Pan-Islamism

1889 and after, Batavia and Buitenzorg

In the kampungs of Java and Sumatra they echoed, the reports from Constantinople: the Friday sermons in which the name of the great caliph was invoked, the announcements that arrived through returning pilgrims, and the thought that in that distant city on the Bosphorus a Sultan-Caliph reigned who wished to gather the Muslims of the world beneath a single banner. Sultan Abdülhamid II had made the pan-Islamic idea into state policy. He had mosques built in the farthest corners of the Islamic world, he sent emissaries to the colonies of the European powers, and he ordered that his name be mentioned in the Friday sermon as the successor of the Prophet ﷺ, as amir al-muʾminin, commander of the believers. And in the meunasahs and the langgars of the archipelago, far from Constantinople, far from Mecca, far from everything the Ottoman court imagined as its imperial sphere, Muslims heard that name.

The previous article closed on the heart of Islam policy: the separation of the religious and the political spheres of Islam, and the claim that Snouck divided what Allah ﷻ had joined together. The pan-Islamic threat was the other side of the same question. If domestic Islam policy sought to categorize and disarm the Islamic community from within, then pan-Islamism was the external gateway through which political energy could flow from without to within. Snouck’s two analyses, the domestic and the foreign, dovetail seamlessly. They are not two subjects; they are one machine of control with two axes.

The question that occupied Snouck Hurgronje, and that kept the colonial administrators in Buitenzorg awake, was simple in its formulation and complex in its consequences: what did that name in Constantinople do to the Javanese peasant, the Acehnese craftsman, the Minangkabau trader? What did it mean for them that somewhere in the world a caliph reigned who laid claim to their religious loyalty?

Abdülhamid II and the caliphate as a political instrument

Abdülhamid II ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1909, a period that coincides with the greater part of Snouck’s career in the Indies. In that period he formulated an Islamic policy that turned the Ottoman caliphate into a political instrument within the European colonial rivalries: the pan-Islamic movement.

The idea was not new. The Ottoman caliphate as a religio-political institution was already centuries old, though its authority over non-Ottoman Muslims had always been contested and limited. But Abdülhamid II gave it a new urgency and a new institutional substance. He invested in ties with Muslim communities in the British, French, Dutch, and Russian colonies. He had the Hejaz railway built, which would eventually connect Damascus with Medina, an infrastructure project that was both practical, easing the Hajj for Muslims from across the empire, and symbolic, strengthening the Ottoman presence in the holy cities in a way visible to all Muslims worldwide. He sent emissaries to Indonesia, India, and North Africa, and he invested in an international Islamic press that spread his name and his claim from Cairo to Singapore.

For the European colonial powers this was a direct threat. An Ottoman sultan who laid claim to the religious loyalty of Muslims in British India, French Algeria, and Dutch Indonesia was a potential instrument of anti-colonial mobilization. If the Muslims in the colonies placed their religious loyalty to Constantinople above their political obedience to the colonial state, the entire structure of colonial rule could be undermined.

This was the fear. Whether it was real, in the military-operational sense, is another question. But fear has a workings of its own. It creates policy, even when its object ultimately behaves differently from what it predicts.

The Hajj as an information network

The pilgrimage to Mecca was the most concrete channel of connection between the Indonesian Muslim community and the wider Islamic world. Every year thousands of Indonesian Muslims set out for Mecca to perform the Hajj. They stayed there for weeks or months, sometimes studying under scholars of Mecca or Medina, meeting Muslims from other parts of the world, and returning with new knowledge, new ideas, new contacts.

Snouck had seen this network from within, in 1885, during his infiltration of Mecca as Abdul Ghaffar. He knew how the Indonesian community in Mecca was organized, who the influential shaykhs were, which scholars drew the most students, and how religious information spread through returning pilgrims. That knowledge was not merely academic; it was operationally useful for colonial surveillance.

After his arrival in Batavia, Snouck built a surveillance system that monitored the returning hajis. On arrival in the Indonesian ports, returning pilgrims were identified, registered, and sometimes interrogated. Their activities after their return were watched, particularly if they took up new religious activities, founded schools, or exercised political influence within their community.

The logic was that of Islam policy: the Hajj itself was a religious duty to be protected, while the political influences that pilgrims might bring back from Mecca were dangerous and had to be monitored. The boundary between religious deepening and political influence was once again drawn by the colonial administration, according to its own standards.

