The Consul in Jeddah

24 August 1884, Jeddah

The previous chapter ended with Snouck building the world of the Orientalist scholars in Leiden into his own platform, and, in correspondence with The Hague, gathering the means to leave the library behind. On 24 August 1884 he stepped ashore on the quay of Jeddah. The ship that had brought him sailed back to Port Said, leaving him behind with his baggage, his notes, and a commission he was not permitted to make fully public.

He was twenty-eight years old, and he stood at the threshold of Mecca, or at least as close before it as a non-Muslim could stand without violating the sanctified boundary. The city lay eighty kilometres inland, behind the mountains that enclosed the Hijaz. He could see the pilgrims passing through Jeddah on their way to the holy places, and he could follow the processions of caravans with his eyes and his notebook. The Kaʿbah itself lay beyond reach, both literally and legally.

Jeddah was the only city in the Hijaz where non-Muslims were permitted to reside; Mecca was forbidden territory. The boundary was ancient, rooted in Islamic law, confirmed by the Ottoman authorities who administered the Hijaz in the name of the caliph, and respected by the European consuls who kept their offices in Jeddah and fixed their gaze on the trade and politics of the region but not on the holy city itself. Snouck settled in Jeddah, where he began to study, to observe, to correspond. And he began to consider the question of how he might bridge the eighty kilometres.

The answer already lay implicit in his doctoral dissertation, though he had not yet fully worked it out.

The Ministry and its money

Snouck did not travel at his own expense. His journey to the Hijaz was financed by the Ministry of the Interior in The Hague, a remarkable fact that deserves closer examination. Why would a ministry concerned with domestic affairs finance a Leiden Orientalist for a journey to the Arabian Peninsula?

The answer lies in the peculiar position of the Netherlands as a colonial power. During that period the Ministry of the Interior also managed aspects of the colonial portfolio, and there existed a close connection between domestic policy questions surrounding the Indonesian community in the Netherlands and the broader colonial problematic. But there is a deeper reason than the bureaucratic organisation of departments.

The Dutch state regarded the pilgrimage to Mecca as a political question of the first order. Every year tens of thousands of Indonesian Muslims set out for the Hijaz, and they returned with ideas, with connections, with religious impulses, and sometimes with political contacts that the colonial administration considered potentially dangerous. The Aceh War, which had already lasted more than ten years and showed no sign of ending, was a continual reminder of the power of Islamic mobilisation as a basis for armed and protracted resistance. The Acehnese fighters who held off the Dutch troops year after year drew their moral and military perseverance in part from their Islamic conviction and their connections with the wider Islamic world, Mecca included.

A scholar who could study Mecca, who could map the pan-Islamic networks, who could offer insight into the religious and political dynamics of the pilgrim community, who could identify which shaykhs exercised which influence over the returning Indonesian pilgrims: such knowledge had strategic value. The Ministry invested in Snouck the way one invests in intelligence, not in the production of neutral knowledge but in the production of usable knowledge for a specific policy aim.

Snouck accepted the financing. He had no other choice if he wished to reach the Hijaz, for his academic salary would not cover the journey, and in 1884 there were no private funds for undertakings of this kind. But the acceptance signified something structural. It meant that from then on he was not merely a scholar studying Islam out of intellectual curiosity, but also an agent of the Dutch state visiting the Hijaz with an eye to colonial policy intelligence. The boundaries between scholarship and intelligence, always porous in the Orientalist project, were here formally crossed.

Plausible deniability

There is an element in the construction of Snouck’s Mecca expedition that deserves particular attention: the question of plausible deniability for the Dutch state. The Ministry of the Interior financed Snouck. Yet the official description of his commission was that of a scholarly investigation into the Islamic society of the Hijaz. Nowhere in the official correspondence that has survived is it explicitly stated that he was to enter Mecca or that he would assume an Islamic identity.

