The Correspondence

The previous article ended with a book and with a shadow. While Goldziher, in his study in Budapest, dissected the hadith and completed Muhammedanische Studien, he maintained a correspondence with the one contemporary who was his equal in the knowledge of Islam, a Dutchman who had entered Islam in an altogether different and far darker manner. That man was Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, the central figure of the first period of this theme, the scholar who had moved among the believers in Mecca under a false name and who had afterwards placed his knowledge in the service of the longest colonial war in Dutch history. Between these two men, the one from Leiden and the other from Budapest, a stream of letters passed back and forth over the course of forty years, nearly five hundred in number, and in those letters something becomes visible that neither life could show on its own. For here the two halves of this theme touch one another, not as opposition and not as likeness, but as a mirror in which each of the two reflects the other and in which the question that carries this whole period comes to light.

The correspondence has been preserved, and it has been published, for its volume and its significance were so great that it merited a scholarly edition of its own. In 1985 there appeared in Leiden the edition by P. Sj. van Koningsveld, under the title Scholarship and Friendship in Early Islamwissenschaft: The Letters of C. Snouck Hurgronje to I. Goldziher, and it contained 469 letters from Snouck to Goldziher, supplemented by nineteen letters from other members of his family to the Goldziher household. It is the same scholar who also acted as an editor of sources in the first period of this theme, which lends a certain continuity to the apparatus on which this narrative rests. In those same years Van Koningsveld published still more of Snouck’s correspondence, among it that with Nöldeke, so that the web of letters in which the early study of Islam discussed itself has been charted and made accessible.

The very title that Van Koningsveld gave his edition deserves attention, for in two words it sums up what this correspondence is: scholarship and friendship. These were no official letters and no diplomatic documents, but the confidential exchange of two men for whom scholarship and affection had become a single fabric. In the early study of Islam, the discipline that in these years first acquired its name and its contours, such bonds were the mortar that held the whole together, and the historian who wishes to understand the rise of this field cannot pass the letters by. They show the field not as it presented itself in its printed works, polished and sure of its case, but as it was truly practised, groping, doubting, dependent on the judgement of the single other whom one trusted.

Two Young Stars

They came to know each other in the eighteen-eighties, when both were still young and both were already recognised as exceptional talents. Modern Islamwissenschaft, the study of Islam that in these decades took shape as an independent field, had its founders, and the historiography of the discipline commonly names three names in one breath: Theodor Nöldeke, who was the eldest and the teacher of many, Ignác Goldziher, and Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje. They formed a triangle of scholarship that set the tone for generations, and the two youngest of this trio found in each other an interlocutor of equal stature. Goldziher had in his youth studied, among other places, in Leiden, at the same university that had formed Snouck, so that the roots of both men’s education lay partly in the same soil, in the historical-critical method that we described in the opening article of this theme.

Nöldeke was the eldest of the three, and to both younger men he was a benchmark. His Geschichte des Qorans, which came up in the opening article of the previous period, had set the tone for the scholarly treatment of the Qur’an, and his judgement weighed heavily in the small world of the field. Both Snouck and Goldziher maintained a correspondence with him, and Van Koningsveld has made those letters accessible as well, so that one sees each of the three corners of the triangle connected to the others. The method that united them was the same as the one the Leiden School had applied to the Bible, the historical-critical reading that treats a text as a product of its time, and what the one applied to the Qur’an, the other to the hadith, and the third to the law and politics of Islam, was at bottom one and the same approach. They were, to use the image of this theme, three craftsmen who worked with the same tools on different parts of the same house, and the tools shaped what they built more than they themselves realised.

It was a time of international congresses and gold medals, of a scholarly world that organised itself across borders and in which the young orientalist could make his name. In 1889, the same year in which the first volume of Muhammedanische Studien appeared, Goldziher received at the Orientalist Congress in Stockholm the great gold medal, a recognition that confirmed his stature in the field even as the university of his own city continued to withhold from him the chair that was his due. The congresses where the orientalists met one another, among them the congress in Leiden of which the first period of this theme spoke, were the places where the friendship between Snouck and Goldziher could be nourished, and where the two men spoke to each other face to face about the texts and the questions that occupied them both.

