The Meccan Feast

24 November 1880, Leiden

The pupil of Kuenen and De Goeje who, in the previous chapter, had absorbed the historical-critical method from the mouths of his teachers, entered the great hall of the Leiden academy as a candidate on the morning of 24 November 1880. The hall smelled of turpentine and candle grease, and the promotor took his customary place behind the lectern. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, twenty-five years old, spare of build and controlled of voice, approached the rostrum with the sure step of a man who fears no surprise.

He defended a dissertation he had titled Het Mekkaansche Feest, one hundred and eighty pages on the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the fifth pillar of Islam. Four years later he would enter Mecca under a false name, and five years after that he would describe the city in two volumes that established his reputation as the foremost Islamologist of his generation. But all of that still lay beyond the horizon. On 24 November 1880 he was a graduating student defending a thesis, and that thesis was formulated simply enough to sound innocent and far-reaching enough to change everything.

The thesis ran, without circumlocution: the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca is not a divine institution. It is a pre-Islamic Arabian festival cycle, taken up into Islam by the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ as a socially unifying factor, pagan in origin at its core.

It was the first stone of a structure he would go on building for the rest of his life. It was, although those present in the hall did not put it that way, an attack: an attack on the very heart of Islamic religious life, in the language of footnotes.

The method that already contained the conclusion

Snouck was not the first to take this direction. Modern Theology, whose principles he had absorbed from Abraham Kuenen, had built up a consistent set of instruments for the historical-critical analysis of sacred texts. Kuenen had applied that method to the Old Testament: the Torah was no divine dictation but a human historical document, grown over centuries, interwoven with mythical material from surrounding cultures. If this held for the Bible, why not for the Qur’an. If the legends of Moses showed the working of Mesopotamian sources, why would the Hajj be immune to comparable historical reduction.

Applying Kuenen’s method to Christianity was already radical, and applying it to Islam was a further step, less offensive to the European academic community but potentially more far-reaching in its consequences. For the Islamic world had had no Voltaire, no internal debate over the historical-critical approach, no academic tradition that had worked through the reconciliation of faith and historical method on its own terms. What was formulated in Leiden could not be answered in Mecca at the level on which it was formulated.

Het Mekkaansche Feest was the consistent application of Kuenen’s method to the pilgrimage. Snouck examined the rites one by one: the circling of the Ka’bah, the seven runs between Safa and Marwa, the stoning at Mina, the wuquf on the plain of Arafat, the sacrifice on the tenth of the month of Dhul Hijjah. For each element he asked the same question. When did this arise. Which pre-Islamic parallels can be demonstrated. What does the tradition literature say about its origin.

His conclusion was sharp and carefully documented: the rites of the Hajj were at their core Arabian seasonal festivals that the Prophet ﷺ had incorporated into Islam, partly by Islamizing them, partly by furnishing them with new layers of meaning, but without removing their pre-Islamic character. The Hajj as a divine command, sent down in revelation, as one of the five pillars of Islam, was in this framework a later theological interpretation, a layer of meaning laid over a pre-existing festival practice by a community that wished to legitimize it.

This is what the critical method can do in the hands of a brilliant and ambitious young man. It reduces the sacred to the historical, it reduces the revealed to the constructed, it reduces the divine to the human. It does this in the mild tone of the scholar who passes no judgment, only describes facts. The facts, however, are not neutral: they are selected, arranged, and interpreted within a framework that already contains the conclusion.

The inquisitorial tone of the neutral voice

Snouck engaged in no polemic in the traditional sense. He accused Islam of nothing, condemned nothing, explicitly rejected no article of faith. He described, he analyzed, he compared. The tone of Het Mekkaansche Feest is that of the calm historian, the language of footnotes and source comparison, the posture of the scholar who merely wants to understand how things really fit together.

