The Indies Administrative Academy

1887, Leiden

The man who had returned from Mecca, as the previous chapter describes, now stood behind the lectern in a Leiden lecture hall and spoke about the institutions of Islam. Behind him were the bookcases with the Arabic manuscripts, and before him sat the students who within two years would be in Batavia, in Semarang, in Makassar, in the outposts of the Outer Territories. They needed knowledge of the Islamic society they would govern, and Snouck gave them that knowledge, ordered, systematic, and usable.

It was 1887, and nearly two years had passed since his hurried departure from the holy city. The notes lay on his desk in Leiden, waiting to be worked up into the great study he had already formed completely in his mind. Mekka I and Mekka II would appear in 1888 and 1889, yet even as he wrote, he also lectured, and even as he ordered his Meccan material, he was shaping a generation of civil servants.

The combination was not accidental, for it was the completion of the project Snouck had already begun in his dissertation of 1880: to produce knowledge about Islam that was usable for European purposes. In the lecture hall of 1887 that project reached its most immediate expression.

The private lecturer and his students

In the period from 1887 to 1889, Snouck was a private lecturer at the University of Leiden. The private lectureship was at that time a post through which one could build an academic career without a fixed salary or a professorial chair. One obtained the right to give lectures and to collect the tuition fees of students, and one depended on the willingness of students to attend the lectures and on the favour of the professors who occupied the chairs.

Snouck’s appointment as private lecturer in the “institutions of Islam” was, however, no precarious position. He was supported by De Goeje, he had an international reputation as an Islamologist, and his forthcoming publication of Mekka promised to strengthen his position further. Moreover, there was an urgent social need for what he had to offer: the training of colonial officials who had to understand and govern the Islamic society of Indonesia.

The students who attended his lectures were not the ordinary Leiden students who studied classical languages out of intellectual interest. They were predominantly enrolled in the programme that prepared them for service in the Dutch East Indies. The colonial administrative official of the late nineteenth century had to learn local languages, understand local customs, and be able to read the religious and social dynamics of the population. In a colony whose population was for the most part Muslim, knowledge of Islam was not an academic luxury but an administrative necessity.

Snouck taught from precisely that perspective. Not theology, not the study of faith, not spiritual deepening, but analysis. How does Islamic society work, which institutions structure it, how does the ulama function as a social class, how does the connection between Mecca and the Indonesian community work, and what are the mechanisms of Islamic mobilization and how can they be influenced, steered, and controlled.

Understanding in the service of governance

What Snouck taught his students was in essence a methodology of understanding in the service of governance. Not in those terms, of course. He spoke of “knowledge of the native population”, “understanding of the Islamic institutions”, and “insight into the religious dynamics of the archipelago”. But the underlying logic was clear and unmistakable. Whoever understands Islamic society well can govern it better, whoever knows how the religious networks work can map and influence them, and whoever understands how the Hajj connection functions can monitor it and control its political effects.

This is the core of the Snouckian method as an instrument of policy: the science of Islam in the service of the colonial order. It is not the brutal suppression of a religion, but the refined control of a society through knowledge of its structures. And refined control is more effective than brutality, because it knows what it controls, it knows the structure of the object and can act upon it more precisely with less resistance and lower social cost.

In these years Snouck formulated the distinction that bears his name in the history of colonial policy: the distinction between “religion” and “politics” within Islam. Religion, the personal practice of faith, the rituals, the prayer, the fasting, the pilgrimage, could be left free, because they pose no direct political threat to the colonial order. Politics, the Islamic claim to political power, the pan-Islamic solidarity, the religious justification of resistance to the colonial government, had to be suppressed, restricted, and neutralized.

The colonial administration was to protect the first and eliminate the second.

A distinction imposed from without

This distinction is intellectually brilliant and, from an Islamic perspective, fundamentally mistaken. It is brilliant because it creates the appearance of religious tolerance and respect for Islamic religious practice. The colonial government does not suppress the religion; it even protects it. It allows the Muslims to pray, to fast, to make pilgrimage. It protects the mosques and the Qur’an schools. What it forbids is not the faith but the political expression of it.