This is a diplomatic construction of some subtlety. The state wanted the knowledge that could only be obtained by crossing the boundary, but it did not wish to be formally responsible for the method by which that knowledge was acquired. If Snouck entered Mecca and was discovered by the Ottoman authorities, he would be an individual academic who had made a personal, recklessly taken decision, not an agent of the Dutch state carrying out an official commission. The Hague could then disown him, keep its distance, and limit the diplomatic damage.

Snouck understood this construction and accepted it. With state money, he placed himself in a position where the state could repudiate his actions should they become politically inopportune. This is the structure of covert operations in every age: the instigator protects himself, the executor takes the risk. Snouck was clever enough to see through this and ambitious enough to accept it. The knowledge he would gather would establish his name; the risk he ran was personal.

It is worth placing here a soberly reconstructed moment, the kind of conversation that in the summer of 1884 is conceivable between The Hague and a consular official involved in the matter, in the spirit of Van den Doel’s reconstruction of the diplomatic culture of the time.

The dialogue is an illustration, not a quotation. The pattern itself, descriptive commissions with an operational underbelly, is well documented in the colonial state records of those years. The state knew what it did not wish to know.

The city as observatory

In 1884 Jeddah was one of the most internationally populated cities of the Arab world. Pilgrims from every quarter of the Islamic world, from West Africa to China, from Central Asia to the far east of the Malay archipelago, passed through the city on their way to and from Mecca. Traders, consuls, local shaykhs, Ottoman officials, Indian merchants, Hadrami diaspora communities that spread their trading networks across the whole Indian Ocean: the city was a microcosm of the Islamic world in its colonial era.

The European consuls sat in Jeddah because they were not permitted to sit in Mecca. They managed the interests of their nationals in the region, reported to their respective governments on the political situation in the Hijaz and the Arab world, and assisted the merchants of their country in their commercial activities. The consuls were also informants: they observed, reported, analysed. Jeddah was a city of observing and of being reported upon.

The urban physiognomy itself is telling. The Dutch consul, the British consul, the French consul, the Russian consul kept their offices a stone’s throw from one another in the old city, in coral-stone dwellings with latticed balconies bricked up to keep out the heat of the Red Sea. Below in the street the caravans passed on their way to the interior: camel trains with shrouded pilgrims from Sumatra, sallow Socotran Arabs, Bukharans in long coats, Africans from Bornu and Sudan. In the souks of Jeddah one heard in a single afternoon the tongues of half an ummah. And in all those tongues sounded the same yearning: the gate of Mecca, eighty kilometres further east.

Snouck was not there by chance. As an Arabist he spoke the language, as an Islamicist he understood the context, as a scholar financially backed by the Ministry he had the means and the time, and as an intelligent observer he had the eye and the ear for what mattered. He established contacts, sustained conversations, and listened attentively. He studied the Indonesian pilgrims who passed through Jeddah, spoke with them in Arabic and through interpreters, and learned from them how the Indonesian Islamic community experienced the pilgrimage, which networks existed between Mecca and Java, and which shaykhs were influential in the Indonesian community of the holy city.

The information he gathered in Jeddah already carried direct policy value. But Jeddah was for him a way station; the actual destination lay eighty kilometres further on.

The Jawa stream and what it carried

Particular attention in Snouck’s stay in Jeddah is due to his intensive study of the Indonesian pilgrim community that passed through the city each year. The stream of Indonesian Muslims toward Mecca was considerable in the nineteenth century. Tens of thousands of people a year left the archipelago for the long and costly sea voyage that carried them by way of Aden and Jeddah to the holy places. They came from Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and the Moluccas, every year anew, in numbers that alarmed the colonial administration as the Aceh War dragged on.

Snouck observed these pilgrims in Jeddah with the eyes of the scholar and the ears of the intelligence analyst. He spoke with them and came to know their social background, their economic position, their religious formation, and their political orientations insofar as he could probe these in brief conversations. He identified the shaykhs with whom they wished to study in Mecca, the networks along which they had travelled, and the contacts they hoped to make.

