Return to the Study

1906, Leiden

He stood behind the lectern in the Leiden auditorium on the morning of his inaugural lecture as full professor, and the hall was full. Colleagues, students, representatives of the Ministry of Colonies, people who knew his name from the reports he had written, from the books he had published, from the debates over Aceh that had filled the Dutch press in the preceding years. He was forty-nine years old. He had spent more than sixteen years in Indonesia, and now he was back in Leiden as professor of Arabic language and literature and of Islamic institutions, the chair that was his due.

The previous article ended at the Aceh War and at the quiet retreat: the voice that outlived the gunshot, the judgment of the umma that no rifle could erase. Now, in the inaugural lecture of 1906, the third act of his life began. No longer the official, no longer the adviser, but the professor, the publicist, the voice that reflected upon his past, defended it, sometimes reformulated it, yet never fully let it go.

The lecture and its purport

The lecture Snouck delivered in 1906 concerned the relationship of European scholarship to the Islamic world. It was less political and less policy-oriented than his Indies reports, yet in its academic formulation it turned upon the same fundamental conviction that had marked his entire career: the Islamic tradition is knowable, describable, and that knowledge is valuable for European purposes.

He did not speak about Aceh. He did not speak about the Short Declaration. He did not speak about Van Heutsz. The lecture was academic in the best and the worst sense of the word: intellectually sharp, institutionally reassuring, free of the uncomfortable details that might have troubled an audience of Leiden academics and colonial officials.

Yet the scholarship he described in the lecture was the same scholarship he had practised in Batavia and Buitenzorg, and the continuity was unmistakable to anyone who knew the archives. The professor in the Leiden auditorium was the same man who had classified the ulama ﵃ of Aceh as irreducible enemies of the colonial order.

His return to the study was not a rupture but a continuation in a different institutional context. The pen that had written the reports in Buitenzorg now wrote, in Leiden, the chapters for a new generation. The hand was the same. The question is what it now wrote, and what it did not write.

Nederland en de Islam: the synthetic work

In 1911 Snouck published his most accessible and most widely read work on the relationship of Dutch colonialism to the Islamic community of Indonesia: Nederland en de Islam. It was a collection of lectures, accessibly written for a broader public, and it offered the most coherent presentation of his Islam policy that he had ever published.

The work combines intellectual depth with a calm that, in the light of Aceh, is difficult to read without discomfort. Snouck presented his distinction between the religious and the political sphere of Islam as a scientifically grounded and humanely motivated contribution to colonial policy. He pointed to the positive results: the protection of the pilgrimage, the recognition of Islamic family law, and the careful handling of the Islamic community which, in his account, compared favourably against the brutal repression that had been attempted in other colonial contexts.

He wrote about the ulama with the tone of analytical neutrality that had characterised his Indies advice. But the reader who knew what had happened in Aceh read that analytical neutrality differently: as the intellectual position that had made it possible for the analytical category to be translated, in practice, into bullets.

Nederland en de Islam is a monument of colonial Islamic scholarship. It is also a document of moral self-justification that obscures the price the Islamic community had paid for the Islam policy.

The friendship with Goldziher: the last correspondence

The correspondence between Snouck and Ignaz Goldziher, which had begun in 1885 and continued until Goldziher’s death in 1921, reached its most intimate phase in the Leiden period. The two men had grown old, and their academic positions were established. The urgency of the earlier letters, the tension of new research and intellectual discovery, gave way to the deeper tone of friends who look back and who know that the great works have already been written.

Goldziher, in his Budapest study surrounded by the library he had built up over decades, wrote about his own ambivalence toward European Islamic scholarship and its relation to the Islamic community. He had devoted his life to the study of the Islamic hadith tradition, Islamic theology, and Islamic legal philosophy, and he admired the richness of what he had studied. He had his doubts, though he formulated them differently from how we would formulate them now, about the function of that scholarship in the colonial context.

Snouck answered with his own formulation of the relationship. He was not someone who doubted easily, not in his published work, but in the letters to Goldziher another tone is sometimes visible: less certain, less definitive, more open to the possibility that the outcomes of his work were other than he had intended.

Whether this was sincere self-reflection or the rhetorical tactic of a man who wished to maintain his position while avoiding the worst consequences is a question to which the correspondence gives no definitive answer. The letters have been preserved, published by S.M. Stern, and studied; yet they are layered enough to support several readings.