The Islamic tradition, however, does not make this distinction in the way Snouck prescribes. For the Islamic scholar, faith and community, prayer and justice, ritual and political order are not separable compartments that can function independently of one another. The shahada does not only say that there is no god but Allah ﷻ. It also says that the authority of Allah ﷻ is universal, and that human political ordering must be in accordance with the divine will as revealed through the Prophet ﷺ. This is not an extremist interpretation; it is the consensus of classical Islamic theology on the relationship between faith and society.

When the colonial administration compels the Islamic community to split its own tradition into an accepted religious part and an unacceptable political part, while the colonial administration itself determines which part is which, it does something the Islamic tradition itself has never done and does not recognize. It imposes a division constructed from without, one that does violence to the internal logic of the Islamic tradition, and one that serves as legitimation for the suppression of any Islamic resistance that carries even the slightest political dimension.

Snouck developed this framework, he taught it in Leiden, and he later applied it in Indonesia.

The generation he shaped

The influence of Snouck’s teaching in the years 1887 to 1889 is difficult to overstate, not least because it is difficult to measure the direct influence of academic teaching on later policy outcomes. But what is certain is that the students who attended his lectures went to Indonesia with an intellectual framework for understanding Islamic society that had been constructed to a great extent by Snouck. His distinction between religious practice and political Islam became the foundation of colonial Islam policy for decades, long after Snouck himself had left the stage.

His recommendations on which religious leaders to support and which to suppress, which Islamic organizations to regard as dangerous and which as manageable, how to monitor the returning pilgrims and to limit their political influence, all became policy guidelines, not only in his own time but as a legacy that would colour Dutch colonial politics in Indonesia well into the twentieth century.

Snouck did not merely shape a generation of officials; he formed a frame of thought. The frame of thought that analyses Islamic society as a system that can be controlled once one understands its components, that regards the ulama as a class with interests that can be influenced, that sees Islamic politics as a danger to be neutralized while Islamic religion as such is tolerated: this frame of thought is Snouck’s intellectual legacy in the colonial context.

It was already present in the lecture hall of 1887, fully formed, thoroughly worked out, and ready for export to Batavia.

The university as laboratory

The University of Leiden legitimated all of this by giving it an academic form. Snouck was not a colonial agent who hid his assignment behind scholarly pretensions. He was a genuine scholar who also rendered colonial services. The distinction was, institutionally speaking, real: the university stood formally outside colonial power, it was the free space of scholarship, and the knowledge it produced could in theory also be used by others for other purposes.

But the connection was structural and unmistakable. The students who absorbed Snouck’s knowledge became officials, the knowledge they carried with them became policy, and the analysis that sounded academic in the lecture hall functioned in Batavia as an instrument of governance. The academic legitimacy of Leiden Orientalism lent its products an authority that purely administrative knowledge did not have. It was not merely usable information; it was scientifically grounded information, produced by the finest Islamologist of his generation, verified by field research, and published in recognized academic series.

This is the political economy of the colonial scholar: the university produces knowledge, and the state consumes it. The producer remains clean, scientific, objective, while the consumer acts on the knowledge as he sees fit. And when the consequences become uncomfortable, the producer can always say that he only described, analysed, understood. Snouck did in fact later use this very argument. He was a scholar, not a politician, a describer, not an enforcer.

The people who bore the consequences of his advice, the Acehnese fighters who were defeated in part on the basis of his intelligence, the Islamic leaders in Indonesia whose movements were restricted on the basis of his categories, the pilgrims whose return was monitored on the basis of his insight into the Hajj networks, could not make this distinction. For them Snouck was not the describer but the designer of the system that imposed their restrictions.

