The International Congress of Orientalists

22 April 1883, Leiden

The dissertation with which the previous chapter closed had by now found its way into the world. Het Mekkaansche Feest stood on the shelves of Europe’s orientalist libraries, had been reviewed in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, and had been cited in correspondence between scholars whom Snouck had never met but whose names he knew from footnotes and title pages. The dissertation had done what a good dissertation does: it had identified its author as someone to keep an eye on.

And now, in the spring of 1883, those scholars came to Leiden for the Seventh International Congress of Orientalists. Snouck was ready to receive them. He was twenty-seven years old and secretary of the Arabic section.

The role suited him, for he was precise, systematic, and composed in social situations. He could flatter the great names without being obsequious and could draw in the younger participants without feigning intimacy. He was also someone who listened, and listened well, and in the world of the international scholarly congress that is a rare skill, prized highly by those who love to talk.

The congress as an institution

The International Congress of Orientalists had first convened in Paris in 1873, and ever since it had offered a forum for the scholars who occupied themselves with what was then called, in shorthand, “the East”: the Arab world, Persia, India, Turkey, China, Japan. The congress rotated among the European capitals of scholarship, from London and Saint Petersburg to Florence and Berlin. In 1883 it was Leiden’s turn. Leiden orientalism, already respected internationally through the presence of De Goeje and the reputation of the Arabic collections in the university library, organized a gathering that brought together more than two hundred scholars.

Snouck was not the chief organizer; that was De Goeje. But as secretary of the Arabic section he was the man who conducted the correspondence, drew up the programs, wrote to the speakers, and managed the logistics. The work was administrative and strategic at once, for through it he learned which names mattered, which schools existed, who was friends with whom and who was quarreling with whom. Alongside being a scholarly forum, the congress was a social and institutional network, and Snouck learned to navigate that network with the ease of someone who seemed born to it.

The theme that dominated the Arabic section was the editing and interpretation of Arabic manuscripts. The great projects of European orientalism in those years were text-critical undertakings: the Ṭabarī edition that De Goeje directed, the critical editions of early Islamic historians, the systematic cataloguing of the Arabic manuscript collections in Leiden, Berlin, Paris, and London. The congress was the occasion to report progress, to discuss methods, and to agree on standards.

Snouck presented a contribution that built on his dissertation, a further analysis of the ritual structure of the Hajj in the light of new sources. The discussion was lively and cordial, and he made a good impression.

The three pillars of orientalism

To understand what the congress meant for Snouck, and what it meant for the production of knowledge about the Islamic world, one must grasp the institutional architecture of European orientalism. That architecture rested on three pillars that supported and reinforced one another: the chairs, the journals, and the congresses.

The chairs were the foundation. In Leiden, Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna, and Saint Petersburg, scholars occupied chairs in Arabic, Iranian, Turkish, and Indian studies. They taught students, supervised dissertations, and built up libraries. They were also the gatekeepers of academic legitimacy. Whoever held a chair spoke with authority, while whoever lacked a chair still had to earn his authority. The chair was the institutional legitimation of the person; without it, one was an amateur.

The journals were the channels of communication. The Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, the Journal Asiatique, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society: in these journals articles were published, reviews written, and debates carried on. The standard of quality was set by the editors, who were themselves scholars and who had their own schools and preferences.

The congresses were the social and ritual spaces. Here the scholars met face to face, exchanged ideas, formed alliances, and judged one another’s work in real time. The congresses also functioned as markets, where young scholars presented their work to the great names, and the great names decided who was worth the trouble. The informal dimension was at least as important as the formal one. A conversation over lunch, a walk through the old center of Leiden, an evening in the company of the congress leadership: all of this played its part in the construction of reputations.

In 1883 Snouck found himself at the edge of this system, and he was moving quickly toward its center. The role of secretary placed him at the heart of the logistics, so that anyone who wished to attend the congress had to come into contact with him at some point. He managed the agenda, the halls, and the programs, and he was indispensable.