One must picture the smallness of this world in order to grasp the meaning of such a friendship. The number of people who could read the Arabic sources at the highest level, decipher the manuscripts, and judge the finest questions of early Islam amounted, in all of Europe, to no more than a handful, and they nearly all knew one another, read one another’s work, contended for one another’s favour and esteem, and formed a republic of scholars that stretched across national frontiers. Within that small republic, Snouck and Goldziher were not merely colleagues but allies, two men who recognised in each other the equal and who gave each other the recognition that their own surroundings sometimes withheld. For Goldziher, who spent his days in Budapest among clerks and municipal officials and who in his diary would bitterly lament the narrowness in which he was confined, the correspondence with the friend in Leiden must have been a window onto the world to which, by his deepest conviction, he belonged and from which he had been shut out.

What bound them was in the first place scholarship itself. They corresponded about manuscripts and traditions, about the dating of texts and the meaning of words, about the discoveries and the errors of their colleagues. The letters are for a large part the conversation of two craftsmen who meet each other at the highest level, who read each other’s work before it appears, who encourage and correct each other, and who recognise in each other the rare other who truly understands to what they devote their lives. For a scholar occupied with early Islam, such interlocutors were extremely scarce, for the field was small and the men who truly mastered the sources in Arabic were few. That two of them found each other and remained faithful for forty years was for both a rare good fortune, and the letters breathe that gratitude, even where they treat the driest of philological questions.

In a letter from 1886, a year after his return from Mecca, Snouck wrote to Goldziher words that strike the later reader, for in them he declared that he had never had any objection to the religious elements of Islam. From the mouth of the man who had gained access to the holy city under a false conversion, such a statement acquires a double bottom that the correspondence nowhere resolves, and which the reader must carry himself. For what does it mean that a man declares he has no objection to the religion whose most holy place he entered under an assumed name. Is it the sincere appreciation of a scholar who had come to know Islam from within and truly loved something of it, or is it the detached benevolence of someone for whom the religion remained an object of study that one might admire as one admires a building, without the thought that it might have something to say about the admirer himself. The letter itself does not decide that question, and Goldziher, who received it, has left behind no answer to it that has come down to us. But the thought presses itself upon one that Goldziher, who on the exalted Friday in Cairo had been more devout than ever in his life, had come to know the religious elements of Islam otherwise than his Leiden friend, not as an institution against which one may or may not have an objection, but as a prayer that one prays along with others.

Letters Between Leiden and Budapest

This correspondence stretched over forty years, and it accompanied the entire careers of both men. When Snouck completed his great work on Mecca, the fruit of his contested sojourn in the holy city, Goldziher was one of the first to read and judge it, for who else in Europe could truly weigh the value of such a description. When Goldziher was working on his studies of the hadith, on the book the previous article treated, he had in the Leiden friend a reader who knew the sources and who could follow his reasoning down to its finest ramifications. They shared their discoveries and their irritations, their judgements of colleagues and their concerns about the future of the field, and through the decades there grew between them an intimacy that reflected the rarity of both men’s position. It is this steady, years-long fidelity that makes the correspondence more than a collection of learned notes. It is the trace of a friendship that lasted two lives long.

One must guard against the temptation to read into these letters more than they carry, and that restraint is here a commandment of honesty and not merely of caution. The correspondence is a scholarly correspondence, and whoever searches in it for confessions, for deep questions of conscience, or for a reckoning between the two lives, will for the most part be disappointed. The men wrote about their field, and the field was for both an almost complete world. It is precisely that sobriety that makes the few places where the personal breaks through all the more telling, and it compels the narrator to the discipline of not filling in what the pages keep silent.

