Islam Policy

1889 and after, Buitenzorg

He sat at his desk in Buitenzorg and wrote. The rain fell, as the rain in Buitenzorg always falls, evenly and heavily in the early afternoon hours, and the sound of it on the roof of the office mingled with the scratching of his pen. Beyond the garden lay the botanical wonder-world of the Governor-General’s grounds, and behind the garden lay the city, the kampungs, the mosques, the langgars, the schools where the Qur’an was recited by thousands of children who knew nothing of the man in the office who was writing about them.

This is the image of Snouck’s Indies labour: the pen and the kampung, the description and the thing described, the knowledge and its object. Between the two sat power. And that power had a name that occupies a central place in the colonial policy history of the Netherlands Indies: Islam policy.

The previous article ended at his arrival in Batavia in April 1889, with the adviser who had completed his first month and whose institutional shadow was already visibly growing larger than his formal office. Here begins the work that cast that shadow. Here the doctrine that bears his name is constructed, the doctrine that would define Indonesia’s Islamic society for generations in the eyes of the colonial administration. And here, too, the criticism that the doctrine deserves must be formulated, not the superficial criticism that Snouck meant harm, but the deeper criticism that his framework did something only colonial power can do. It imposed the Islamic tradition upon its own believers as a corrected version of itself, stripped of the dimensions that the colonial administration found inconvenient.

The Founding Proposition

Snouck Hurgronje’s Islam policy rests on a single distinction. That distinction can be formulated as follows: the Islamic tradition can be divided into two spheres. The first sphere is the religious, comprising personal faith, ritual practice, prayer, fasting, the pilgrimage, family law, and the fulfilment of Islamic religious obligations within the private sphere of life. The second sphere is the political, comprising the Islamic claim to political authority, the use of Islamic arguments for political mobilization, the pan-Islamic solidarity that transcends national borders, and resistance to the colonial state on Islamic grounds.

The colonial administration, according to Snouck, had to protect the first sphere and eliminate the second. Muslims were free to pray, fast, make pilgrimage, marry and inherit according to Islamic law, follow their religious education, and build their mosques. But Muslims were not to make political claims on the basis of Islam, not to exercise a pan-Islamic solidarity that raised the Ottoman caliph in Constantinople above the Dutch Governor-General in Batavia, and not to invoke religious justification for resistance to colonial authority.

The doctrine sounded reasonable. It sounded even progressive compared to the policy of raw oppression that had preceded it. The colonial administration as protector of the Islamic religion: that was a positive formulation, a frame resonant with good intentions and scholarly care.

Yet in the message of the Prophet ﷺ there is no Islam that stands outside society; the salat and the zakat are one single fabric. And it was precisely this fabric that Islam policy tore in two.

The Intellectual Construction

Snouck built his doctrine not as an opportunistic political pamphlet but as a considered intellectual construction, grounded in his study of the Islamic tradition. He was the most accomplished Islamologist of his generation in the Netherlands, perhaps in Europe. His knowledge of classical Arabic, of Islamic jurisprudence, of the hadith sciences, and of Qur’anic exegesis was deep and nuanced. He knew what he was describing.

It was precisely this expertise that made his distinction dangerous. A crude ignoramus who claimed that religious and political Islam could be separated could be contradicted on the ground of factual knowledge. Snouck could not be contradicted in that way, not in the circles that mattered. His distinction carried the authority of academic Islamic scholarship, verified by fieldwork in Mecca and confirmed by the authority of Goldziher and the Leiden faculty.

But the distinction is intellectually untenable from within the Islamic tradition itself.

The classical Islamic theologians never made a systematic separation between the religious and the political domain of the kind Snouck prescribed. The Islamic concepts of din, dunya, and dawla, meaning faith, world, and state, are in the classical tradition not strictly separated compartments but overlapping spheres of human responsibility. The fiqh, the Islamic jurisprudence, regulates not only prayer and marriage but also contract, property, public order, and the relationship between the believers and the government.

