A convert to Islam in 1915: Carl Wolff Schoemaker

I am now finishing my last assignments for the great CMR: Bibliographical History of Christian Muslim Relations. In the entry on Ache I wrote about a father and a son. First the father: Jan Prosper Schoemaker was born in Ambarawa, south of Semarang, Fort Willem I, on 12 July 1852 apparently in a family of the KNIL, the Royal Dutch Indies Army. He married in 1877 and had three children between 1880 and 1886. He died in The Hague 23 February 1918. He was active in the KNIL in the 1870s and 1880s in Aceh and afterwards started a career as a writer on popular colonial history. His first book was on the Aceh War in two volumes, published in 1887 and 1890. They were followed by one on Lombok, another on wars in Java, Boni and Banjarmasin and several other works. He sometimes gave other titles to previous work and also published sections of it as separate booklets.  The two volumes on Aceh were also translated in Malay. Most of his books were several times reprinted in sometimes more than ten thousand copies. He was definitely a popular writer about the heroism of the colonial army. In 1908 he published with the prestigious firm of Brill a book on ‘the Asian Danger’ (Het Aziatisch Gevaar).  

The son is more adventurous: His son Charles Prosper Wolff Schoemaker (born 1882 in Banyubiru, Semarang, and died 1949 in Bandung) was a very successful architect in the last decades of colonial Indonesia. He was a professor at the Technical University of Bandung since 1922 and mentor of the first President of Indonesia, Soekarno. He converted in 1915 to Islam, but his five successive spouses were all Dutch ladies. In 1921 he became the architect for the new Catholic St. Peter’s Cathedral, built in neo-gothic style. In 1933 he built the mosque in the new European section of the town of Bandung on Nijlandweg (now Jalan Cipaganti). The mosque was built in traditional Javanese joglo-style with three roofs. However, in the history of architecture he is best known as the architect for great villas, like this Vila Isola (see above) in the mountains just outside Bandung. It was for one of the owners of the colonial newspapers in the 1920s.

In 1937 he published a small book of 116 pages, together with Muhammad Natsir, with the titel Cultuur Islam. It was reprinted in 1948 by Sinar Ilmu or Tintamas in Jakarta under the title of Keboedajaän Islam. In the copy I borrowed from KITLV/Asian Library in Leiden, there was a review by Baahrum Rangkuti. He writes that pages 67-114 are on international Islamic architecture and written by Schoemaker. The first section of the book must have been written by Natsir, although this is not clear from the book itself. The first section discusses early Muslim history, the results of the translation from Greek philosophers and other science to Arabic and the glory of Islam in Baghdad, Basra, Damascus, Toledo, Cordova. Quite much here about the excellence of medical knowledge with the Arabs, the decline of Europe in the period until 1100.
Wolff Schoemaker als writes about architecture of later periods like the Mughal of India and Muslim architecture in Indonesia.
Is this apologetic, a style so clearly rejected by Mukti Ali as not productive? While reading this material now, one may also conclude that this memory of the glory of Islam in previous centuries also may give confidence and pride to Muslims, esepcially in the colonial period. This somewhat apologetic pride about the past is better than the simple convictions of Salafi Muslims about a reclaimed but never changing past for doctrines and social commands.