What he learned was disquieting for someone in the service of the colonial state. The Hajj functioned as a powerful maker of cohesion for the Islamic community of the archipelago, as a place where Javanese, Acehnese, Malays, and people from the Outer Islands recognised one another as a single ummah, as members of the same faith, bound by the same practice. The pan-Islamic solidarity that the colonial authorities feared as a political danger was visible in Jeddah and Mecca as a living social reality: not a theory, not a propaganda product of Istanbul, but a lived actuality.

Snouck noted all of this down. He analysed it, and he began to understand its implications for colonial policy. The Hajj was not merely a religious duty but a political institution that reproduced and reinforced the unity of the Islamic community across the boundaries of language and island. Whoever wished to understand the Hajj understood the Islamic world; whoever wished to master the Islamic world had to understand the Hajj; and whoever wished to master the Islamic world in the archipelago had to understand the Hajj in its Meccan core.

The Ottoman context

The Hijaz in which Snouck arrived in August 1884 was a province of the Ottoman Empire holding a special status. Mecca and Medina were the holiest cities of Islam. The Ottoman sultan bore the title of “servant of the two holy cities” and derived from the protection of the Hijaz a large part of his religious legitimacy in the Islamic world. The province was governed by an Ottoman governor, but the local structures of power, trade, and religion were largely Arab and possessed their own internal logic that the Ottoman bureaucracy had not fully penetrated.

Sultan Abdulhamid II, who reigned in 1884, had made pan-Islamic policy the cornerstone of his foreign policy. He sought to mobilise the Islamic world, threatened from Morocco to Indonesia by European colonial powers, around the Ottoman caliphate as its political and religious centre. Within this framework the Hajj was a political instrument of great value. Every year Muslims came from all over the world to Mecca, met one another, sustained networks, and carried ideas and sentiments back to their lands of origin.

The European colonial powers, the Netherlands included, were keenly aware of this pan-Islamic dimension. The fear was not unfounded. The Aceh War, which had already continued for more than ten years, had a clearly Islamic mobilising dimension. The Acehnese fighters drew moral support, and sometimes material support as well, from their connections with the wider Islamic world, the Ottoman context included.

Snouck arrived in Jeddah at the moment when the tension between Ottoman pan-Islamic aspirations and European colonial interests was at its height. He was a representative of a colonial power that feared what the Hajj might set loose politically. He was at the same time a scholar who believed that understanding was the best strategy for channelling that fear into effective policy. Both roles coexisted in him without tension, for within his framework scholarly knowledge and colonial politics were not opposites but complementary instruments of the same project.

The Hadrami networks and the shadow of Aceh

In the port city Snouck encountered the Hadrami diaspora, the traders and scholars originating from Hadramawt who had spread their networks across the whole Indian Ocean, from Aden to Surabaya, from Mombasa to Singapore. It was these Hadramis who in the Indonesian archipelago had contributed to the deepening of Islamic scholarship in the preceding centuries and who still, in 1884, formed an essential link between Mecca and Java. They were shipowners, merchants, shaykhs, sometimes all at once.

Snouck learned their names, their families, their spheres of trade. He learned which Hadrami families were connected with which regents in the archipelago, and which shaykhs in Mecca clothed their pride as descendants of the Prophet ﷺ in an authority that played a role in Java. He understood that the pan-Islamic connection was not merely ideological. It was familial, commercial, juridical, learned. It was, in a word, socially anchored. And social anchoring is not to be waved away with a military offensive.

Here lies the quiet linkage between Snouck’s work in Jeddah and the Aceh War that he would help bring to an end five years later. The information he gathered on the Jeddah quay concerning Hadrami intermediaries and pilgrim networks would form the basis of the counsel with which, in Batavia, he would help dissect the structure of Acehnese resistance. It is a line not yet spoken aloud in 1884, but one that already runs internally: from Jeddah to Banda Aceh, by way of Mecca and Leiden.