For there is a silence in these letters, and it is a telling silence. The one correspondent, Snouck, was in the years in which he wrote to Goldziher entangled in the colonial politics of the Dutch East Indies. He advised the government, he analysed the Acehnese resistance, he formulated the doctrine that identified the religious scholars of Aceh as the irreconcilable core of the resistance, the doctrine of which the thirteenth article of the previous period spoke. The other correspondent, Goldziher, refused all his life every service to any empire and stayed with his scholarship and with his congregation. What the one did and what the other left undone thus lay miles apart, and yet they wrote to each other as friends and fellows of the craft. What did Goldziher know of Aceh, and what did he think of it. The honest narrative must here keep its hands to itself. The letters that have been published do not bear the weight of an expressed judgement by Goldziher on Snouck’s counsel of war, and whoever would construct such a judgement would be writing a novel and not history. The silence may sound as silence. It need not be filled in to be meaningful.

There is yet a second reason for restraint, and it touches on the nature of the source itself. The published correspondence consists above all of the letters from Snouck to Goldziher, for those have been preserved in the estate of the Hungarian, while the other half of the conversation, the letters from Goldziher to Snouck, has come down to us far more incompletely. Whoever reads the correspondence therefore hears in the first place the one voice, and must reconstruct the other from what the first answers. That is one more reason not to put into Goldziher’s mouth what he did not demonstrably write, and to limit the narrative to what the pages truly carry. History gains nothing from a feigned judgement, however tempting it would be to give the silent friend a voice on the war that the speaking friend helped to wage.

What the letters do carry is the unmistakable warmth between the two men, an affection that survived the decades and that expressed itself in the care for each other’s well-being, in the sharing of each other’s joys and sorrows, in the fidelity of a correspondence that ended only when death broke it off. It was a friendship between two people who saw each other rarely and yet remained close to each other, borne by the ink and the paper that bridged the distance between Leiden and Budapest. And it is precisely this warmth that makes the mirroring so sharp, for it shows that the two lives were not divided from each other by character or by hardness. They were both amiable, learned, devoted men. The distinction between them lay not in their hearts. It lay in the roads they took with the same knowledge in hand.

The Excluded Man and the Initiated

To see the mirroring in its full sharpness, one must not merely lay the two lives side by side but let them run simultaneously, for they ran through the same decades and that simultaneity makes the contrast all the more painful. In the years in which Snouck rose, Goldziher was shut out, and it was the same time, the same scholarly world, the same method that made the one an adviser to a colonial empire and the other the secretary of a Jewish congregation.

While Snouck in the eighteen-eighties returned from Mecca as a celebrated scholar, whose description of the holy city astonished the scholarly world and whose career opened toward Leiden and toward Batavia, Goldziher sat in Budapest keeping the administration of births, marriages, and burials, because the university of his own city withheld from him, as a Jew, the chair that had long been his due. While Snouck in the eighteen-nineties wrote his De Atjehers and formulated the doctrine that would determine the course of a war, Goldziher declined one foreign offer after another, a professorship at Heidelberg in 1893, an offer from Cambridge the year after, because he did not wish to leave his country and his community, and after each refusal he returned to his office at the congregation. The one was admitted into the chambers of power and made of his knowledge an instrument of governance. The other was shut out of the chambers of scholarship and kept his knowledge, partly because he could not do otherwise and partly because he would not, free of all service to any power.

In those years of exclusion the friendship with Snouck became for Goldziher probably more than a collegial bond, for it connected him with the world of recognition and equality that his daily surroundings denied him. The man who in Budapest was treated as a subordinate, as the secretary to whom one gave orders, was in the correspondence with Leiden a master among masters, someone whose judgement was sought and whose work was admired. The diary he kept in secret and that would not appear until long after his death is full of the bitterness over the humiliations he underwent at home, and against that background the fidelity of the distant friendship takes on something moving. It was one of the few places where Goldziher was allowed to be what, by his deepest conviction, he was, a scholar of the first rank, recognised by the one contemporary whose recognition in this field truly counted.