The late moderating voice

In his Leiden years after 1906, Snouck was less the advocate of the hard line than he had been in his Indies reports. There are specific moments when he distanced himself from certain aspects of colonial policy, refused to endorse certain recommendations, and criticised certain forms of repression.

He was concerned about the second-generation Islam policy as it was carried out by his successors in the colonial service. The doctrine he had created had passed into the hands of people who applied it without his nuances, who dropped the analytical care and retained the operational logic. The Islamic surveillance he had built up functioned also without him, and it produced results that he sometimes found went too far.

His concern, however, had a limited reach. He did not speak about the victims of the Aceh campaign. He did not recant his analysis of the ulama as the core of irreconcilable resistance. He did not publicly acknowledge that his advice had contributed to the military operations that had caused more deaths than any humane policy could have justified.

The late moderating voice is real but limited. It is the voice of a man who criticised the extremes of his own work without calling its foundation into question. That is not the voice of the penitent; it is the voice of the architect who found his work beautiful but regretted the errors of its execution. Late ambivalence is not absolution. It is a form of comfort that the man could summon because he sat in Leiden and had not died at Kuto Reh.

The students of Leiden and his academic legacy

In Leiden, Snouck formed a new generation of orientalists and Islamologists. His students, the most talented of Leiden Arabic and Islamic studies in the early twentieth century, sat in his lecture halls and received their training from the most authoritative Islamologist of his generation in the Netherlands.

The academic legacy he passed on was rich and complex. His knowledge of classical Arabic, his command of the Islamic legal and theological sources, and his methodological precision in historical-critical research were all an intellectual inheritance of the highest quality. His students learned from him how to read the Islamic sources, how to use the historiographical tradition of the Islamic world, and how to situate the Arabic texts in their historical context.

But they also inherited his analytical framework, including the fundamental distinction between religious and political Islam that had defined his policy work. For academics who ended up in the colonial service, this framework was directly applicable. For academics who worked purely scholarly, the framework became less directly relevant to policy, but it remained analytically present: the Islamic society as a system that can be understood by analysing and categorising its components.

Whether his students considered the moral implications of this inheritance in their training under the master is a question that the surviving sources do not fully answer. The academic world has a capacity for compartmentalisation that keeps the painful separate from the inspiring.

Scholarship and public opinion about Aceh

In the years after his return to Leiden, in the period around 1905 to 1915, a modest but real debate was conducted in the Netherlands about the Aceh campaign. The reports of the excesses of the concentration strategy also reached Dutch public opinion, through the press and through the accounts of returning soldiers. The Aceh affair was discussed in the Second Chamber; critical journalists wrote about the victims of the campaign. The reports of the Van Daalen expedition, and the photography of the fallen women and children before the fortified kampungs, moved some Dutch citizens to public outrage.

Snouck took a characteristic position in this debate: he defended the foundation of his policy, the necessity of breaking the ulama-led resistance, while regretting the excesses of its execution. It was a position that allowed him both to defend his analytical work and to distance himself from its most uncomfortable consequences.

His defence was intellectually skilled but morally unsatisfying. He could show that his analysis of Acehnese social structure had been correct, that the ulama had indeed formed the core of the resistance, that the strategy of uleëbalang co-optation and ulama elimination had been militarily effective. What he could not show, and did not try to show, was that the price of that success had been morally acceptable.

The reports of Kuto Reh and comparable incidents were present in this debate. Snouck responded to them not as the architect of a system that had produced such outcomes but as an outsider who regretted the errors of execution. That position had been made institutionally possible for him by his status as an academic: he had formally been an adviser, not a commander. The formal distance protected him from the direct accountability that a military commander would have had to render.

What Snouck still did, and what he no longer did

It is only just to name the positive things that Snouck continued to do in his Leiden years. He resisted, sometimes sharply, specific colonial proposals that he regarded as counterproductive or needlessly harsh. He refused to lend his voice to plans for further military escalation in other regions. He intervened, at the request of Indonesian correspondents or Arab scholars in Leiden, in individual cases where his influence could help. He defended the pilgrimage when some colonial officials wanted to restrict it again after the First World War. He dismissed the warnings of a “red Islam” and of a “communist threat through the mosques”, which arose in colonial circles in the 1920s, as partly invented and partly exaggerated.

What he did not do is equally important. He wrote no retraction of his Aceh reports. He expressed no public regret for the human lives the campaign had cost. After his departure in 1906 he never again visited Indonesia and did not seek out conversation with survivors or descendants. He did not acknowledge the Indonesian Islamic intellectuals who criticised his work as equal interlocutors. He kept his academic position and his institutional honour, and he left the structural critique of his work to later generations.