The boundary and what it protected

The boundary around Mecca, the so-called Haram boundary, is no arbitrary administrative line. It is a theological reality, anchored in the Qur’an and the Sunnah, guarded by centuries of Islamic law. The prohibition upon non-Muslims is explicit: whoever enters the holy city without faith violates the sanctity of the space that Allah ﷻ has appointed as the centre of worship, the place that Ibrahim ﵇ built at divine command.

The Ottoman authorities maintained the boundary with varying intensity but with consistency of principle. The European consuls respected it, not out of religious conviction but out of diplomatic necessity: the Ottoman Empire was their host in the region, and an incident concerning the holy cities would have had unacceptable diplomatic consequences. Moreover, maintaining the boundary was practically straightforward: the access roads were limited, the local population knew its visitors, and strangers stood out.

The boundary held.

But Snouck was not prepared to accept that boundary as final. He reasoned, as appears from his later writings and his correspondence with Goldziher, that his academic mission required the crossing of the boundary. To truly understand the Hajj, he had to observe it from within; to analyse the Islamic community of Mecca, he had to move within it. The thesis he had formulated in Leiden and had defended at the congress required empirical verification in the field.

It was a reasoning he did not voice aloud in the presence of the Ottoman authorities, but one he most certainly pursued inwardly. And the consequence of that reasoning was single. He had to cross the boundary, and the only way to cross it legally was as a Muslim. The Sunnah knows no underground test of loyalty, because the shahada itself is the test. The test exists. The boundary exists.

The rehearsal of a role

There was only one way to enter Mecca legally: as a Muslim. And there was only one way to be recognised as a Muslim: to pronounce the shahada, the profession of faith, the core of Islamic identity, the articulation of surrender to Allah ﷻ and recognition of the Prophet ﷺ as His messenger. For a believer the shahada is the core of faith, the foundation of identity, the gate to the ummah. For Snouck it would become an entry pass.

Wim van den Doel analyses in his biography the steps by which Snouck prepared himself in Jeddah for this step. They were methodical and careful, as was everything Snouck did. He held conversations with Islamic scholars in Jeddah. He deepened his knowledge of the Islamic prayer rituals in their practical execution. He learned the movements of the prayer that one expects of a believing Muslim. He grew a beard. He adopted the dress of a Muslim. He acquired the specific knowledge needed to appear convincingly as someone who had been a Muslim for years and faithfully practised his faith.

He did not rehearse the inside of the faith. That he did not have. He rehearsed the outside: the body language, the ritual movements, the social forms of conduct, the religious formulas a Muslim uses in daily interactions. It was actor’s training, pursued relentlessly and consistently, carried out by someone who knew that his freedom and possibly his life depended on it if the act should fail.

The consulate as institution

The European consular post in Jeddah was in the nineteenth century a hybrid institution. Formally the consul managed the commercial interests and the protection of the nationals of his country. In practice he was the eyes and ears of his government in a region of great strategic and religious importance to the entire Islamic world. The consuls in Jeddah reported not only on shipping and merchants, but also on the movements of the Hajj, on Ottoman politics in the Hijaz, on the religious currents among the pilgrims, and on the moods of the local ulama and sharifs.

The Dutch consular representation in Jeddah was relatively small compared to that of the British or the French, but it was strategically placed. The Dutch pilgrim streams from the Dutch East Indies were among the largest single Hajj streams in the world. What happened in Jeddah concerning Indonesian pilgrims had direct consequences for the administration of millions of Muslims in the archipelago. Snouck therefore did not arrive in an institutional vacuum. He arrived within an infrastructure of European consular observation that had already functioned for decades, and to that infrastructure he added the deep understanding that an ordinary consul could not supply.