But this is precisely the heart of the Orientalist project as Edward Said would later characterize it: the appearance of objectivity is itself a position of power. The question “how did this arise historically” seems innocent, but presupposes a fundamental epistemological standpoint, namely that the sacred truth of a religious community is in principle reducible to historical explanation. The Muslim who professes that the Hajj was instituted by Allah ﷻ, who knows the verses about Ibrahim’s ﵇ call to the pilgrimage, who believes that what takes place at Arafat is an echo of the Judgment, experiences the Hajj as being of a different order than what the historian describes. Snouck stripped that order of its epistemological status, not by refuting it but by circumventing it.

The historical-critical method is, in its deepest character, an inquisitorial method. It interrogates its object with questions the object itself would never pose, in categories the object does not acknowledge, from an authority the object has not recognized. It is also, in its application to the Islamic world by a Leiden Orientalist in 1880, a colonial instrument in the making: it produces knowledge about Islamic society for European purposes, and it does so without involving Islamic society in defining the question.

The divine institution of the Hajj

The Qur’an speaks of the Hajj not as a human custom that is approved or tolerated, but as a command whose origin lies in the act of Ibrahim ﵇ and his son Ismail ﵇. The verses are unambiguous: this is not a cultural practice that was later marked as religious, but an institution that Allah ﷻ Himself established through the hand of His prophets ﵈.

This verse, and the verses that follow it, and the direct instruction in Surah al-Hajj, describe the Hajj as a charge from Allah ﷻ Himself, laid down in the time of Ibrahim ﵇, reaffirmed in the revelation to the Prophet ﷺ. The theological meaning is not ambiguous: this is no cultural custom that received retroactive approval. This is an institution that derives its origin and its legitimacy from the divine will, working through the history of the prophets ﵈.

Snouck knew these verses. His dissertation cites the Qur’an, it refers to the hadith literature, it treats the classical commentators. But his methodological framework made it impossible to read these sources as anything other than historical documents reflecting the fortunes of a religious community. The Qur’an was for him no revelation, it was text, a weighty and fascinating text, but a human document that could be analyzed with the same instruments Kuenen had applied to the Bible.

This is the moral core of Het Mekkaansche Feest. Not a lie, not a distortion, but a fundamental reduction. To read the Hajj as a pre-Islamic festival is to read the Hajj outside the framework within which it has meaning for the pilgrim. It is to describe the inside of the door from the outside, precisely, accurately, and wholly unfit to grasp what goes on within.

The tawaf and the Arabian substratum

Snouck’s central argument concerns the historical continuity between the pre-Islamic Arabian pilgrimage practices and the Islamic Hajj. The circling of the Ka’bah, the tawaf, already took place in the Jahiliyya, the pre-Islamic age of ignorance. The Arabian tribes gathered in Mecca even before the coming of Islam, for trade, for tribal councils, for seasonal festivals. The Ka’bah, with its three hundred and sixty idols, was the center of a form of religious culture that Islam subsequently transformed but did not create.

This is not historically incorrect as a description of the Jahiliyya. The Qur’an itself acknowledges that Mecca and the Ka’bah existed before the revelation, that the Ka’bah had to be cleansed of the idols, that the pilgrimage practices Ibrahim ﵇ had instituted had over the centuries been corrupted by Arabian polytheism.

Here, however, Snouck’s reasoning breaks down against an internal boundary he does not acknowledge. The presence of pre-Islamic elements in the surroundings of the Hajj does not prove that the Hajj itself is of pre-Islamic origin. Islamic theology draws precisely this distinction. The Ka’bah was built by Ibrahim ﵇ on divine command, the pilgrimage was instituted by Ibrahim ﵇ on divine command, and in the centuries that followed these divine institutions were corrupted. The Prophet ﷺ cleansed the Ka’bah, restored the original practice, and confirmed the Hajj as an obligation for whoever had the means. Not as an innovation. As a restoration.