Between what he did and what he did not do lies the moral biography of a man who sheltered behind the status of scholar. He had not committed the deed, he had supplied the knowledge. He had not given the orders, he had furnished the categories. And in that separation he found, for a whole lifetime, room enough to be treated with full respect, even by people who knew what had been done in his name.

The correspondence with Goldziher on Islam and modernity

The correspondence with Goldziher, which reached its richest phase in the Leiden years, also addressed the question that moved both men deeply: the future of the Islamic tradition in the modern world.

Goldziher had described, in his great works, the historical development of Islamic theology and jurisprudence as a human, historical process, subject to the forces of politics, culture, and intellectual struggle that subject every human phenomenon to change. His analysis had undermined the Islamic claims to divine origin and absolute validity of its institutions in a way that the Islamic community found painful but that the academic world regarded as groundbreaking.

Snouck shared this analytical position. Both were convinced that the Islamic tradition was a human, historical product that could and had to undergo change in order to survive in the modern world. Both saw the Islamic modernist movement of Abduh ﵀ and Rashid Rida ﵀ as an interesting attempt at adaptation, though they were not free of scepticism about its success.

In the letters a tone of shared sorrow is sometimes discernible: two scholars who have deeply studied the Islamic tradition, who know its richness and appreciate its beauty, and who see how the tensions of colonial modernity increasingly place it under pressure. Goldziher was more authentic in this sorrow, insofar as his letters show it: he had held no direct policy responsibility and could lament the Islamic community without the doubleness of the man who had at once described it and contributed to its oppression.

Snouck always had that doubleness. Every word of admiration for Arab culture, every word of sympathy for the Islamic community, had to be read against the background of his Indies reports. The letters and the reports are the same man, and the two do violence to each other, though Snouck himself was evidently able to hold them in a compartmental balance that disturbs the historian but that the man plainly found possible.

The judgment of his contemporaries

In Leiden, Snouck was a respected figure, one of the great scholars of Dutch orientalism. His students admired him. His publications were discussed in the international academic journals. His correspondents in the Islamic world, insofar as he had any, wrote to him with respect.

But there were also other voices. In the Islamic community of Indonesia, in the circles of the emerging nationalist movement that began to speak in the early twentieth century, the name Snouck Hurgronje was not that of a protector but that of the man who had constructed the colonial Islam policy. Boedi Oetomo, founded in 1908, Sarekat Islam, founded in 1912, and the emerging Islamic organisations of Java and elsewhere in the archipelago grew up in the shadow of the Islam policy that Snouck had designed, and they defined themselves partly in opposition to the colonial categories that his work had created.

In Aceh, where the wounds of the Van Heutsz campaign were deepest, the memory was more concrete still. For the families of the slain, the descendants of the ulama who had fallen, and the communities that had been bombarded and burned, the abstract category “colonial adviser” was not abstract but personal. The memory of the war was alive in Aceh in a way that never reached the Leiden auditorium. What in Leiden was a paragraph in an inaugural lecture was, in a meunasah in the mountains of Pidie, a name remembered in a prayer.

Death in 1936

Snouck Hurgronje died on 26 June 1936, in his house in Leiden, at the age of seventy-nine. He had lived long and worked long. His final years were quiet; he had ordered his scholarly estate, published his Verspreide Geschriften in six volumes, and preserved his correspondence for posterity.

He died four years before Germany occupied the Netherlands and six years before Japan took Indonesia. The occupation by Japan ended Dutch colonial rule abruptly and, as would later prove, permanently. He did not live to see the independence of Indonesia, nor the radical revision of the colonial past that decolonisation brought with it. His reputation remained relatively unblemished in his own time, protected by the academic authority that had protected him his whole life long.

The radical reconsideration of his work, the recognition of the moral price of the Islam policy, and the linking of his name with the excesses of the Aceh campaign would all come in the decades after his death, in the historical revision of the Dutch colonial past that reached its full scope only in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Wim van den Doel’s biography of 2021 is a late chapter in that revision, and even it is no final word.

The foundation that cannot be lifted

The late ambivalence is real. The moderating voice is real. The sincere admiration for Arabic literature and Islamic culture is real. Snouck was a complex human being, as human beings are complex, full of contradictory impulses, of moments of insight and of numbness, of grand intellectual achievements and of moral blindnesses.