Ignaz Goldziher and a friendship that would shape a career

One of the most impressive figures present at the Leiden congress was the Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher. Goldziher was at that moment already establishing his reputation as the sharpest analyst of the hadith literature of his generation. His work on the traditions, his research into the historical layering of hadith transmission, and his analysis of Islamic jurisprudence would in the decades after 1883 name him one of the founders of modern Islamic studies.

Goldziher had a different background from Snouck. He was Jewish, born in Hungary, and raised in a religious milieu that gave him a different relation to the Bible than Snouck’s Protestant background did. He had received his first Arabic lesson as a child of twelve, had studied in Berlin and Leiden before Snouck was a student there, and had even spent a period in Cairo during which he maintained contact with al-Azhar, the famous Islamic university. His knowledge of the Islamic tradition came from more than books alone.

Goldziher and Snouck met in Leiden, on the margins of a session on early Islamic historiography. It was the beginning of a lifelong correspondence, later published by P. Sj. van Koningsveld and his collaborators, which records in more than five hundred letters the intellectual friendship of two of the most influential Islamologists of their time. Goldziher admired Snouck’s acuity and his ability to abstract from sources toward patterns, while Snouck admired Goldziher’s erudition and his nuanced ear for the subtleties of the Arabic tradition. Both shared the historical-critical foundation, the conviction that the Islamic tradition could be explained through its historical development, and both drew from that conviction consequences that the Islamic community itself would never accept.

The friendship was sincere and intellectually fruitful. It was also, from an Islamic perspective, the joining of two scholars whose work reduced the Islamic tradition to a historical phenomenon. The method was shared, and the consequences for the Islamic community were grave, even though neither Goldziher nor Snouck formulated it in those terms.

A learned discourse without those being studied

In the Arabic section, papers were presented on Arabic manuscripts, on grammar, on poetry, and on the geography of the early Islamic world. Snouck presented his contribution. The discussions were lively, the polemic friendly, and the tone that of scholars who find the subject interesting but not threatening.

That last point is relevant. The participants in the Congress of Orientalists regarded the Islamic world as their object of study. They did not imagine that Islamic scholars might think along with them, let alone that they might object to the methods or conclusions. The congress was European, the method was European, and the conclusions were for European use. The Islamic world was present as text, as manuscript, as geographical phenomenon, but not as an interlocutor.

This was not a consciously xenophobic choice on the part of the congress organizers. It was the structural reality of the academic world of 1883. The Islamic universities of Cairo, Istanbul, and Delhi had different traditions, different methods, and different aims. They produced no papers for the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, acquired no chairs in European universities, and did not appear at the congress in Leiden. The two worlds were separate, and European scholarship described the Islamic world with the ease of someone who knows that his description will never be contradicted by the object itself.

Snouck organized this system, facilitated it, and contributed to it. He was good at his work. But his work was the production of knowledge about Islam for European use, and the asymmetry between producer and object was so ingrained that no one experienced it as problematic.

The institutional reward

The mechanism by which the orientalist establishment reproduced itself was elegant and closed. A good dissertation led to an appointment as assistant or lecturer. A good congress paper led to invitations to other congresses. Invitations led to publications in the right journals. Publications led to chairs. And chairs produced students who themselves wrote dissertations and gave congress presentations.

In 1883 Snouck stood at the second stage of this process. He had the dissertation, and now he was building the network. The chair would come later, but he could already see it.

The role at the congress gave him something else as well: visibility among the people who handed out the great commissions. In the Leiden context those people were partly academic, but partly also connected to the machinery of state, for the Ministry of the Interior, which helped administer the colonial interests, had contacts at the university. De Goeje knew the policymakers, and through De Goeje, Snouck knew them too.

What was missing: the living reality

For what Leiden orientalism lacked, what Snouck lacked, what all his brilliant analysis lacked, was direct knowledge of the living subject. He had read the Arabic manuscripts, analyzed the early Islamic geography, and deconstructed the rituals of the Hajj. But he had never seen Mecca. He had never circled the Kaʿbah. He had never stood on the plain of ʿArafat.