Snouck hears this argument, describes it, and can give it no epistemological weight. For him it is a defensive strategy of a community wishing to legitimize its own rites, not a theological reality it knows. The Islamic claim to the divine origin of the Hajj is degraded to a claim that is historically explained, not recognized as a truth.

The ritual landscape

The Hajj is a complex ritual with distinct phases, each with its own symbolism. Snouck describes each element systematically, with attention to sources and parallels, and his descriptions are often accurate. But the context of his describing, the reductive context of pre-Islamic origin, colors every description.

The sa’y, the seven walks between Safa and Marwa, is connected in the Islamic tradition with Hajar, the mother of Ismail ﵇, who walked between the hills in search of water for her thirsting child. The pilgrim who performs the sa’y experiences this act as a remembrance of Hajar’s surrender and as an embodiment of trust in Allah ﷻ. Snouck describes the movements accurately, but reduces the meaning to its historical component.

The wuquf at Arafat, the standing on the plain on the ninth of Dhul Hijjah, is the culminating moment of the Hajj. The Islamic tradition describes this as the moment that comes closest to the Day of Judgment: pilgrims stand together in white garments, equal before Allah ﷻ, praying and supplicating for forgiveness. Snouck analyzes Arafat as an old tribal ritual of Arabian nomads that has been given an Islamic charge.

The stoning at Mina, in which the pilgrim throws pebbles at three pillars that symbolize the devil, connects the Islamic tradition with the trial of Ibrahim ﵇, who drove off the devil that tried to keep him from obedience. Snouck searches for pre-Islamic parallels.

In every case the pattern is the same. The Islamic ascription of meaning is treated as secondary, as a layer laid over an older substratum. The pilgrim who performs the rites in the belief that he is fulfilling what Allah ﷻ has instituted through His prophets ﵈, experiences something Snouck’s method cannot describe because it has no categories for it.

The plain of Arafat

Whoever has ever performed the Hajj, or has merely read the accounts of pilgrims who reached the plain of Arafat on the ninth of Dhul Hijjah, understands that what takes place there is not explained by its historical origin. The two million people who stand on that plain, in white pilgrim garb that indicates neither rank nor origin, who pray and supplicate and weep, are not praying for a pre-Islamic travel festival. They stand on the spot where Ibrahim ﵇ stood, they embody the surrender of Ismail ﵇, they anticipate the Judgment, they beg for the mercy of Allah ﷻ.

The pilgrimage is no archive of pagan rites. It is a living act of surrender, performed anew each time by people who experience it as what it is in their faith: the fulfillment of a divine command, the embodiment of the community of believers across all borders of language, nationality, and culture. The unity that the Hajj brings about, that unity of the umma made visible at Arafat, is not incidental. It is not historically contingent. It is constitutive of what the Hajj is.

Snouck writes, in the introduction to his dissertation, that he wishes to understand the Hajj in its historical reality. But what reality is more historical than the reality of the pilgrim at Arafat. The scholar in Leiden who deconstructs the feast describes a different phenomenon than the Senegalese woman who sees the Ka’bah for the first time in her life and bursts into tears. Both are real. But Snouck’s method has no language for the second reality, and what his method cannot describe, it does not know.

The academic reception

The defense proceeded flawlessly. The jury consisted of scholars who acknowledged the method and appreciated the execution. No one in the Leiden academic community called the epistemological foundations into question, for that was not how academic criticism worked in those circles. One judged the execution of the method, the accuracy of the source references, the quality of the reasoning. On all those points Snouck was impeccable. Het Mekkaansche Feest was good work, expertly done.

The candidate received his doctorate, and his academic career began. Michael Jan de Goeje, the Arabist of stature who dominated Leiden Orientalism, saw in him a promising talent. De Goeje was the man who led the standard edition of Tabari ﵀, who gave the Leiden school international authority, and his approval was currency in the international Orientalist world. Snouck had the doctorate, he had the recognition of his teachers, he had a first publication that put his name on the map. Now he had to go further.