The zakat, the obligatory religious contribution, is at once a religious duty and a socio-economic instrument. The amr bil-maruf wal-nahy an-il-munkar, the enjoining of the good and the forbidding of the reprehensible, is at once an individual obligation and a political claim: the community of believers has the duty to speak and to act when the public order stands in conflict with the divine will. This is no extremist interpretation of Islam; this is the consensus of the classical tradition, carried by the imams ﵃ of the four Sunni schools of law and by the scholars who built upon them.

When Snouck decreed that the political dimension of these traditions must be suppressed while the religious dimension is protected, he cut with a scalpel through a fabric that the Islamic tradition regards as indivisible. The blade of that scalpel is colonial power.

Religious Tolerance as Colonial Technology

Here lies the heart of the criticism of Islam policy: it is not religious tolerance but a colonial technology that uses the appearance of religious tolerance to dismantle the Islamic community’s political capacities.

Religious tolerance in the true sense of the word would allow the Islamic community to profess its faith as it itself believes that faith ought to be professed, including the political dimensions that in the Islamic tradition are inseparable from the practice of belief. Snouck’s tolerance is conditional: we tolerate your faith insofar as it does not hinder us. We protect your prayer, but we forbid your politics. We permit your pilgrimage, but we monitor your return. We recognize your family law, but we eliminate your political leaders.

This is not tolerance but a bargain, offered by the holder of power to the bearer of faith, in which the bearer of faith surrenders the political dimension of his faith in exchange for the protection of the ritual dimension. It is a bargain that can only be offered by someone with the violence to enforce it. And it is a bargain that the Islamic community never accepted, for it never signed.

Snouck knew this. He knew that the Islamic tradition did not recognize the distinction he was making. His letters and reports show a man who understands very well that he is designing a technology of control, not a system of protection. His formulation is precise on exactly this point: the Islamic religion must be protected, Islamic politics must be broken. Not: the Islamic community has a right to full religious freedom including its political implications.

The distinction is everything.

A Conversation in the Palace of Buitenzorg, Reconstructed

The counsel that Snouck gave to successive Governors-General concerning the Islamic community is partly preserved in the archives and partly passed into policy without written trace. What follows is not a literal quotation but a reconstruction, based on the tone, the argumentation, and the mutual positioning that emerge from the surviving correspondence and reports. It is expressly marked as reconstructed.

The last word is the heart of the matter. We draw the line. The Islamic community has no voice in where the boundary runs between what it may live of its faith and what it must forgo of it. The boundary is drawn for it, by someone who studies it but does not belong to it, and the boundary can be shifted according to the interests of the one who draws it.

How the Doctrine Worked in Practice

How did Islam policy work in the daily reality of the colony? It had three operational components, each of which touched its own field of Islamic activity.

The first component was the protection of religious practice. The colonial administration recognized Islamic family law in the priesterraad (raad agama), the religious court that applied Islamic marriage and inheritance law. It permitted the pilgrimage, albeit with restrictions; it respected the Islamic sacred months; it protected the Islamic schools, the pesantren, insofar as they engaged in no political activity. This was the positive side of the doctrine, the side that Snouck could present as proof of his sincerity and of the humanitarian intentions of colonial policy.

The second component was the surveillance of political Islam. In practice this meant monitoring the pilgrims returning from Mecca, who were regarded as potential carriers of pan-Islamic ideas. It meant mapping Islamic organizations and networks, identifying ulama who held political influence or made political statements, and reporting on contacts with the Ottoman caliph or with pan-Islamic movements elsewhere. It also meant limiting the influence of Arab traders and religious figures, the hadrami community, who were seen as carriers of foreign Islamic influences.

The third component was the elimination of the political ulama. This is the most drastic and most contested component of Islam policy, and the component directly connected to the bloodiest episode of Snouck’s Indies career: the Aceh War. In his reports Snouck analyzed the Acehnese ulama ﵃, the religious scholars who led the Islamic resistance, as a category that was in principle irreconcilable with the colonial order. Not all religious leaders, not the whole Islamic community, but the ulama who used their religious authority to justify and to lead political resistance. Those had to be broken. Not converted, not persuaded, not integrated into the colonial system: broken.

The uleëbalangs and the ulama: a Colonial Sociology

In his analysis of Acehnese society Snouck introduced a distinction that would take on military consequences: the distinction between the uleëbalangs and the ulama.