Snouck’s analysis of the pan-Islamic threat

Snouck was not the most alarmist voice in the colonial debate over pan-Islamism. Compared with some colonial soldiers and administrators, who regarded the pan-Islamic movement as an immediate and existential threat to colonial rule, he was measured. His reports and publications contained both an acknowledgment of the pan-Islamic movement and a qualification of its practical danger.

His analysis was in essence the following: the pan-Islamic idea has a religious appeal to Muslims across the world, but its organizational capacity is limited. The Ottoman caliph holds symbolic authority but no operational control over the Muslim communities in the colonies. The returning pilgrims bring new ideas with them, but the conversion of ideas into political action requires local organization and local leaders, and these are controllable if the colonial administration is well informed.

Yet this is precisely where his two analyses meet: Islam policy and the pan-Islamism analysis are two sides of the same policy program. Islam policy supplies the taxonomy: this is religious (acceptable), this is political (dangerous). The pan-Islamism analysis supplies the external dimension: these are the connections that link the Indonesian Muslim community with the wider Islamic world, and those connections are potentially dangerous because they can facilitate political mobilization.

Together the two analyses give the colonial administration a complete technology of control: internally you classify Islam into the religious and the political, externally you monitor the connections that can bring political impulses in from outside. The circle is closed.

The umma as lived reality, not as analytical category

Before the pan-Islamic movement had become a security category in the reports of colonial advisers, it was a lived reality for the Muslims of the archipelago. This is a distinction that must be emphasized in any historical analysis, because the colonial documentation systematically conceals it.

In the Islamic tradition the umma is not a political organization but a community of believers bound together by shared faith in Allah ﷻ and the message of the Prophet ﷺ. The Javanese woman who performs the salat toward the Kaʿba, knowing that at that same hour millions of others are doing the same, experiences the umma not as a category but as a concrete reality of time and space. The Acehnese scholar who reads a book by an Egyptian author experiences the world of scholarship as a living conversation, not as a network. The Minangkabau trader who drinks tea with a Moroccan in Mecca experiences the community of believers as company, not as a security risk.

This must be said first, otherwise we do not understand the pan-Islamic movement under Abdülhamid II. It was no artificial construct of an ambitious sultan. It was the political articulation of a feeling that already existed within the umma, that was bound to its very form of existence, and that took on a new urgency through the colonial oppression of Muslim societies in British India, French Algeria, and the Dutch East Indies. Abdülhamid II did not invent a sentiment; he gave it an address.

Snouck knew this. In his more reflective passages he acknowledges that pan-Islamic sympathy does not arise from Constantinople’s manipulation but from the essential structure of the Islamic community. But his policy recommendations did not proceed from that acknowledgment; they proceeded from the position that the sentiment, however natural in its origin, had to be controlled in its consequences.

The concrete vectors of the caliphal message

How did the name of Abdülhamid II travel to the kampungs of the archipelago? The most direct vector was the khutbah, the Friday sermon. In the Hejaz, in Mecca and Medina, where thousands of Indonesian pilgrims stayed each year, the name of the caliph was mentioned in the Ottoman-affiliated mosques as the commander of the believers. The pilgrim who returned carried the memory of that liturgical recognition with him, and that memory traveled further than any pamphlet.

The second vector was the diplomatic one. Ottoman emissaries visited the archipelago, sometimes officially by way of Singapore, sometimes more covertly. Their conversations with uleëbalangs in Aceh, with sayyids in the hadrami community, and with religious leaders on Java left traces that the Dutch intelligence service could sometimes trace and sometimes not.

The third vector was the press. Al-Manar of Muhammad Abduh ﵀ and Rashid Rida ﵀, published in Cairo from 1898, reached the archipelago by way of Singapore. Before Al-Manar there had already been Al-Urwa al-Wuthqa of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani ﵀, shorter-lived but influential. Local Malay periodicals reprinted articles and translated them. The Islamic press was slow by the reckoning of our own time, but it was effective: an idea formulated in Cairo could be read within a year in a pesantren in Central Java.

The fourth vector was trade. The Indian Ocean had been an Islamic maritime realm for centuries before European colonialism. Arab, Indian, Malay, and Indonesian traders had their routes and their meeting places. News of the faith traveled with their goods. A fatwa from Mecca could arrive in Banda Aceh before the Dutch Resident had learned of it.