The foundation for a career

Het Mekkaansche Feest is not only an academic work, it is an intellectual foundation. Snouck would build the rest of his career on the thesis he developed here. Islam is explicable from its historical context, its rites are traceable to pre-Islamic sources, its law is reconstructible as a human product, its claims to divine origin can be historically analyzed as the faith claims of a community. From this foundation he would study Mecca, analyze Indonesian Islam, advise colonial policy.

It is precisely that continuity that makes the dissertation so significant. This is no work of youth that the later Snouck leaves behind him, it is the program he formulated in 1880 and that he was still carrying out in 1889, in 1906, in 1924. The thesis of Het Mekkaansche Feest, that the Islamic pilgrimage has its origin in pre-Islamic Arabian rites, resonates through every piece of advice Snouck gave the colonial administration, through every article he wrote about the Indonesian Islamic movement, through every policy recommendation with which he legitimized the curbing of Islamic politics.

For if the Hajj is a pre-Islamic festival, then the Islamic claim to divine legitimacy is a later construction. And if that construction is historically explicable, then it is in principle also politically manageable. Then the community that gathers around the Ka’bah is not a community of faith responding to a divine command, but a socio-political phenomenon that draws its coherence from the cultural customs and power strategies of early Islamic rulers. Then the pan-Islamic solidarity the Hajj fosters is not a spiritual reality but a political danger that can be controlled.

From the dissertation’s thesis to colonial policy the line is shorter than it appears.

Internal coherence and epistemological closure

One cannot simply dismiss the thesis of Het Mekkaansche Feest as factually incorrect. Snouck is accurate in his description of the pre-Islamic Arabian pilgrimage practices, he is correct in his observation that the rites of the Hajj partly show continuity with pre-Islamic customs. His source analysis is careful, his reasoning consistent, his conclusions internally coherent.

But internal coherence is not the same as truth. A methodologically consistent but epistemologically closed system can lead to coherent yet fundamentally inadequate descriptions, and this is what Snouck does. His system is internally coherent. It excludes in advance what the Islamic tradition regards as its most essential truth: that the Qur’an is the word of Allah ﷻ and that the Hajj is a duty instituted by Allah ﷻ.

The historical-critical method can describe the continuity between the pre-Islamic veneration of the Ka’bah and the Islamic Hajj. It cannot explain why the Prophet ﷺ chose which elements to purify, which to retain, and which to reformulate, unless it takes the Qur’anic revelation as its source material. And if it takes the Qur’anic revelation as source material, then it cannot at the same time describe it as the product of historical forces. This is the insoluble tension in Snouck’s method: it wishes to understand the Islamic tradition from its sources, but it refuses to accept the Islamic definition of those sources.

A community that was not asked

There is in the intellectual production of Het Mekkaansche Feest something that is scarcely mentioned and yet fundamental. No Muslim was involved in the writing, the discussion, or the assessment of this work. The scholars who assessed the dissertation, the journals that reviewed it, the congresses that would cite it, were all European, Christian, or post-Christian scholars. The community about whose sacred practice this dissertation deals had no voice in the process.

This is no incidental shortcoming that later scholarship has corrected, it is a structural feature of the Orientalist project. The Islamic world was described, not engaged as an interlocutor. Islamic theology was analyzed, not analytically consulted. The Islamic community of faith was object, not subject.

Snouck could, had he wished, have made contact with Islamic scholars, could have asked how they understood the relationship between the Jahiliyya practices and the Islamic Hajj. He could have included their answer in his dissertation as a serious theological position that deserved attention. But he did not, and his dissertation committee did not miss it. The absence of the Islamic voice is structural, not personal. Snouck was not exceptional in this respect, he was representative of his discipline. But being representative of a systematic injustice is still injustice.