The uleëbalangs were the traditional aristocracy of Aceh, the chiefs of the gampongs and the mukims, the owners of the land and the holders of political power in the pre-colonial order. They had interests: property, authority, status. And interests, Snouck reasoned, are negotiable. An uleëbalang who could keep his landholding and his local authority under colonial rule had less reason to fight than he would have without that security. The uleëbalangs were, in Snouck’s analysis, potential partners of the colonial order.

The ulama were the religious scholars, the bearers of the transmission of Islamic learning, the teachers of the pesantren and the meunasahs, the men of the Qur’an and the sunna. They had no interests in the material sense that were negotiable with the colonial state. Their authority rested not on land or political position but on knowledge of the Islamic law and on the religious legitimacy that this knowledge conferred. Their resistance to the colonial state was not political opportunism but conviction of faith: the colonial occupation of an Islamic land was, in their theological analysis, an attack on the umma that imposed a religious duty of defence.

This distinction had far-reaching military and moral consequences. If the uleëbalangs were potential partners, the colonial administration had to win them by protecting their interests and respecting their status. If the ulama were irreducible enemies, the colonial administration had to eliminate them, not as persons but as political power, as a source of religious legitimation for resistance.

The Short Declaration of 1899 was the legal instrument of the first: the uleëbalangs who signed the declaration recognized Dutch sovereignty and received in return their local authority. The military campaigns of Van Heutsz were the military instrument of the second: the ulama who led the resistance were pursued, tracked down, captured, or killed.

Snouck had recommended both instruments. He had supplied the theory; others had carried out the execution.

What He Called Protection Became Suppression

Islam policy had a fatal internal logic that Snouck perhaps did not fully foresee but that was inevitable, given the premises of his doctrine.

If the boundary between the religious and the political sphere is drawn by the colonial administration, and if the colonial administration may suppress the political sphere while it protects the religious sphere, then the colonial administration is the authority that determines which part of the Islamic tradition falls into which category. The Islamic community has no say in that categorization. It can protest, but the protest itself then falls into the political category and is thereby already subject to suppression.

This is the circular structure of colonial religious policy: the government decides what is religion and what is politics, and only the first is permitted. Every protest against the categorization is itself already political and thus already forbidden. The Islamic community finds itself in a hermetically sealed system: it may profess its faith insofar as the faith is recognized by the colonial government as non-political, but it cannot call the categorization itself into question without being in violation.

In practice this meant that the limits of permitted Islamic practice were always determined by the interests of the colonial state. An ulama who spoke of the duty of Muslims to form an Islamic state: political, forbidden. An ulama who spoke of prayer, fasting, and Qur’anic recitation: religious, permitted. But the boundary between the two was not determined theologically but politically: the colonial state classified according to its own needs, not according to the internal logic of the Islamic tradition.

Snouck separated what Allah ﷻ had joined together. That separation was enforced by violence. And the violence was not the whim of those who carried it out; it was the logical fulfilment of a framework in which the government held the last word over what faith was allowed to be.

The Application in Administrative Practice: Concrete Cases

Islam policy was no abstract document but a working system that was applied in the daily practice of administration. How this worked can be seen in the concrete cases on which Snouck advised in his first years in Batavia.

A typical case: a resident in one of the outer provinces reports that a returning hadji in his district has opened a new Qur’an school and that his sermons have a strikingly political tone. Must the authorities intervene? Snouck advises: first investigate precisely what the content of the sermons is. If they concern prayer, fasting, and personal piety, there is no reason to intervene. If they call the believers to collective action against the colonial administration, or if they make the connection with pan-Islamic movements elsewhere, then monitoring and possibly restriction are justified.

The formulation sounds nuanced. But in practice it grants the resident a discretionary authority to judge, and that authority is guided by the categories Snouck has created. The resident now knows: religious is good, political is dangerous. But the boundary between the two is drawn anew in each concrete case by an official who himself has no deep knowledge of the Islamic tradition. That official knows he must be able to answer to his superiors: better too cautious than too late.

The result is a systematic tilting toward the categorization of Islamic activity as politically suspect. The threshold for intervention is formally high, but the practice of surveillance itself, the registering, the monitoring, the reporting, already has a restraining effect on the Islamic community. Whoever knows he is being watched behaves differently.