The difference between the consul and Snouck matters. The consul observed from the outside. He spoke with traders, with Ottoman officials, with the European merchants who lived in the city. He was visible as a European, and his observations remained at the outer edge of the community he analysed. Snouck would, in his coming Mecca undertaking, break through this outer edge. The consul could do no more than report on the shadows upon the city wall; Snouck wanted to be inside the house itself.

The image of the city

The city itself was in 1884 a peculiar place. The coral-stone houses with their narrow, bricked-up wooden balconies, the so-called mashrabiyyas, caught what sea breeze there was and kept out the fierce sunlight of the Red Sea. The narrow alleys smelled of incense, of the droppings of camels and mules, of the spices of the pilgrim markets. Water was scarce and it was brackish, and the well-to-do families had caravans organised to fetch sweet water from the interior.

Men from the whole ummah walked in these alleys. A Bengali pilgrim with his round cap passed a Moroccan merchant in his djellaba. A Sudanese shaykh in a dark robe stood still before a shop of Hadrami traders. Indonesian pilgrims in their hajji garb, often for the first time in their lives so far from home, looked about them with a mixture of reverence and exhaustion. In the mosques the adhan resounded five times a day. In the harbour taverns, insofar as there were any, sounded tongues that no Leiden Orientalist could ever wholly place.

Snouck drank all this in. He walked through the city, addressed people, and wrote everything down. He developed a mental map of who was who and who was connected with whom. He noted which families dominated the pilgrim economy, which caravan leaders enjoyed the trust of the Indonesian groups, which shaykhs in the city mosque exercised influence over the arriving and departing pilgrims. No detail seemed to him too trivial to note, for the details formed the structure of a community, and the structure was what he wished to understand.

In the waiting room

The months in Jeddah were not lost time. There Snouck already produced material that would later find its way into the two volumes of Mekka: observations of the Jeddah community, interviews with pilgrims who had completed the Hajj, notes on the social structure of Hijazi society, descriptions of the Hadrami diaspora and its role in the commercial life of the port city. His powers of observation were extraordinarily sharp, his memory exact, his habit of note-taking systematic.

He also built relationships. He was taken into the circle of the Jeddah community, Islamic scholars and merchants who knew him as a learned stranger who spoke the language and respected the customs. Through these contacts he also learned more about Meccan society: how the city was organised, which families were influential, how the system of Islamic instruction in the holy city worked, which shaykhs drew students from all over the Islamic world.

But the material he could gather in Jeddah was, in his own eyes, incomplete. The core of what he wished to understand, the inner heart of the holy community, the rituals he had analysed in his dissertation from the conditions of a Leiden library, the social dynamic of Meccan society: all of that required presence in the city itself.

He waited. He prepared himself. And on 17 January 1885 he was ready.

The boundary crossed

The moment at which Snouck pronounced the shahada and assumed the name Abdul Ghaffar lay not in Mecca but in Jeddah. Here, in the port city, before Muslim witnesses who knew him as a scholar with Islamic sympathies, the formal transition took place. He was recognised as a Muslim. He booked a place in the caravan to Mecca.

The eighty kilometres that separated him from the holy city were no longer legally unbridgeable. He had the status that made the boundary accessible. Or rather, he had assumed the appearance of that status. The reality of faith, the inner surrender that the shahada presupposes and requires, was absent.

This is the heart of what took place in Jeddah. A man intellectually brilliant, institutionally supported, methodologically consistent, and ethically rudderless crossed a boundary meant to protect a holy community. He did this deliberately, according to plan, and with premeditation. And he did it with the support, however implicit, of the Dutch state. The community that would receive him knew nothing of any of it. It would hear the shahada, and it would recognise the covenant it had always recognised in its ears.

The holy city lay open to him. What he would do there, and what it would cost the ummah, is the next chapter.

Sources

• Wim van den Doel, Snouck, Boom (2021)
• C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka, 2 vols., Martinus Nijhoff (1888-1889)
• C. Snouck Hurgronje, Verspreide Geschriften, 6 vols., K.F. Koehler (1923-1927)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)