The scholar against the pilgrim

It is worth pausing a moment on the fundamental asymmetry that Het Mekkaansche Feest represents. Snouck wrote his dissertation without ever interviewing a pilgrim, without ever observing the Hajj, without ever having set a foot in Arab lands. His sources were exclusively textual: manuscripts, early Islamic historical works, Arabic geographical literature, the accounts of European travelers who had visited Jeddah. It was, in essence, a product of the library.

This was not unusual in the Orientalism of that time, it was the norm. The Orientalist worked from his library, analyzed texts, drew conclusions. That the texts concerned a living community with its own insights into the subject was, for the method, not relevant. The Islamic community was the object of study, not a partner in the research.

But it also meant that Snouck wrote about an experience he had never had, from a perspective that stood fundamentally outside that experience. When he described the tawaf, he described a ritual he had read of in traditions but never seen or felt. When he analyzed the wuquf at Arafat, he analyzed a moment he knew from descriptions but not from presence.

The pilgrim who approaches the Ka’bah for the first time, the pilgrim who stands in the crowd of hundreds of thousands at Arafat in the afternoon sun, the pilgrim who completes the seven rounds and feels that something within him has shifted: all of this was for Snouck pure text. And this is not merely a practical shortcoming, it is an epistemological problem. Whoever knows the Hajj only as text does not know it in the way that matters to the believer, and whoever does not know it in that way cannot fully describe it either, not even from the historical-critical method.

Snouck sensed this, even if he did not fully acknowledge it. It is one of the reasons he would later decide to go to Mecca. The manner in which he would approach that reality, however, was not that of the humble scholar who asks the community to teach him, but that of the scientist who observes his object from a position of epistemological superiority. And that makes the difference.

The calm of one who knows what he will find

There is something in the tone of Het Mekkaansche Feest that strikes the later reader at once: the calm certainty. Snouck does not write like someone developing a hypothesis and cautiously testing it against the available sources, he writes like someone who knows what he is going to find and is now demonstrating that he is right. The Hajj is a pre-Islamic festival: this is the conclusion toward which the argument inevitably converges, and the text is organized so that every step points in that direction.

This is no deliberate deception, it is a feature of the historical-critical method as it was practiced in Leiden. The method had brought its own convictions with it, its own assumptions about what religion is and how it works, and these assumptions colored the analysis so strongly that the conclusions were fixed in advance. The question was not “is the Hajj a divine institution or a historical phenomenon”, but “what was the historical development that led to the present Hajj practice”. The first question is open, the second has already taken the conclusion up into its formulation.

Kuenen had done the same with the Old Testament. The question Kuenen posed was not “is the Torah of divine origin or not”, but “how did the Torah grow historically”. This is epistemologically consistent if one accepts the historical-critical method as the only legitimate scholarly approach, but it excludes in advance what falls outside that method, and what falls outside that method is precisely the heart of religious faith. Snouck wrote with that calm of the man who masters and trusts the method. He was right on his own ground, but his ground was not the ground of the believer.

The language of distance

An aspect of Het Mekkaansche Feest that is seldom discussed and yet significant is the language Snouck uses when he describes the rites of the Hajj. He writes consistently in the third person and in the past tense, as though documenting a historical phenomenon that has already had its high point and can now be analyzed as an artifact. The Hajj is for him an object, stable in its historical determinateness, available to the analytic gaze.

The pilgrim who performs the Hajj experiences it otherwise. For the pilgrim the Hajj is present, living, urgent. It is not a repetition of an old ritual but a direct encounter with the reality that makes the ritual possible. The Ka’bah is not a historical monument but the house of Allah ﷻ, the place toward which all prayer is directed, the center of the Islamic world in the most fundamental sense. When the pilgrim sees the Ka’bah for the first time, something breaks open within him that no historical explanation adequately describes.

Snouck had no access to this experience because he did not seek it. He sought the historical explanation, and that he found. But the historical explanation is not the religion, it is the description of the religion from outside, and the description from outside, however accurate, is something other than the understanding of the religion from within.