Snouck knew all four vectors. He had taken part in each of them during his year in Mecca. His surveillance system tried to intercept, or at least monitor, all four. But even his system could not interrupt the most fundamental vector: the heart of the believer that seeks the Kaʿba in its five daily prayers, and with it the confirmation of a community that allows itself to be bounded neither geographically nor politically.

The Javanese and Acehnese haji: two portraits

For Snouck the returning pilgrim was a type, a social category with specific characteristics and specific risks. But the concrete individuals who returned from the Hajj, the hajis of Java and Aceh, were not types but people with their own lives, their own experiences, their own insights that they brought back from Mecca.

For the Javanese haji the pilgrimage was often a transformation of life. He returned with a new title, a new status in his community, a new religious seriousness that set him apart from his surroundings. The white clothing, the cloth about the head, the use of Arabic formulas in his everyday speech: these were signs of a changed man, someone who had seen the holy city and who carried the experience with him as a permanent change.

In the eyes of the colonial administration, through Snouck’s analytical framework, this transformation was potentially dangerous. Not the pious acts themselves, but the new connection with the wider Islamic world, the new knowledge of Islamic positions toward the colonial powers, the new contacts with scholars who sometimes held outspoken views on the relationship between Islam and colonial domination.

For the Acehnese haji the situation was different. Aceh had a longer and more intense relationship with Mecca than most other parts of the archipelago. Acehnese scholars had studied in Mecca for centuries; Acehnese merchants had maintained trade networks along the Hajj route; Acehnese religious authorities were tied to the great centers of learning of the Islamic Middle East. The connection was not new but a continuity of centuries.

The Acehnese resistance to Dutch colonialism, which Snouck found as a persistent and ever more urgent problem, was fed in part by these connections. The ulama ﵃ who led the resistance had periods of study in Mecca behind them, knew the Islamic theological traditions concerning jihad and the defense of the Islamic community, and were in contact with scholars elsewhere who confirmed their position theologically.

Snouck saw these connections as a security risk. The Islamic community saw them as a community.

The Ottoman caliph and the kampung: the reach of the connection

How concrete was the connection between Ottoman pan-Islamic politics and the kampungs of the Javanese and Acehnese Muslim community? This is a question that still occupies historians, and the answer is more nuanced than either the colonial fear or the pan-Islamic hope suggested.

There were connections. Ottoman emissaries visited the Indonesian archipelago, sometimes officially, sometimes covertly. Letters from the Ottoman sultan reached Aceh in the period before and during the early phase of the Aceh War, with offers of support or simply as expressions of Islamic solidarity. Acehnese leaders had sought contact with Constantinople, had asked for the protection of the Ottoman caliph against Dutch colonialism.

But the practical consequences of these connections were limited. Ottoman military power could not reach the Indonesian archipelago; the logistical and geographical gulf was too great. Pan-Islamic solidarity was real as feeling, as religious identity, as a source of moral support for the fighters in Aceh. But it could supply no troops, no weapons, no concrete military or political aid.

Snouck understood this, intellectually. His reports acknowledge the limited operational capacity of the pan-Islamic movement. But his policy recommendations went further than the intellectual analysis. Even a symbolic connection was dangerous if it strengthened the moral backbone of the Islamic resistance. Even a caliph who could send no troops was dangerous if he gave the Acehnese fighters the conviction that their struggle held a religious legitimacy the colonial state could not take away.

The pan-Islamic movement was therefore for Snouck not primarily a military but a moral-religious threat. Moral-religious threats are, within his framework, precisely the threats most dangerous to the colonial order, because they cannot be neutralized by material concessions but only by breaking the religious infrastructure that carries them.

The Arabs in the archipelago: the hadrami community

A specific object of Snouck’s surveillance was the Arab community of the archipelago, the hadramis of Yemeni descent who had traded in Indonesia for centuries and who held a particular religious position within the local Islamic community. The hadrami scholars, descendants of the family of the Prophet ﷺ, the sayyids and sharifs, were bearers of a religious authority conferred by their lineage: as descendants of the House of the Prophet ﷺ they held a special status in the eyes of pious Muslims.