This is the effect of the surveillance state upon the religious community: not necessarily active repression but the internalization of the potentially repressive gaze as self-restraint. Islam policy produced not only its direct policy results but also this indirect norming of the Islamic community: the Muslim who censors his own sermons out of caution, the ulama who hides his networks, the hadji who keeps his new knowledge to himself out of fear of the colonial watcher.

Islamic Family Law and Its Limits

One of the concrete protections that Snouck’s Islam policy offered was the recognition of Islamic family law. In the priesterraden, the religious courts that functioned in the provinces, Islamic marriage and inheritance law was applied. Divorce, succession, marriage law: all of this was regulated not by Dutch civil law but by the Islamic law, the fiqh, applied by Islamic judges.

This was a genuine concession, a genuine recognition of the Islamic institutional structure. Snouck defended it vigorously against colonial officials who preferred the simplicity of a uniform legal system on the European model. His argument: Islamic society recognizes family law as a core of its religious identity. Any encroachment on it leads to resistance that raises the costs of administration. Its protection is both just and practical.

But the protection had limits that mirrored precisely the limits of Islam policy. Islamic family law was recognized insofar as it did not hinder the colonial order. Islamic criminal law, the hudud, the penalties that Islamic jurisprudence prescribes for certain offences, was not recognized. The Islamic obligation of taxation, the zakat as an institutional duty that the Islamic community imposed upon itself, was recognized in theory but not in the sense that it might compete with the Dutch tax revenues.

The limits of the protection were the limits of the colonial interest. What did not touch the colonial administration could be protected. What touched the colonial administration in its financial revenues or its security was not protected but suppressed.

Snouck knew this. His advices are clear about the limits. But the clarity of the limits does not make the protection into genuine religious freedom. It is, to stay with the metaphor, a reservation: a demarcated area within which the practice of Islam is permitted, with the colonial government as the guardian of the demarcation.

The Working of the Doctrine on the pesantren

The pesantren, the Islamic boarding school on Java that formed the backbone of the transmission of Islamic learning, was a particularly sensitive point in Islam policy. The pesantren was at once a religious institution, a social institution, and an intellectual institution: it formed the ulama of the future, it maintained the connection with the Islamic scholarly tradition, and it was the place where the Islamic community produced its own leaders, beyond the control of the colonial administration.

Snouck held an ambiguous judgement of the pesantren. On the one hand it was the institutional bearer of the Islamic tradition that he knew so well and at times admired. The pesantren culture with its intensive study of the Arabic texts, its intellectual tradition of commentary and debate, and its formation of scholars who mastered Islamic jurisprudence: all of this was for him not hostile but part of the Islamic cultural heritage that he respected.

On the other hand, the pesantren was the place where the next generation of ulama was formed, and those ulama were, in his taxonomy, potential carriers of the political dimension of Islam that had to be suppressed. The pesantren that gave purely religious formation was acceptable. The pesantren that also imparted political consciousness to its pupils, that drew the connection between the Islamic normative tradition and the political situation of the Islamic community under Dutch rule, was dangerous.

In practice this distinction was scarcely tenable. For the Islamic scholar, the Islamic normative tradition and the political situation of the Muslim community are not two separated domains. The question of what a just society is, the question of whether Muslims must obey a non-Islamic government, the question of which forms of resistance are Islamically legitimate: these are not political but theological questions, and they are taught in the pesantren because they are the core of the Islamic normative tradition.

The supervision of the pesantren that Islam policy implied was thereby a supervision of Islamic theology as such.

The Second Generation: Successors and Heirs

Snouck did not work alone. Over the course of his Indies years he formed a generation of colonial officials who internalized his method and reproduced his categories. The most direct of his successors were the so-called field Islamologists, officials with some training in the Arabic language and the Islamic institutions who functioned as his extension in the provinces.

This second generation, however, was different from the master. Snouck combined academic depth with operational acuity. His successors often had more of the second than the first. They knew the categories but not always the nuances. They knew that the ulama were dangerous and the uleëbalang useful, but they did not always understand why, and they could not always draw the boundary between the two as precisely as Snouck could.

