Snouck Hurgronje and the ethics of academic research

Beatrice de Graaf is Professor of International Relations at Utrecht University. She has some fame as a specialist on the history and presence of terrorism. Recently she paid a visit to Indonesia and met a former leader of Jemaat Islamiyah. She wrote in the Newspaper NRC (Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant) a column about this visit. Was it with Imam Samudra? No name was mentioned. When she talked about her Dutch origin the man said "Oh. Ah! Belanda, Leiden, Snukhurgronnie!” And added that Snouck formally became a Muslim, married a young lady from a good Muslim family, was a truly scholar of Islam and wrote books about Muslim practice in Indonesia. The reaction of Beatrice de Graaf was that this Snouck probably would meet serious problems in the Dutch academic world for abuse of his knowledge and research facilities. She mentioned a recent case of a colleague who did research on the hard-line Muslim chats on the internet and was condemned by the academic ethical committee, because she used personal material without permit of the authors (een collega mocht geen onderzoek doen naar uitlatingen op extremistische fora, omdat ze dan eerst formeel de instemming van alle anonieme reaguurders had moeten vragen.)

This is just one of the problems for academic researchers of different religions. I remember an article by the German anthropologist Susanne Rodemeier who did research about an Evangelical Megachurch in Surakarta and met often the question, whether she was planning to join the community. Contact with religious people seldom can be done without consequences. One of my Indonesian students wrote a dissertation and thanked God in the preface for help and inspiratioon. This was criticised by one of my Dutch/German colleagues in Utrecht because prayers and invocations are not usual in academic writings! How 'objective' and 'detached' should academic research be?
Snouck Hurgronje showed great concern for his Indonesian students like Hoessein Djajadiningrat. He definitely was not anti-Islam in general, although he hoped that some modernisation of shari'a should be possible: academics do not live in another world than the present one!