Snouck was wary of the hadrami community, not because of their origin but because of their connections. They had trade networks that linked the archipelago with the Arab world, with Mecca and Medina, with the Ottoman Empire, and with the wider Islamic community of the Indian Ocean coast. They could pass on information and impulses that the colonial administration did not want passed on.

His advice concerning the hadrami community was a refinement of his Islam policy: distinguish the pious trader from the political agitator, monitor the religious leaders who exercised political influence, restrict the mobility of those classified as dangerous. Here too: the boundary between religious and political, drawn by the colonial administration.

The Hejaz railway and international Hajj politics

A concrete example of Abdülhamid II’s pan-Islamic ambition is the Hejaz railway, whose construction began in 1900 and which by 1908 connected Damascus with Medina. It was an infrastructure project of imperial scale, financed in large part by donations from Muslims across the world, gathered through the international Islamic press. Indonesian Muslims donated to it. Indian Muslims donated to it. Egyptian, Algerian, and Moroccan Muslims donated to it.

For Snouck this project was a case study in the workings of pan-Islamic sentiment. Its material form was technology, iron and steam, but its financing was a worldwide mobilization of the umma around a shared goal. The railway itself made the pilgrimage easier, and that was its practical side. But its symbolic side was greater: it proved that the Muslims of the world could cooperate in a common project, that the caliph in Constantinople could mobilize them for a shared goal, and that modern technology could be put to use by Islamic institutions.

The self-confidence that arose from this was precisely what the colonial administration did not want. A demoralized umma is manageable. An umma that experiences its ability to act worldwide, its recognizability worldwide, and the readiness of the modern world’s instruments to serve its own ends as well, is a different political subject from the atomized community for which Islam policy had been calculated.

Abdülhamid II’s Hajj politics went further than the railway. He invested in the holy cities, in the logistics of the pilgrimage, and in the protection of the pilgrims against the Bedouin raids that in earlier centuries had plagued the Hajj. He positioned the Ottoman state as the protector of the Hajj, and thereby as the natural authority over the whole umma. That is worldwide soft power on an Islamic foundation, a century before the term soft power was coined.

Snouck saw all this with the acuity of the scholar and the concern of the colonial adviser. In his reports Abdülhamid II appears as a serious adversary: not militarily, but politically and symbolically. And in the world of pan-Islamism the symbolic was not subordinate to the material. It was the building block out of which the material might later be constructed.

The Arab press and its spread in the archipelago

Another vector of pan-Islamic influence that Snouck mapped was the Islamic press. In Cairo, Beirut, and later also in Singapore and Batavia themselves, Arabic and Malay periodicals and newspapers appeared that carried Islamic news reporting, conducted theological discussions, and sometimes published explicitly political commentary on the situation of Muslims under European colonialism.

Al-Manar, the influential Islamic reform journal that Muhammad Abduh ﵀ and Rashid Rida ﵀ published in Cairo from 1898, also reached the Indonesian archipelago, if in limited print runs. The Islamic modernist movement that Al-Manar represented, the Salafiyya of that generation, argued for a return to the sources of the Islamic tradition combined with a critical engagement with Western modernity. This was intellectually challenging, even for Snouck, who followed the movement with the ambivalence of a man who recognized its intellectual quality but considered its political implications dangerous.

The Islamic modernists posed a question that struck at the very foundation of Islam policy: who determines what the correct interpretation of the Islamic tradition is? For Snouck the answer was, implicitly, the European science of Islam that had studied the sources historically and critically. For the Islamic modernists it was the Islamic community itself, schooled in the sources and the traditions, but also in conversation with modernity.

If the Islamic community itself determines what its religion is and what it is not, then the basis of the colonial Islam policy disappears: there is then no external authority that can draw the boundary between the acceptable religious and the political to be suppressed. The Islamic community would draw that boundary itself, and it would draw it differently from Snouck.

The world of Islamic scholarship as an information network

Beside the Hajj and the hadrami community there was a third channel that Snouck mapped: the international world of Islamic scholarship. Islamic scholars in Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Constantinople, and Beirut corresponded with their pupils and contacts in the archipelago. Books, treatises, and fatwas traveled by way of the trade routes of the Indian Ocean to the bookshelves of the Acehnese and Javanese ulama.