This is no romantic argument for the indescribable character of religious experience, it is an epistemological argument. Different kinds of knowledge are not interchangeable. The knowledge that the historical-critical method produces about the Hajj is not the same as the knowledge the pilgrim has who performs the Hajj. Both are real, both are valid in their own domain, but they are not the same things. Snouck acted as though his knowledge was the superior one. The pilgrim would dispute this.

Leiden, winter 1880

Snouck left the hall a doctor. The graduation ceremony was modest, academic, correct. The young doctor looked out over an open academic horizon: a career at the university, further publications, perhaps travel. The Arab world lay waiting for him, he felt that himself.

In that same winter of 1880, events were unfolding in the Islamic world that Snouck did not know of, but that would form the context of his later work. The Ottoman Empire was weakened but not yet fallen, the pan-Islamic movement around Sultan Abdulhamid II was growing. The Dutch colony in Indonesia was ravaged by the Aceh War, which did not cease and was not won. The stream of pilgrims that traveled each year from Indonesia to Mecca brought back the sounds of political agitation, of resistance, of an Islamic solidarity that unsettled the colonizer.

In Mecca itself, that winter, tens of thousands of pilgrims performed the Hajj. They stood at Arafat in the afternoon sun, they threw their pebbles at Mina, they circled the Ka’bah in the great mosque. They experienced the Hajj not as a pre-Islamic festival but as the fulfillment of a divine command, as the embodiment of the unity of the umma, as the moment in which personal faith found its most collective expression. For none of them was it relevant what a young Leiden doctor had argued that winter in a hall they would never see.

The gulf between the Leiden hall and the Masjid al-Haram was, in 1880, absolute. Snouck had not yet crossed it, but he had, in his dissertation, thrown the first bridge: a bridge of words, of analysis, of reduction. The bridge was built from his side. The other side did not know that anyone was building.

The reception in the Islamic world

It is also necessary, to close this chapter, to discuss how Het Mekkaansche Feest was later received in the Islamic world, insofar as this can be traced. Islamic scholars who took note of the dissertation responded for the most part with rejection. Not because they disputed the historical facts Snouck adduced about the pre-Islamic Arabian customs around Mecca, but because they rejected his conclusion that the Hajj could thereby be reduced to a pagan practice.

Islamic theology had always acknowledged that Arabian society before the coming of Islam had known practices around the Ka’bah and the Meccan seasonal markets. What the Islamic tradition argues forcefully, however, is that the Ka’bah itself was built by Ibrahim ﵇ on divine command, that the pilgrimage was instituted by Ibrahim ﵇ on divine command, and that the centuries of corruption by Arabian polytheism had not erased this divine origin but only obscured it. The Prophet ﷺ restored the pure form, cleansed the Ka’bah of the idols, and confirmed the Hajj as an obligatory pillar of Islam. Not as an innovation. As a restoration.

This argument is theologically coherent and has its own force if one takes Islamic epistemology seriously. Snouck could not take it seriously, for his method excluded this type of argument in advance. And so the two worlds continue to stand side by side: the historical-critical analysis that describes the Hajj as a historical phenomenon, and the Islamic theology that experiences the Hajj as a divine institution. Both are internally consistent. They are not speaking of the same thing.

The dissertation of 1880 was the definitive formulation of the first position. The umma maintained, without rejoinder in the European academic forums, the second. The gulf remained. And Snouck, who both formulated the first position and observed the second from within, was the man who moved in both worlds without being at home in either.

The moral weight of an academic work

One may ask whether a dissertation is a moral act. Academic works are, after all, neutral, the production of knowledge, a contribution to the collective understanding of humanity. But Het Mekkaansche Feest is no neutral contribution. It is the attack of the historical-critical method on the heart of Islamic religious life, carried out with craftsmanship and self-assurance, from a position of institutional power.