The result was a systematic coarsening of Islam policy in the execution. Snouck’s subtle analysis became a blunt instrument in the hands of people who knew less but had to do more. The population that dealt with this execution experienced not the subtlety of the analysis but the direct consequences of the categorization.

This is a pattern that recurs in the institutional history of policy design: the designer of the system understands the nuances; the executors reproduce the categories without the nuances; the consequences for the people to whom the system applies become cruder than the designer had intended. Snouck can be held to account for this: whoever designs a system of categories intended for execution by others bears responsibility for the predictable coarsening that execution by others always brings with it.

The Doctrine as a Mirror of Orientalism

In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said analyzed the structure of European knowledge about the Islamic world as a knowledge system that does not describe but produces: the Orient that European scholarship described was not the Orient as it experienced itself, but the Orient as the European system needed it in order to understand and control it.

Snouck’s Islam policy is a perfect illustration of this structure. He produced a categorization of the Islamic tradition, a distinction between the religious and the political sphere, that arises not from the Islamic tradition itself but from the needs of the colonial administration. The colonial administration needed an Islamic community that was obedient, controllable, and politically inactive, while it remained religiously free so as to avoid social unrest. Snouck’s doctrine delivered precisely that Islamic community, constructed as an analytical category and then imposed as a policy reality.

The Islamic scholars whose category this was, the ulama of Aceh, of Java, of the Minangkabau, were not consulted. They were described. The description functioned as legitimation for the violence with which the thing described was transformed into the model of the description.

This is the Orientalist moment in Islam policy: the knowledge that pretends to describe while it in fact prescribes, that defines the Islamic tradition in a way that strips it of its political capacities and reduces its religious core to a controllable reservation of personal piety.

The Generous Reading and Its Limits

It would be unjust to describe Islam policy only from the critical dimension. Snouck also had sincere intentions, and his doctrine also had sincere positive effects.

He protected the pilgrimage. In his first years in Batavia he contested the inclination of some colonial officials to restrict or even forbid the Hajj, out of fear of the pan-Islamic influences that returning pilgrims might bring with them. His argument: prohibition leads to clandestine pilgrimages that are harder to monitor; protection with monitoring is the better policy. The argument was instrumental, but the result was a protection of a religious duty that concerned millions of Muslims.

He also protected Islamic family law. His advices resulted in the institutionalization of Islamic courts that could apply marriage and inheritance law, which was a recognition of the Islamic institutional structure that in other colonial contexts was not taken for granted.

And he contested the crudest forms of anti-Islamic discrimination in the colonial apparatus. His reports contain sharp criticism of colonial officials who despised the Islamic population or obstructed its religious practices out of ignorance or antipathy.

But the generous reading has a limit, and that limit is drawn by Aceh.

For Islam policy had in Aceh a consequence that morally overshadows all protection of prayer and pilgrimage: it classified the ulama ﵃ who led the religious resistance as political enemies who had to be broken, and that classification was carried out by a military apparatus that went far beyond what civilization or proportionality allowed. Snouck had created the analytical category. Van Heutsz had filled it with bullets.

His advice legitimized the bombardments. Not as his intention, but as the logical consequence of his framework.

The ulama and Their Answer

The ulama of Aceh, Java, and elsewhere in the archipelago understood Snouck’s Islam policy differently than he intended it. They saw not a protector of religion but an engineer of oppression, who had identified their political capacities with academic precision and then offered them to colonial power as a target.

In their own theological language they formulated an answer that Snouck could not hear, not because he did not read the Arabic but because he placed it in another category: religious, not political, and therefore not relevant to his policy advices. But the answer was there: in the fatwas that legitimized the resistance, in the sermons of the meunasahs, in the letters that circulated among the Islamic community of the archipelago.

The answer ran, put simply: the separation that this Dutchman prescribes does not exist in our tradition, and we do not recognize his authority to determine what is religion and what is politics. The zakat, the amr bil-maruf, the jihad in defence of the Islamic community: these are religious obligations, not political choices. Whoever forbids them or punishes their fulfilment is not the protector of our religion but its enemy.