This gap he felt, and he was not the only one who felt it. In the orientalist circles of the late nineteenth century there was a growing awareness that fieldwork was a necessary complement to library work. It was not that the manuscripts fell short, nor that the grammars were unusable, but that the living reality of the Islamic world had dimensions no manuscript could convey. The tone of the spoken language, the social dynamics of the religious community, the ritual life of the faith as practiced.

All of this required presence, not merely reading.

Moreover, the Dutch state had a practical interest in experts who could operate not only in the library but also in the field. The Aceh war dragged on. The colonial administration needed people who understood how the Islamic community worked, what the Hajj meant for the Indonesian pilgrims, and how the pan-Islamic networks functioned. An Islamologist who knew Mecca from the inside was worth more than one who had only read books, worth more in the most concrete sense of the word. This was the first quiet coupling, already perceptible in 1883, between Leiden and Aceh, a coupling that would become explicit six years later.

After the congress, in the months that followed, Snouck began to explore the possibilities. He spoke with De Goeje. He corresponded with contacts at the Ministry. He wrote letters to Jeddah and Cairo, to scholars and diplomatic contacts in the region. He prepared himself, intellectually and logistically.

The turning point

The Congress of Orientalists of 1883 marks a turning point in Snouck’s career, not dramatic but decisive. Before the congress he was a promising young scholar with a single publication. After the congress he was absorbed into the international network of European orientalism, acknowledged by the great names as a colleague of the first rank, and linked to Goldziher and others whose support would carry his later career.

The crowning had a price, however, not in money but in direction and identity. By identifying himself so completely with institutional orientalism, by internalizing its methods so thoroughly, and by cultivating its networks so actively, Snouck bound himself to its perspective. The Islamic world was the object, and he was the subject. The Hajj was a pre-Islamic festival, and he had demonstrated it. The Islamic tradition was historically explicable, and the method had proven how.

And if he were now to go to Mecca, then he would go as a scholar who studies the object, not as a human being who approaches the community. That orientation was, in 1883, unshakable. The congress confirmed it, the institutional world rewarded it, and Snouck had no reason to call it into question.

Cairo as a way station

Before his arrival in Leiden as congress organizer, Snouck had already taken the first step toward the Arabic-speaking region. In the years between his doctorate and the congress he had made a study journey to Cairo, where he had come into contact with scholars of al-Azhar and had practiced his spoken Arabic in a way no Leiden lecture hall could offer. For nineteenth-century European orientalism, Cairo was an important stopover: the city had an active intellectual life, a large Arabic manuscript collection, and an Islamic university that was the oldest in the world and drew scholars from across the entire Islamic world.

Al-Azhar, however, was also an institution that represented an approach to Islamic knowledge different from what Snouck had learned in Leiden. Where Leiden orientalism approached Islam in a historical-critical manner, al-Azhar preserved the tradition of the classical Islamic sciences: the transmission of knowledge through isnād from master to student, the study of fiqh, hadith, and tafsīr as religious disciplines with their own epistemology, not as historical sources for secular analysis.

In Cairo, Snouck learned how the Islamic scholars worked. He also learned that their method and his own were fundamentally incompatible, not in the sense of being hostile to one another, but in the sense of two systems that read the same texts with different questions and different aims. The scholar of al-Azhar asked: what does this teach us about the duties of the believer? Snouck asked: what does this tell us about the historical development of the Islamic community?

This incompatibility did not weigh on Snouck. It confirmed him in his method. He was the scholar with the superior analytical tools, while the scholar of al-Azhar was the believer with the transmitted knowledge. Both had their value, but the scholar understood what the believer experienced, whereas the believer did not understand what the scholar analyzed. The asymmetry was, in Snouck’s eyes, a fact. The Sunna knows no underground test of loyalty, because the shahada itself is the test. Snouck would dismantle that very logic in Mecca itself, but in 1883 it posed no problem for him.