Mekka I and II: the product of the deception

While Snouck lectured, he worked up his Meccan material. The notes, the observations, the interviews, the descriptions, all of this was turned in Leiden into the text of Mekka I and Mekka II. The reception was overwhelmingly positive in the European world of scholarship. Goldziher praised the work, the Leiden faculty was proud, and the Ministry noted its importance.

In the Islamic world the reaction, insofar as it reached Leiden, was different. That an unbeliever had entered the holy city under false pretences was, for Islamic scholars, no academic success but a sacrilege, a violation of the boundary that protected the sacred community. But the Islamic world had no access to the European academic debate. Its voice did not penetrate the journals and the congresses.

Mekka remained on the shelves as a monument of European Islamic scholarship. Its sources were not questioned, its method was not put up for discussion, and the Islamic community whose trust had been abused to write it was not consulted about its own portrayal.

Goldziher and the shared orientation

During the period of his Leiden private lectureship, Snouck maintained an intensive contact with Goldziher, whose research into the hadith literature was taking its definitive form in those same years. The correspondence between the two men, preserved and later published, offers a unique window onto the intellectual world of European Islamic scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century.

What stands out in the letters is the depth of the shared orientation. Both analysed the Islamic tradition as a historical phenomenon, both were sceptical of the Islamic claims to the divine origin of its institutions, and both regarded the critical method as the only legitimate instrument for understanding Islam. Yet both also had a genuine admiration for the richness of Islamic culture, the beauty of classical Arabic, and the intellectual depth of Islamic philosophy and theology.

This is the paradox of the great Orientalists: they admired the object of their study while they dismantled it. Their admiration, however, was that of the aesthete or the historian, not that of the believer. They valued the Islamic tradition as a human cultural product of great beauty and complexity, not as a divine revelation of universal validity. And this distinction made all the other distinctions possible: it made it possible to study Islam, to describe it, to analyse it, and at the same time to reduce it, to disenchant it, to instrumentalize it for non-Islamic purposes.

Snouck wrote to Goldziher about his Leiden students, about the challenges of transmitting Islamic knowledge to people who knew nothing of it, and about the tensions between academic thoroughness and administrative usefulness. Goldziher answered with intellectual encouragement and critical remarks on the analyses. They were friends in precise scholarly debate, and their friendship was grafted onto the shared conviction that Islam could be understood and had to be understood.

The shadow of Aceh

The Aceh War, which had already been going on for more than ten years by the time Snouck gave his Leiden lectures, was the immediate context for much of his teaching. The Acehnese fighters, who held off the Dutch troops year after year in a war of attrition that cost hundreds of thousands of guilders a year and had cost thousands of lives on both sides, were, in the analysis of the colonial administration, primarily religiously motivated. They fought for Islam, not only for their political autonomy, and the Islamic mobilization was the key to their exceptional will to fight and their capacity for sustained resistance.

Even in his Leiden period Snouck was already consulted on this question. His analysis was nuanced but had a clear policy direction: one had to distinguish between the religious and the political dimension of the Acehnese resistance. The religion was to be respected, and the political mobilization on religious grounds was to be broken. This required knowledge, more precise knowledge than the colonial administration had until then possessed, about the religious structures of Acehnese society, the role of the ulama, and the connections with Mecca.

Snouck had that knowledge, or the basis for it. His Meccan material offered insights into the pan-Islamic networks that were also relevant to the Acehnese situation, his forthcoming publication of Mekka would give him the authority to lend force to his advice, and his forthcoming journey to Indonesia would enable him to deepen and refine his analysis in the field itself.

The Aceh problem was the most concrete expression of the tension between the colonial state and the Islamic community that would define Snouck’s entire career. How to resolve that tension. Not through suppression, for the colonial administration had already tried that and it had not worked, but through understanding, through knowledge, by understanding Islamic society in a way that enabled policy to influence it without attacking it head-on. This was Snouck’s contribution to colonial thinking, and it was also his debt toward the Islamic community.

