semitic philology as a supplement to their theological formation. For Snouck, the step from Hebrew to Arabic was therefore a small one in terms of discipline, even though it opened an immeasurably larger field in terms of content: a new alphabet, a new metrics, a new and non-European history of learned debate that had inscribed itself upon this tongue.

Michael de Goeje

The second crucial teacher was Michael Jan de Goeje. Born in Dronrijp in 1836, De Goeje had pursued his Arabic studies in Leiden under the great Dutch arabist Reinhart Dozy, and after his doctorate he had remained attached to the university as a lecturer. In 1866 he was appointed professor of oriental languages, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1906. He was a philologist of the first rank. His most ambitious project, the edition of the Tarikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk by the early Islamic historian Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari ﵀, a monumental work of fifteen volumes that appeared in Leiden with Brill between 1879 and 1901 under his editorship and with the collaboration of an international consortium of scholars, is regarded to this day as a supreme achievement of Western arabistics. He gathered the manuscripts from Berlin, Cairo and Constantinople, compared their variants, ordered their readings, and gave the Muslim world an edition of one of its most important historical works that was more accessible to the European scholar than to the average Arabic student.

De Goeje taught his students classical Arabic in the full depth of the tradition, not the modern spoken dialect but the Qur’anic fusha, the language of hadith literature, of the great Islamic historians and theologians, and of the poetry of the Abbasid period. He taught them the grammar of Sibawayhi ﵀, the founder of Arabic linguistics whose Kitab was composed in the second Hijri century; the lexicography of Ibn Manzur ﵀ in his monumental Lisan al-'Arab; and the historiography of Ibn Khaldun ﵀ in his visionary Muqaddima. The Islamic intellectual tradition was represented in Leiden by its texts, and De Goeje took those texts seriously in the manner that his discipline calls taking seriously: he read them, compared them, ordered them, edited them.

He took them seriously, however, as a philologist and not as a believer. His position toward the Islamic texts was that of the editor: he wished to reconstruct, understand and make them accessible to Western scholarship as accurately as possible. The religious claims made within those texts, the qualification of the Qur’an as the Word of Allah ﷻ, the authoritative status of the Prophet ﷺ as the last and most perfect among the messengers, the spiritual seriousness that the hadith tradition drew from its claim to record the voice of the Prophet ﷺ: to him these were historical data, describable facts about what people believed, not claims upon which his method needed, or was permitted, to pass judgement.

For Leiden arabistics this was a workable position. For the Islamic textual tradition it was something else. The isnad of a hadith was, in the tradition, no literary convention but a chain of human trust reaching back to the Prophet ﷺ. The tafsir of a Qur’anic verse was, in the tradition, no literary reflection but an effort to do justice to a text that may reorder the believer’s life. The philological edition can unlock these texts, but it cannot indicate what is already present within them to unlock the reader. Whoever maps a mountain does not climb it, and whoever does not climb it does not know what it lets him see from above.

Orientalism as a discipline

The orientalism that De Goeje represented was in 1874 a discipline in full bloom. It had its journals: the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft published philological contributions on Arabic, Persian and Turkish. It had its societies: the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde in Leiden organised the study of the Indonesian archipelago. It had its international congresses, where scholars from Leiden, Berlin, Paris and London exchanged their findings and conducted methodological discussions. And it had, crucially, its institutional ties to colonial power.

Dutch orientalism could not be thought of apart from the colonial administration of the Indonesian archipelago. The chairs in Malay, Javanese and Arabic existed partly because the Dutch colonial state had need of officials who knew the languages and cultures of the archipelago. The Indische Instelling in Delft, which trained officials for the colonial civil service, drew upon the expertise of Leiden scholars. Some Leiden orientalists went to the colonies themselves; others remained in Leiden and supplied the knowledge that the administrators in Batavia required. It was no conspiracy, no hidden network, no secret society. It was an institutional structure, as visible as the façades along the Rapenburg, and just as self-evident.

Snouck Hurgronje entered this world as a theology student who had brought his method with him. He possessed Kuenen’s historical-critical gaze and De Goeje’s philological precision. He also possessed, though he was not yet fully aware of it, the position of someone studying at an institution that maintained direct ties to the colonial state. The road from the lecture hall to the administrative apparatus was shorter in Leiden than elsewhere. Whoever wished to take it needed only to cross the street to the right door.

The method and its object

During his Leiden student years Snouck Hurgronje immersed himself for the first time in earnest in the Islamic textual tradition. He read the Qur’an in Arabic. He studied the hadith literature in its scope and diversity. He worked his way through the classical juridical texts of the four madhab schools of Islamic law: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali. He did this as an orientalist, with the gaze of the scholar from outside, armed with the method of Kuenen and with the philological discipline of De Goeje.