But the foundation of his work cannot be lifted by his ambivalence. The Islam policy is his work. The taxonomy of religious and political Islam is his construction. The classification of the Acehnese ulama as irreducible enemies of the colonial order is his analysis. The Short Declaration, the co-optation of the uleëbalangs, the isolation of the ulama, and the military campaign of Van Heutsz that built upon this foundation: all of this bears Snouck’s intellectual signature.

The foundation cannot be lifted. It can be acknowledged, interpreted, placed in its historical context, understood in its intellectual depth and in its moral insufficiency. But it cannot be talked away by pointing to his later doubts or his sincere love of Arabic poetry.

The Islamic community of Aceh paid the price of a framework it had never requested and never accepted. That is the foundation. It stands.

The umma and its own knowing

Here, in the closing section of the story of Snouck Hurgronje, it is necessary to turn the camera. Not toward Leiden, not toward the professor’s office, but toward the umma that had been his subject and that never became his object.

The Islamic community of Indonesia had its own answer to the questions that Snouck posed. It had its own scholars, its own traditions, its own insight into the relationship of faith to society. The ulama ﵃ of Aceh who fought, the pesantren masters of Java who taught, the ulama of the Minangkabau who wrote and thought: they were not the objects of knowledge but the bearers of a tradition older and richer than the European Islamic scholarship that described them.

The Islamic scholarly tradition had answers to the questions that Snouck posed, answers that did not fit into his categories but that were coherent and deep in their own terms. The question of whether Islam has a political dimension had been answered by the classical jurists centuries before: yes, and that dimension is not a department of the religion but its integral part. The question of whether Muslims have the right to defend themselves against violent occupation: yes, and that right is theologically grounded in revelation.

Snouck could not hear these answers as answers, for in his framework they were not scholarly but political, not knowledge but ideology. The asymmetry of colonial knowledge production is total: the European scholar describes, the Islamic community is described, and the described has no position from which to contest the description that the European academic institutions recognise as authoritative.

But the umma had a position. That position was not in the Leiden auditorium or in the reports to the Governor-General. It was in the meunasah, in the pesantren, in the Friday sermon, in the mutual conversations of the believers. It was in the memory passed on from generation to generation, in the names of the fallen that were remembered, in the conviction that the struggle for justice was not lost merely because it had been lost militarily.

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

The transition to Goldziher

The story of Snouck Hurgronje ends here, in the Leiden study, with his books and his letters and his unsettled accounts. The story of European Islamic scholarship does not end with him.

His friend and intellectual companion Ignaz Goldziher in Budapest represents another path within the same project of orientalism. Goldziher did not have the direct colonial connection that Snouck had. His work, the great studies of Islamic hadith literature, Islamic dogmatics, and Islamic sects, was more academic and less policy-oriented in character. His personal relationship to the Islamic community was in some respects more intimate and more complicated than Snouck’s: he had his own religious identity as a Jew, his own experience of minority existence in a non-Jewish world, and sometimes an admiration for the Islamic tradition that exceeded the bounds of academic distance.

Whether that admiration lifted the fundamental tension of the orientalist project, the tension between understanding the Islamic tradition and producing knowledge that serves non-Islamic powers, is the question that the next chapter of this theme will explore.

Snouck is the man who most directly embodies the connection between European Islamic scholarship and colonial administration. Goldziher is the man who most directly shows the intellectual richness and the moral tension of that connection without the operational directness of Snouck’s position.

The comparison between the two, the similarities in method and the differences in moral position, is the analytical key to understanding European orientalism as a historical and moral phenomenon.

That comparison begins in the next article, in the first period of Goldziher’s life, a Hungarian-Jewish boy growing up in Budapest who learns to master Arabic letters already at a young age.

The judgment of time

Snouck Hurgronje was grand and morally insufficient. He was the finest Islamologist of his generation in Europe and the architect of a policy framework that killed people. He protected the pilgrimage and he legitimised the bombardments. He admired Arabic poetry and he classified the ulama ﵃ as targets. He doubted in his final years and he did not recant his foundation.

All these things are true. None of them is the whole truth. The whole truth is the tension between all of them at once.

The Islamic community of Aceh, of Java, of the whole archipelago that experienced his work as colonial technology, has its own judgment. That judgment need not wait for the historians of the twenty-first century. It was always there, in the meunasahs, in the pesantrens, in the traditions of the community that had been the subject of his scholarship but never wished to be its object.

The scale that Allah ﷻ sets down is more precise than any historical judgment. It weighs not the intention alone, but also the effect. Not only the man, but also the structure. Not only the words of the reports, but also the silence that followed the reports of Kuto Reh. No rifle, no report, no Leiden lectern can escape this scale.