Snouck knew this network. He had been part of it as Abdul Ghaffar. He knew which scholars in Mecca were the most influential teachers for the Indonesian students, which works were read, which theological positions were dominant. And he knew that this network, alongside its religious function, also had a political dimension: the Islamic theology of jihad, of the relationship of the Muslim community to non-Islamic rulers, of the duty of resistance, was not secret but available to anyone who could read the Arabic texts.

The ulama of Aceh could read those texts. They cited them in their sermons. They used the classical Islamic legal tradition on the defense of Islamic territory as justification for their struggle. For Snouck this was the political dimension of the world of Islamic scholarship that had to be suppressed. For the ulama it was the religious core of their obligation.

No rifle could erase this answer, no bombardment, no telegram.

The instrumentalization of fear

There is a point at which the analysis of the pan-Islamic movement ceased to be a neutral scientific description and became an instrument of policy legitimation. That point is hard to fix exactly, but it is discernible in the structure of Snouck’s reports.

When he describes the pan-Islamic connections as a threat requiring surveillance and control, he implies that every contact of the Indonesian Muslim community with the wider Islamic world is a potential danger. Every new idea that arrives by way of the Hajj route, every letter from a Meccan scholar, every dissemination of new religious texts: all of this falls under the category of the pan-Islamic connection to be monitored and controlled.

The consequence is that the Islamic community of Indonesia stands permanently under surveillance, not because its members have done anything but because they are Muslims in a colony of a non-Islamic power, and because their faith connects them with a wider world that the colonial administration regards as potentially hostile.

This is the structure of collective surveillance on religious grounds. Every Muslim is potentially suspect, not as an individual but as a member of the umma, the community that stands in solidarity across borders. The surveillance strikes not the perpetrator but the believer.

Snouck personally was more nuanced: he drew distinctions, he pointed to the limited practical danger, he warned against overreaction. But the system he helped set up was not nuanced. It was a surveillance apparatus that treated the believer as such as potentially suspect. Between the architecture of the system and its execution in practice lies the moral gulf that his intellectual nuance could not fully bridge.

The meaning of the umma connection for the community itself

It is necessary to describe also the perspective of the Islamic community itself: what did the connection with the wider Islamic world mean for it, apart from the security categories of the colonial administration?

The connection with Mecca, with the world of Islamic scholarship, with the umma across the borders of the Ottoman Empire and the European colonies, was for the Indonesian Muslim community not a political instrument but a spiritual reality. It gave the Indonesian Muslim community an identity broader than the island, the residency, the colony. It was part of something greater: a worldwide community that recited the same Qur’an, performed the same prayers, celebrated the same sacred months. The returning haji who told of the multitude of pilgrims from Africa, Asia, and Arabia who circled the Kaʿba together described an experience of community that transcended the geographical and political borders of the colony.

For Snouck this experience was a security risk. For the umma it was a source of strength, of identity, of the certainty that the Islamic faith was not a local custom but a universal reality.

No law could forbid this feeling. No surveillance could take it away. No Islam policy, however refined, could reduce the faith experience of the Muslim community to a categorized function within an administrative system.

The connection with Aceh and the inevitable confrontation

The pan-Islamic analysis was not merely an abstract policy analysis. It had its most concrete and most dramatic application in Aceh, where the Islamic resistance to Dutch colonialism found its most organized and most enduring expression.

The ulama ﵃ of Aceh, who formed the core of the resistance, were precisely the type of religious leaders that Snouck classified as dangerous in his pan-Islamism analysis: they had studies in Mecca behind them, they were connected to the wider world of Islamic scholarship, they used Islamic theological arguments to legitimize the resistance, and they refused to recognize the separation that Snouck made between the religious and the political dimension of Islam.

For Snouck the Acehnese ulama were the living refutation of his optimistic projection that the Islamic community, if the colonial administration approached it well, would accept Islam policy. The ulama did not accept it. They fought.

And that fight, the Aceh War in its bloodiest and most destructive phase, is the subject of the next article. How Snouck analyzed the Acehnese situation, what his reports recommended, who the executors were, and what the price was: that is the moral core of the whole story of Snouck Hurgronje. There, in the mountains of Aceh and in the quiet of his office in Buitenzorg, the two analyses of this article and the previous one come together into a single catastrophe.

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)
• M.C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200, Palgrave Macmillan (2001)
• Anthony Reid, The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern Sumatra, Oxford University Press (1979)
• Michael F. Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma below the Winds, Routledge (2003)