What he read compelled admiration. The Islamic intellectual tradition was in every respect the equal of the European. Its theologians were as sharp-minded as the scholastics of the Latin Middle Ages, its jurists as systematic as the glossators of Roman law, its historians as careful, and also as partisan, as Greek antiquity at its best. The language was complex, the terminology precise, the internal debate nuanced and many-sided. Whoever had expected to find the Islamic world an intellectually primitive environment stood before a surprise. What he encountered here was a civilisation that had for centuries done with its own instruments what Europe had only recently discovered for itself: it had weighed the text of its traditions carefully and critically.

But Snouck Hurgronje read all of this through the lens of his method. The Islamic texts were historical documents, not revealed but made, not by divine inspiration but by the human mind in a historical context. The hadith traditions had been transmitted by people who had interests, political, theological, dynastic. The juridical schools were political institutions as much as religious ones: their controversies reflected the struggle for power in early Islamic history. The Qur’an itself was a text of the seventh century, shaped by the Arab society of that moment, by the political and cultural context of the Prophet ﷺ and his surroundings. No Word from on high, but a word from the Hijaz.

This was not an opinion but a method, and the method was, within its own frame of reference, consistent. Yet it had a blind spot that it could not itself see. It could understand how people in a historical context arrived at certain convictions of faith. It could analyse the social functions of those convictions. It could date the texts, identify the authors, trace the sources. But it could not reach what the Islamic tradition regarded as the core of faith: the direct relationship of the believer to Allah ﷻ, the inner reality of iman, faith as personal surrender to the One. Not because the method refuted this reality, but because its instruments could not measure it. What a microscope does not see does not exist for the microscope, and the method mistook its microscope for reality itself.

A method that reads revelation as the sediment of its time reads the believer as the sediment of his surroundings. The Muslim who hears the Qur’an as the Word of Allah ﷻ is not refuted by this method but passed over. His testimony is recorded as a historical phenomenon, just as a seismologist records an earthquake without ever considering what it caused in the heart of one who survived it. The Qur’an does not fall silent for the one who approaches it thus. It merely becomes inaudible. This is no polemical reproach against Leiden arabistics; it is a diagnosis of what it methodically excludes. Whoever builds upon all this builds a fortress whose walls face inward. Whoever stands outside is not attacked. He is left unheard.

A student on his way

In the years that Snouck Hurgronje studied in Leiden, his interests shifted gradually but perceptibly from theology to oriental studies. Arabic took up more of his time than Hebrew, and the Islamic juridical texts drew more of his attention than the biblical ones. The study of Islam as a historical and sociological phenomenon began to overshadow the study of Christianity, not through an explicit choice but through the logic of his intellectual curiosity. In this phase he followed no plan; he followed, rather, a slope.

What distinguished Snouck Hurgronje from most of his fellow students was the intensity of his engagement and the sharpness of his analytical power. He was gifted, and that was clear early on. The teachers who instructed him, Kuenen and De Goeje foremost among them, recognised in him a student who could go further than the average graduate, someone who could master the discipline at a level that would enable him to make contributions of his own. Their encouragement was not without ulterior motives. Orientalism had need of new generations who could carry on the work. Leiden had an interest in maintaining its position in the international scholarly world. And the Dutch colonial state, in the years when the Aceh war was bogging down, had an increasing need of an orientalist who commanded not only the texts but could also penetrate the living Islam of Sumatra.

The dissertation that Snouck Hurgronje would defend in 1880, Het Mekkaansche Feest, would be the beginning of his scholarly career and would immediately position him at the intersection of Islamic scholarship and colonial politics. It would also raise for him the question that would govern his whole life: to what extent can a scholar who studies Islam from the outside ever truly understand what Islam is from within? To that question he would find an answer that would lead him in the following decade as far as Mecca, and that is the subject of the next article.

In 1874 that question still lay far in the future. For the moment he was a first-year student in Leiden, learning to read in Arabic, with the method of Kuenen in his mind and before his eyes the texts of a civilisation whose alphabet he had barely begun to know. The structures were already there: Modern Theology, the men of Ghent, the colonial state in Batavia. The young Snouck would take up residence within them, not as someone carrying out a plan but as someone growing in the direction that his milieu pointed him. This is how formation works. Not through conspiracy. Through convergence.

Sources

• Wim van den Doel, Snouck, Boom (2021)
• Abraham Kuenen, De Profeten en de Profetie onder Israël, 2 volumes, Sijthoff (1875)
• Michael de Goeje et al. (eds.), Tarikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk (Annales) auctore Abu Djafar Mohammed ibn Djarir at-Tabari, 15 volumes, Brill (1879–1901)
• P.S. van Koningsveld, Snouck Hurgronje en de islam, Biesheuvel (1987)
• Jan Just Witkam, De Leidse arabistiek in de 19e eeuw, Leiden (1980)
• R. Paret, The Study of Arabic and Islam at German Universities, Steiner (1968)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)