The waiting room for Batavia

In 1887 and 1888 Snouck was already in discussion with the Ministry of Colonies about an appointment in the Dutch East Indies. His knowledge of Mecca had made him valuable, his academic reputation gave him standing, and his command of Arabic together with his knowledge of Islamic society made him ideal for the post of adviser for Islamic affairs to the colonial government.

The Ministry of Colonies had long felt the need for such an adviser. The Aceh War simply would not end, the Islamic mobilization on Java was a constant source of unrest, and the networks that ran along the Hajj route had to be mapped and controlled. Snouck was the man who could do this, not only because he knew the theory but because he had seen Mecca from within, had met the shaykhs, and had observed the networks. His knowledge was not only academic but operational.

He accepted the appointment. He completed his Leiden duties, he published Mekka II in 1889, and later that year he departed for Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, where he would work for more than twenty years as the most influential adviser to the colonial administration on matters of Islam.

The closing of the circle

The years from 1887 to 1889 in Leiden form a transitional period, but in their intellectual and institutional significance they are a central one. Here Snouck closed the circle. From a student of theology to a private lecturer in the Islamic institutions, from a scholar who analyses the Hajj to an adviser who controls the Islamic community. The Leiden academy was the laboratory; Indonesia would be the field of application.

The continuity is impressive and oppressive at once. The dissertation of 1880, which reduced the Hajj to a pre-Islamic festival, laid the epistemological foundation: Islam is explicable, not untouchable. The congress of 1883 gave him the network that anchored his method institutionally. The Jeddah mission of 1884 gave him the access he needed. The Mecca infiltration of 1885 gave him the knowledge that could only be obtained through deception. The Leiden lectures of 1887 ensured that this knowledge was passed on to the people who would apply it.

Each station on this path built on the previous one, and each was necessary for the next. And the endpoint, the Indonesian Islamic community that was judged, categorized, and controlled by a system Snouck had designed, was already present in the embryonic form of the dissertation of 1880.

What the students took with them

It is worth pausing over what the student who sat in Snouck’s lecture hall in 1888 or 1889 took with him precisely to Indonesia. Not only factual knowledge of the five pillars, of the schools of fiqh, of the structure of the mosque. He took with him an attitude, a way of looking at the Muslims he would govern that was not that of a believer among believers, nor even of an outsider who approaches the umma with respect from an equal distance, but of an analyst standing above his object.

This attitude is difficult to document in a single sentence, because it is formed by hundreds of sentences, by the tone of the lecturer, by the self-evidence with which certain categories are used. A student who had learned in Leiden that the Hajj was historically explicable as an Islamized seasonal ritual, that the ulama were a socio-political class with class interests, that the pan-Islamic solidarity was a constructed instrument of mobilization of Ottoman politics, arrived in Batavia with an interpretive equipment by which he could immediately classify every form of Islamic expression within his own categories. What a believer experiences as obedience to a divine command, the student saw above all as a social phenomenon with knowable causes and manageable effects.

This was not hateful. It was not even openly condescending. It was genuinely interested and intellectually rich. But it was the gaze of the owner of the classification system upon the community that was being classified, and that gaze would shape the practice of governance in Indonesia for decades.

The farewell to Leiden

In the autumn of 1889 Snouck left Leiden for Batavia. He had what he needed: the knowledge, the method, the network, the institutional position. He also had the reputation of a man who understood his field like no other, who knew from within what Islamic society was and how it worked.

The Islamic community of Indonesia, which had no idea who would come to it, stood before an encounter with the man who believed he understood it from within because he had circled the Kaʿba as Abdul Ghaffar, in the holy city that was not his own, under a name that was a lie, with a faith he did not hold.

Batavia lay ready. The archipelago waited. And the second act of the story of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje could begin.

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)
• P. Sj. van Koningsveld et al. (eds.), Scholarship and Friendship: The Goldziher-Snouck Hurgronje Correspondence, Brill (2021)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)