There is a bitter symmetry in this simultaneity, and it deepens the thesis of this period. For if the distortion of the orientalist gaze had been a privilege of the powerful, of the scholars who stood in the service of empires and who had their scholarship paid for by ministries of colonies, then one might have explained it from that power alone, and then Goldziher, the excluded man, would have been spared it. But he was not spared it. The man who served no power, who himself belonged to the humiliated, who as a Jew in the Habsburg empire knew in his own flesh what exclusion meant, nonetheless wrote the book that devalued the hadith. The distortion lay therefore not in the power but in the gaze, not in the empire but in the method, and that is precisely what this period wishes to make visible. The mirror distorts even in the hands of one who has himself been set before the mirror and not admitted to the hall.

The Friendship as Mirror

Here the thesis of this whole period becomes explicit, and it is good to formulate it with care, for it is subtle and lets itself easily be coarsened. Snouck and Goldziher shared a method. They had both absorbed the historical-critical approach of the Leiden School, the approach that treats revelation as a historical document and that leaves its claim to a vertical origin out of consideration. They shared a field, a network, a series of congresses, and a mutual respect that neither of them ever renounced. And yet their lives diverged to the point of opposition. The one travelled under a false name to Mecca and placed his knowledge in the service of a colonial regime that subjugated the Muslims of Sumatra. The other refused every offer that would have led him away from his country and from his congregation, and he kept his scholarship free of all servitude to power.

What does this opposition teach. It teaches first of all that the method does not of itself lead to the one life or the other, that between the historical-critical reading of Islam and the colonial subjugation of Muslims there exists no iron necessity, but a choice. Snouck chose to make his knowledge an instrument of governance. Goldziher refused that step. The mirror distorts for both the image of revelation, for both read it as sediment of its time and both deny it the capacity to be anything that surpasses time. But the distortion in the work need not be accompanied by a transgression in the life, and with Goldziher it was not. That is the reason why this period grants him more warmth than the previous period granted Snouck, and why that greater warmth is historically deserved and not sentimentality.

This observation is of importance, for it guards the narrative against a determinism that would absolve people of their responsibility. Whoever would claim that the method inevitably drove Snouck to colonial service would thereby unwittingly exonerate him, as if he could not have done otherwise. The presence of Goldziher in this same story refutes that thought, for he possessed the same method and made a different choice. The instrument imposes a certain gaze on its user, but it does not compel him to a certain deed, and between the gaze and the deed there remains the free human being who is responsible for what he does with his knowledge. Snouck chose power. Goldziher chose his congregation and his conscience. The mirror gave them the same distorted image, but what they did with that image was their own affair, and history holds each of them to his own choice.

But the opposition teaches something second as well, and that is the more painful insight. For even the purer of the two, the man who deceived no one and subjugated no one, produced with his scholarship a distortion that has continued to work long after his death. The method distributes its fruit unequally over the deeds of people, but it distributes its distortion equally over the image of revelation. Snouck deceived Mecca and armed Aceh. Goldziher remained honest and remained at home. And yet it was precisely Goldziher who wrote the book that devalued the hadith in Western eyes, while Snouck embodied most sharply the political consequences of the orientalist gaze. The guilt does not lie equal, and this theme will never claim that it lies equal. But the distortion is the same, and that is what the mirror shows when one holds the two lives side by side.

The Qur’an speaks of the way in which people come to know one another, and it is a word that casts a peculiar light on this friendship, for it treats the knowing that reaches further than perceiving. It is a word in which Allah ﷻ presents the diversity of peoples and tribes not as an obstacle but as an invitation, as the very reason why humanity was created in its multiplicity.

The knowing of which this verse speaks is a knowing that recognises the other in his own distinctiveness, that bridges the boundaries of people and language without effacing them, and that makes the other not into an object of study but into a counterpart whom one truly hears. It is precisely this knowing that the orientalist method, however learned, could not bring forth, for it placed the knowing scholar always above the known object and let the Muslim be studied but never speak back as an authoritative voice. Snouck and Goldziher knew each other as friends, as equal to equal, and that reciprocity was absent precisely where they would have needed it most, in their dealings with the tradition they studied.