That is the judgment that falls beyond the reach of the historian. But the memory of it, the conviction that every injustice is weighed and every deed has its consequences beyond the limits of human memory, is a part of the Islamic tradition that Snouck studied and that he, despite everything, never fully understood.

The institutional legacy: the colonial institute and its heirs

Snouck’s institutional legacy in the Netherlands was considerable. The Royal Institute of Linguistics, Land and Ethnology, the KITLV in Leiden, which centralised the scholarly study of the Indonesian archipelago, bore the signature of his work and his generation. The Islamological section of Leiden University, which lived on after his retirement, was formed in part by him.

These institutes produced, in the twentieth century, a large part of the scholarly work on the Islamic society of Indonesia, and that work carried the legacy of the Snouckian method: the Islamic society as an object of knowledge, to be understood through the categories that European scholarship had constructed. The paradigmatic shift that would come in the second half of the twentieth century, the shift toward the Islamic community as the subject of its own history rather than the object of European categorisation, was made possible in part because the Indonesian Islamic scholars themselves took up the pen and told the story in their own words.

The decolonisation of scholarship followed the decolonisation of politics, but with its own timing and its own dynamics. Snouck’s institutional legacy was not destroyed in this but transformed: the knowledge he had built up, the methodological precision he had fostered, and the detailed description of Indonesian Islamic society that his work represented remained available as material for later generations who could read it differently than he had intended.

The Islamic resurgence after 1906 and Snouck’s analysis of it

The period after Snouck’s departure from Indonesia in 1906 was a period of growing Islamic organisation in the archipelago. Sarekat Islam, founded in 1912, grew rapidly into a mass movement with millions of members, the first Islamic popular movement of Indonesia. The Muhammadiyah of Ahmad Dahlan ﵀ expanded its network of schools and hospitals. The Nahdlatul Ulama, founded in 1926 by Hasyim Asy’ari ﵀, brought the traditional pesantren community into a structured framework. The Islamic press began to flourish, in Malay and in Arabic.

Snouck followed these developments from Leiden with analytical interest and administrative concern. His advice to the Ministry of Colonies, which continued also in his Leiden period, revealed a man who carefully distinguished the new Islamic organisations: which were religious and therefore acceptable, which were political and therefore dangerous. The Islam policy remained his analytical framework, even now that he was no longer on the spot.

But the Islamic community of Indonesia developed beyond the categories he had constructed. Sarekat Islam was neither purely religious nor purely political in the Snouckian sense: it combined religious identity with political demands, social movement with economic action. It did not fit neatly into the boxes that the Islam policy had created, and its success demonstrated that the Indonesian Muslim community would not let itself be sorted into the categories that the colonial administration had devised for it.

Snouck acknowledged this in his advice, though without drawing the fundamental consequence: his system of categories proved inadequate for the dynamics of an Islamic society that reorganised itself in response both to the colonial situation and to its own internal religious impulses. The umma once again gave itself its own form, and that form could no longer be captured by the Batavia reports.

The last word to the umma

A biography does not close with its subject, not when he has served in a history that is greater than he. The Islamic community of Indonesia outlived Snouck Hurgronje. The Republic of Indonesia was proclaimed in 1945, upon the Bismillah, with Islamic institutions that the colonial Islam policy had not been able to mow away. Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah are today mass movements with tens of millions of members, institutions that form the social fabric of the country. In Aceh the names of the fallen are still commemorated. In the meunasahs of the mountains people still recite from the same Qur’an that Teungku Chik di Tiro ﵀ carried forward when he wrote his fatwa.

The umma carries its own memory, its own judgment, its own scale. No Leiden professor, however great, has the last word over it. The last word rests with Allah ﷻ, on the Day of Resurrection, when the scales are set down. Until then it rests with the believers who have passed on their faith, notwithstanding everything that was constructed against them, everything that sought to reduce them to an object of knowledge, everything that wished to cut their community into a religious part that was permitted and a political part that had to die.

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

And with that word ends the period of Snouck Hurgronje within the theme of the False Mirror. The next article moves to Budapest, to the young Goldziher, to another face of the same scholarship, to another position within the same structural tension.

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)
• Ignaz Goldziher and C. Snouck Hurgronje, Briefwechsel, ed. S.M. Stern, E.J. Brill (1967)
• M.C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200, Palgrave Macmillan (2001)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)