Language as the key

One element that set Snouck’s position in European orientalism apart from many of his colleagues was the quality of his spoken Arabic. Where most European orientalists commanded written Arabic, only a few had spoken Arabic at the level necessary for genuine conversation. Snouck was an exception, for his Arabic was fluent and idiomatic. He could read texts, he could hold conversations, and he could catch nuances, gauging the tone and register of his interlocutor.

He had acquired this skill partly in Leiden and deepened it partly in Cairo, and it would enable him in Jeddah and Mecca to blend into a community as no European orientalist had done before him. At the congress of 1883 his command of languages was already visible. He could correspond in Arabic, he could debate with visitors who had Arabic as their first language, and he could grasp the subtleties that others were bound to miss.

This was a technical advantage, and it had a moral dimension. The fluent speaker of a language can meet the other on his own ground, can win the trust that shared speech creates, and can enter where others are held at the door. In Snouck’s case the command of languages was, in the end, an instrument of infiltration. The fluent speaker of Arabic could pass the boundary of Mecca; the library scholar could not.

The price of recognition

There is something melancholy about the figure of the young Snouck who in April 1883 walks through the Leiden lecture halls, escorts the famous guests, distributes the papers, and chairs the sessions. He is brilliant, socially adept, ambitious in an elevated way. He wants to become the finest Islamologist of his generation. He wants to understand things. He wants to produce knowledge that matters. These are not low motives.

But the recognition he finds at the congress binds him to a system that is fundamentally unjust in its structure. The system describes the Islamic world without consulting it. The system produces knowledge that serves colonial power. The system rewards those who master its methods and endorse its conclusions. Snouck mastered the methods. He endorsed the conclusions.

The price was not visible in 1883. The price would become visible in the Aceh war, in the suppression of the Islamic movement in Indonesia, in the generation of colonial officials who used Snouck’s analyses as a guide for policy that curbed Muslim communities in their political self-expression. All of that still lay before him. In April 1883 he stood at the congress and was learning who he wished to become.

The ulama of Cairo and the silence of Leiden

There is an asymmetry that sums up the whole congress, one that Snouck as secretary recorded precisely in his files without ever making a matter of principle of it. The scholars of al-Azhar, the schools of Damascus, the madrasas of Lucknow, the Qarawiyyin of Fez: they commanded the Arabic manuscripts better than any European orientalist. They knew the isnād of the hadith from the inside. They had inherited the tafsīr along a line reaching back to the first generations of Medina. And they were absent in Leiden.

Not because they had refused to come. They were not invited. Not because the congress organizers were actively obstructive. It had simply not been thought of. The idea that an Egyptian shaykh ﵀ of al-Azhar would sit beside Goldziher and De Goeje in the Arabic section, that he would join the same discussion about the transmission of a hadith or the source criticism of an early historical work, lay beyond the academic imagination of the Europe of that time.

Snouck noted, in the margins of his correspondence, the names of scholars in Cairo with whom he maintained contact. He exchanged letters with them. He valued them. But as interlocutors at the congress, as members of the international circle of scholars of which he was secretary, they were not eligible. The congress was, as it was called in the language of that time, a gathering of Orientalists, not a gathering of Orientals. The names alone made the difference clear.

Jeddah on the horizon

A year after the congress Snouck would stand in Jeddah, the port city on the Red Sea, the gateway to Mecca. He had gone there at the expense of the Ministry of the Interior, with an assignment that was never made fully public, in a capacity that needs to be more closely defined.

The congress had given him the legitimacy. The state would provide him the means. And the combination of academic legitimacy and state resources would bring him where he wished to arrive: to the very threshold of the holy city he had described in his dissertation without ever having seen it.

The road from the Leiden congress hall to the Jeddah quay was shorter than it seemed.

Sources

• Wim van den Doel, Snouck, Boom (2021)
• C. Snouck Hurgronje, Verspreide Geschriften, 6 vols., K.F. Koehler (1923-1927)
• P. Sj. van Koningsveld et al. (eds.), Scholarship and Friendship: The Goldziher-Snouck Hurgronje Correspondence, Brill (2021)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)
• Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Orientalists, Leiden (1883)