The Leiden scholar who reduces the Hajj to a pre-Islamic festival commands means against which the Meccan pilgrim has no defense. He writes in Latin and Dutch, he publishes in academic series, he speaks at congresses, he teaches the future administrators of the Dutch colonial empire. The asymmetry is not incidental, it is constitutive of the Orientalist project. The Eastern world is the object of study, the Western scholar is the studying subject. The object does not join the conversation, the subject describes, and what the subject describes becomes reality in the archives of scholarship, in the curricula of the universities, in the minds of the officials who are sent to Batavia.

Snouck was not yet a powerful man in 1880. He was a young doctor with a good dissertation, but he stood at the beginning of a career that would make him powerful, and the method he had refined in Het Mekkaansche Feest would be the foundation of that power. That dissertation is the first stone. Snouck lays it carefully, precisely, with the calm precision of a man who knows what he is building.

The legacy of the reduction

The broad project of which Het Mekkaansche Feest was a part also included the hadith criticism of Goldziher and later Schacht, the critical approach to Islamic jurisprudence, the historical analysis of the Qur’anic text. This broad project undeniably bore scholarly fruit: it mapped the historical dimension of the Islamic tradition, it refined the source analysis of early Islamic texts, it produced knowledge that Islamic scholars too, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have used and criticized and developed further.

But it also did damage. It determined the dominant image in the European academy that the Islamic claims to the divine origin of its institutions are historically explicable, and therefore implicitly not to be taken seriously. It formed a generation of Islamologists who regarded the Islamic world primarily as the object of scholarly inquiry and not as an interlocutor with its own epistemology. It laid the foundation for a colonial policy that sought to neutralize Islamic politics while tolerating the Islamic religion.

Het Mekkaansche Feest is the first step on this path. It was written by a young man who did not yet know where the path led. But the step was taken, the direction set, the foundation laid. What was later built upon it was already implicitly present in the calm certainty with which Snouck, on 24 November 1880, reduced the Hajj to a pre-Islamic festival.

The pilgrim who was not heard

Behind every paragraph of Het Mekkaansche Feest stands an unread counter-voice. The Senegalese woman who saved her whole life for a single Hajj. The Indonesian village elder who travels with his son from Java to Mecca. The Malay scholar who studies for years in the Hijaz before returning to train his own students. None of them had access to a Leiden hall, none of them was asked for comment, none of them had the instruments to publish a rebuttal in the Zeitschrift. Their voice existed, but in a register that European scholarship did not receive.

Had those voices been heard, they would not have refuted the historical facts Snouck put forward. They would have contested the framework within which those facts took on meaning. They would have said: yes, there were pre-Islamic rites around the Ka’bah, and yes, some of the outward movements of the Hajj have a history older than the revelation; but what that means for the present duty is a question of revelation, not of archaeology. For the believer the Hajj is no reconstruction of a festival, it is obedience to a command, and obedience cannot be historically invalidated by proving that the command has old roots.

This answer was almost never taken up in European circles. It remained the oral culture of the community of believers. Het Mekkaansche Feest became the standard work on the Hajj in the European libraries. The pilgrim who could have answered read no Dutch, gave no lectures, wrote no journal articles. The silence was not assent, it was structural exclusion.

The path beyond the library

Snouck knew all this vaguely, theoretically, from the Leiden library. It would become more concrete, for the world was not waiting for him. Three years later, in the spring of 1883, he would establish his name on the international stage. The Seventh International Congress of Orientalists was to be held in Leiden, and Snouck had been appointed secretary of the Arabic section. The scholars of Europe would come, and Snouck would receive them.

The dissertation had established his name, the congress would build his network, and the network would open the way to what he truly wanted: to see the city he had described in his dissertation without ever having set foot in it.

Sources

• Wim van den Doel, Snouck, Boom (2021)
• C. Snouck Hurgronje, Het Mekkaansche Feest, E.J. Brill (1880)
• Abraham Kuenen, De godsdienst van Israël, 2 vols., P.H. van Wely (1869-1870)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)
• The Holy Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah 2:125; Surah al-Hajj 22:27