One sees that asymmetry most clearly when one considers how the two men dealt with each other and how they dealt with their subject. Toward each other they were willing to listen, to revise, to suspend their judgement before the arguments of the other. Toward the tradition they studied, and above all toward the transmitters who had passed on the words of the Prophet ﷺ, they knew no such willingness. The Companions ﵃ who had carried the transmission, the scholars who had tested it, the community that had preserved it as an entrusted good, appeared in the work of the orientalist not as voices one ought to hear, but as phenomena one ought to explain. The friendship proved that both men were capable of reciprocity. Their scholarship proved that they withheld that reciprocity from the tradition. And therein lies, more subtly than any indictment can say it, the shortcoming that neither man’s virtues could make good.

What the Method Shares, It Does Not Share the Guilt Equally

There remains, after all this, a difference that one may not blur in the name of symmetry, and it is a difference that the narrative emphatically holds fast. The mirroring of the two lives is an instructive image, but it is no balance that brings both men into equilibrium. Snouck’s knowledge became blood, for it passed over into policy recommendations that set villages ablaze and that marked the religious leaders of a people as enemies to be exterminated. Goldziher’s knowledge became a book, a contested book, a book that pointed out a wrong road in the understanding of the hadith, but a book and not a command. It is an essential difference between the distortion that touches only the image and the distortion that wounds life itself, and this theme has never had the intention of equating the two.

And yet, and this is the paradoxical conclusion of this interlude, the friendship between these two men was perhaps the purest thing the early study of Islam brought forth. Two scholars who remained faithful to each other over forty years and over many national borders, who entrusted each other their thoughts and read each other’s work with love, who in a time of nationalism and imperialism maintained a bond that was tributary to no empire. That the fruit of their shared method turned out so differently, and that even the purest fruit remained a distortion, is the tragedy that this theme wishes to show, without resolving it into an easy judgement.

It is tempting to pass, at the end of such a reflection, a judgement that closes the account, to make the one into a villain and the other into a saint, or to catch both in a single moral verdict. But the letters themselves resist that simplicity. They show two people, with their virtues and their blind spots, with their affection and their limitations, who together stood at the cradle of a scholarship that would shape the dealings between the West and Islam for a century. Whoever wishes to do them justice must learn to live with the tension they embody, with the observation that sincerity and distortion can dwell in the same man, that love for a tradition can go together with a method that imposes silence on that same tradition. That is no comfortable conclusion, and it is not meant to console. It is meant to be true.

This weighing is no relativising of Snouck’s deeds and just as little a palliating of Goldziher’s book, but an attempt to estimate both at their own weight. The reader of today, who can survey the consequences of both lives in a way the contemporaries could not, may wield that balance without turning it into a tribunal. It is not a matter of passing a verdict on two men who can no longer defend themselves, but of understanding what their example teaches us about the relation between knowledge and disposition, between what one knows and what one does with one’s knowing. That is the fruit the correspondence carries for us, and it is richer than any simple judgement of good and evil could have been.

The correspondence runs on until just before Goldziher’s death in 1921, and it thereby forms the thread that physically strings together the two periods of this theme. When that thread breaks, when the last letter has been written and the old friend has departed, there remains of Goldziher not only this network of correspondence, but also a series of late works and a diary that would not speak until long after his death, and in which the bitter inner side of this scholarly life at last became visible. To those last years, and to the rejoinder that the century after him would give to his work, the closing article of this period leads.

Sources

• P. Sj. van Koningsveld (ed.), Scholarship and Friendship in Early Islamwissenschaft: The Letters of C. Snouck Hurgronje to I. Goldziher, Leiden (1985)
• Róbert Simon, Ignác Goldziher: His Life and Scholarship as Reflected in his Works and Correspondence, Brill/Akadémiai Kiadó (1986)
• Ignác Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien, 2 vols., Halle (1889-1890)
• Wim van den Doel, Snouck, Boom (2021)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)