This is the deepest point of the theological criticism: Snouck could not at the same time protect the Islamic community and politically emasculate it, for the political capacities he wished to dismantle are inseparably bound to the religious obligations he wished to protect. The protection was a sham, not because Snouck meant it so, but because the promise of protection was built upon a denial of what was to be protected.

The Doctrine That Bears His Name

Snouck Hurgronje’s Islam policy outlived him. It is not only a historical document of Dutch colonial policy in the period 1889 to 1942, but a model that has been applied elsewhere, sometimes explicitly, sometimes without knowing its intellectual foundation yet with the same operational logic: tolerate the private, ritual Islam; suppress the political Islam.

This model has made a worldwide career in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, far beyond the borders of the former Netherlands Indies. Every government that says it leaves Muslims free in their prayer while it forbids Islamic political organizations, every analysis that makes a neat distinction between a tolerable “moderate” Islam and a “political” Islam to be forbidden, stands in the intellectual inheritance of Snouck Hurgronje, whether his name appears in the analysis or not.

This is his intellectual legacy in the most uncomfortable sense: not only the Islam policy of the Netherlands Indies but an analytical frame that proved reproducible and was reproductive, that repeats its logic in every context where a non-Islamic power determines the parameters of permitted Islamic practice.

The Shortcomings of the Doctrine as an Intellectual Product

Apart from the moral criticism there is also an intellectual criticism of Islam policy that Snouck, as an Islamologist, ought to have foreseen.

The doctrine presupposes that the religious and the political sphere of Islam can be stably separated, that there is a clear boundary that can be drawn and maintained in practice. But the Islamic tradition knows no such stable boundary. The boundary is always contested, always dependent on the specific theological and juridical debate within the Islamic community itself.

When the colonial administration draws and maintains that boundary, it enters into an internal Islamic debate and decides it from the outside. It chooses a line that the Islamic community itself has not chosen. And because the colonial power draws and maintains the boundary, the boundary shifts as the interests of the colonial power shift. In times of unrest the category “political” shifts to encompass more; in quiet times it can be narrowed. The Islamic community has no control over its own position in the classification system that has been laid over it.

This too is an intellectual error: the doctrine presupposes a stability that does not exist, and the instability of the boundary gives the colonial power an instrument that can be used according to circumstances, without any principled limitation.

Snouck, the scrupulous Islamologist who knew how contested the boundaries of the Islamic debate were internally, ought to have foreseen this. That he did not foresee it, or would not foresee it, is one of the intellectual shortcomings of his work that the light of his later thought would illuminate only partly and too late.

The Insoluble Tension in the System

The deepest flaw in Islam policy is a systemic flaw: it rests on the assumption that it is possible to draw an external boundary within a tradition without changing that tradition itself. But every boundary drawn from the outside changes the object that it bounds. When the colonial administration decrees that Islamic practice is acceptable insofar as it keeps to the boundary of the “religious”, it changes Islamic practice itself: it forces it into a category imposed from the outside, and it sanctions the Islamic identity that fits the approved category while it punishes the Islamic identity that falls outside the category.

The result is an Islamic community that is gradually shaped after the model of the colonial category: an Islam that learns to understand itself as private religion, as ritual practice, as personal piety without a political dimension, because that is the only version that is not punished. This is not protection of the Islamic religion but its transformation into a functional equivalent of the privatized religion of European Protestantism, which likewise regards the distinction between the private and the public domain as normative.

Snouck could have foreseen this pattern if he had followed the logic of his own system. That he did not do so, or would not do so, is one of the inner inconsistencies of his intellectual project.

The Pan-Islamic Threat and the Next Step

Islam policy did not stand on its own. It was part of a larger analytical framework that also encompassed the pan-Islamic movement under Abdülhamid II, the connections along the Hajj route, and the networks of Arab scholars who linked the archipelago to the greater Islamic world.

Snouck analyzed the pan-Islamic movement as a security threat to the colonial order. His surveillance of the returning pilgrims, his monitoring of the Arab community, and his reports on the relationship between the Ottoman caliphate and the Indonesian Muslim community: all of this was connected to his Islam policy by the underlying logic that every connection of the Indonesian Muslims to the greater Islamic world was potentially political and therefore potentially dangerous.

How Snouck analyzed that pan-Islamic threat, how he saw the connection between the Ottoman caliph and the kampungs of Java and Aceh, and how his surveillance of the Hajj networks functioned as a policy instrument: that is the subject of the next article.

Islam Policy in Comparison with Other Colonial Approaches

Snouck’s Islam policy was not the only possible colonial approach to the Islamic community. In the British, French, and Russian colonial contexts other strategies were followed, sometimes with comparable results, sometimes fundamentally different.

The British approach in India was more gradual and less systematic than the Snouckian one. The British had no Snouck, no Islamologist of his calibre who constructed a coherent policy framework for the whole of the British Islamic colonies. Instead they developed pragmatic local solutions, sometimes more tolerant, sometimes more repressive than the Dutch policy, depending on the local situation and the personality of the responsible administrators.

The French approach in North Africa, in Algeria and Morocco, was more explicitly assimilationist: the Islamic population had to be integrated into the French cultural and administrative order, not administered through its own religious institutions. Snouck’s Islam policy was by comparison paternalistic but also more respectful of Islamic institutional distinctiveness: he wished to administer the Islamic community in its own terms, not to dissolve it in a European cultural homogeneity.

This difference is not trivial. Dutch policy, on the basis of Snouck’s advices, left the Islamic institutional structures of Indonesia relatively intact, which meant that after decolonization they were available as a basis for building an Islamic public space in independent Indonesia. French policy in Algeria damaged the Islamic institutional structures more deeply, with consequences that reverberate into the present period.

Whether this is a credit to Snouck’s approach, or simply a difference in colonial system without moral significance, is a question that historians answer differently. But it is a difference that must be noted in an honest assessment of his legacy.

Islam Policy and Its Refutation by the Islamic Modernists

The Islamic modernist movement that in the early twentieth century also gained a foothold in Indonesia, under the influence of the Egyptian thought of Muhammad Abduh ﵀ and Rashid Rida ﵀, delivered an implicit refutation of the underlying structure of Snouck’s Islam policy.

The Islamic modernists held: Islam is dynamic, it is capable of renewing itself, it has the means within its own tradition to answer the challenges of modernity. It need not be administered by a colonial power that determines from the outside what the correct Islamic practice is. The Islamic community can itself make the distinction between what is time-bound and what is eternal in its tradition.

This was an intellectual answer to the Orientalist premise that the Islamic tradition had to be understood and administered from the outside. It was also a political answer: if the Islamic community can understand and renew its own tradition, then it does not need the colonial adviser, and then Islam policy is a tutelage that it does not accept.

The founding of the Muhammadiyah in 1912 in Yogyakarta, by Ahmad Dahlan ﵀, was a concrete institutional manifestation of this answer: an Islamic modernist organization that founded schools, established social institutions, and organized the Islamic community in a way that neither accepted the colonial tutelage nor blindly reproduced the traditional pesantren system.

Snouck regarded the Islamic modernists with mixed feelings. He recognized their intellectual quality; he distrusted their political potential. The Islamic modernists stood, in his taxonomy, on the boundary of the religious and the political sphere, and that borderline position made them analytically complicated for his system.

Toward the External Threat

Up to this point the doctrine concerned what could be done with the Islamic community within the archipelago: how to categorize it, how to protect it in its ritual core, how to disarm it in its political capacities. But the Indonesian umma was not an isolated population. It was connected to a worldwide community that the Prophet ﷺ had created and that had survived the centuries. In Constantinople sat a sultan who cast himself as the leader of that community. In Mecca the Indonesian pilgrims stood among fellow believers from every region of the world. In Cairo and Beirut journals were printed that reached the archipelago along the same shipping routes as the Hajj.

How Snouck read that pan-Islamic connection as a threat that had to be integrated with his domestic doctrine into a single administrative grip: that is the step the next article takes.

Sources

• Wim van den Doel, Snouck, Boom (2021)
• C. Snouck Hurgronje, Nederland en de Islam, E.J. Brill (1911)
• C. Snouck Hurgronje, Verspreide Geschriften, 6 vols., K.F. Koehler (1923–1927)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)
• M.C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200, Palgrave Macmillan (2001)
• Harry J. Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun: Indonesian Islam under the Japanese Occupation 1942–1945, W. van Hoeve (1958)