(Again:) A new book on Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje

 Again a new book on the scholarly work by Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936). Its title is not directly modest:Wim van den Doel, The Complete Scholarly life of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, 448 pages, Amsterdam: Prometheus. The picture on the cover of the books shows the black, piercing eyes of the young Snouck (27 years old) in Mecca, the Arab centre of Islam. Since the revelations about the offspring and personal Indonesian life of  Snouck by Sjoerd van Koningsveld in the 1980s, and the doctoral dissertation by Dr. Husnul Aqib Suminto (Jakarta 1984) about the political strategy of the colonial administration, there was some time of silence. Only in 2006 there were more details about his stay in Jeddah and Mecca, 1885-6, by Jan Just Witkam. The Dutch publications by the Dutch authors Van Koningsveld and Witkam were about his personal conditions, while Suminto wrote about the social and political implications for the Muslim community in colonial Indonesia.

Michael Laffan has since written on him. In 2014 Kevin W, Fogg wrote a very outspoken, nearly agressively written article about him. I found it recently in The Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in Asia, (published by the Shanghai International Studies University, 2014:51-73) under the title:  Seeking Arabs but looking at Indonesians: the Arab lens on the Dutch East Indies. Because Snouck concentrated hisIslamic Studies between 1877-1888 on the Arab societies and its literature, he found the Indonesians 'to be inferior Muslims', because of their lack of orthodoxy (defined as 'being that which the center taught' p. 63).  

After reading this, I looked again in Edward Said's Orientalism, where Snouck is only portrayed in the way Suminto looked at him: "Snouck Hurgronje went directly from his studies of Islam to being an adviser to the Dutch government on handling its Muslim Indonesian colonies' (210).

Like many other people Snouck had various roles in his life. In his scholarly work two different styles can be distinguished: he wrote the reports as an employee of the colonial government, in complicated bureaucratic style. Besides this there are the much more lively scholarly books. He had his professional view on Islam: as successors to scores of local sultans and other rulers, the Dutch administrators and so he himself should give advice in the style of orthodox Muslim doctrine. In his academic work he realised and described that Islam has many faces and interpretations and is changing continually. Finally, he did not often express his personal views in his printed work, but also in this genre he sometimes openly expressed his view that the present state  of Islam needed a reform, where many aspects of customs and rules should be deleted. I still have to start reading the summary of his scholarly life in the quite many pages by Van den Doel.

Abangan in Bugis society?

 Books about (past of) Indonesia appear again and again in the Netherlands, even in a period of Covid-19, when books shops are closed and distribution is only through internet-orders, while communication through life presentations and discussions ('bedah buku') is not possible yet. A new book last week was by Jan Brokken, De Tuinen van Buitenzorg (The Gardens of Buitenzorg).  Brokken (born 1949 in Leiden) is the son of a Protestant Minister, who worked as a missionary in Southwest Sulawesi between 1935-1946 (including livingas a risoner in Japenese ca,ps, 1943-5). The book is not based on the work of his father, but on the 39 letters written by his mother to her sister while living in Indonesia. Brokken never paid much attention to this material, partly because the family liked often to talk about Indonesia, where Jan Brokken himself never lived and only saw a country during two turistic trips.

For several reasons, I became quite in his father Joseph C. Brokken, who was sent to study a movement in the island of Selayar, established as a independent movement around 1910 by Haji Abdul Gani Daneng Maurapi ibn Rakhman (ca 1846-1922) as Igama Binanga Benteng after the place where he lived. This movement can be compared to the 'aliran kepercayaan' of Madrais in West Java (Kuningan, Ceribon, but also Garut). After the Pacific War this Buginese movement became known as the Mukhdi Akbar Movement. Initially they remained, like the Madrais people, between Islam and (elements of) Christianity, moreor less as an individual tarekat. But after 1965 they were forced to opt for one of the five major religions and the majority then wanted to remain Muslim, but hundreds also wanted to stress their Protestant Christian identity and formally asked for Baptism (where quite many Madrais people became Catholic, of whom somealso 'returned' to Islam.

A second movement started in in the town in the early 1930s of Makassar as PMKI, Perkoempoelan Menoentoet Kebenaran Igama or 'Society for the search of religious truth'. According to some it was close to theosophy, but others wanted to curb it to reformed Islam, like Muhammadiyah. Reverend Blokker became in 1937 an official advisor, and he hoped that quite many of its members would turn to Christianity, but it remained a liberal debating network.

A third free movement started in Soppeng, about 100km north of Makassar, by one Haji La Galiti(k), born about 1900 in a noble family. He was head of an unnamed village,had performed the hajj and thrugh Qur'an reading became convinced that Jesus was the greatest Prophet. He met reverend Blokker in September 1939 and was baptised in March 1940, together with one La Salomo. 15 May 1940 they were followed by 150 sympathizers. In December 1941 this group had grown to some 800.After the Pacific War, in 1945 they had grown to some 2000. They are a quite rare example of people whocame to Christianity through the Muslim story and doctrine about Jesus.

Buginese society has, like Javanese culture, a great literary religious work, the I La Galigo. Like Javenese societyit has a strong pre-Islamic identity, which is still fostered until nowadays, notwithstanding the formal Islamization in the fist decade of the 17th century. So, one may question whether there is something like an abangan or non-Arab, Islam, where also pre-islamic and other traditions are kept. Some contribution for the idea of Islam Nusantara?

The title of the new book is taken from a great piano work by the Polish-American composer, Leopold Godowsky (1870-1930), who wrote in 1924-5 a Java Suite, where the Gardens of Buitenzorg are no 8 (out of 10). Godowsky liked to include elements of gamelan music in his compositions.

Indonesia as part of Greater India?

 If we look to the study of Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (1996), we can see Indonesia, together with Malaysia in one  of the seven civilizations: Islamic. There have been and are different classifications. From its name alone Indonesia means 'Insular India', and the word Insulinde was also for some time used as a name for Indonesia. If we visit the Louvre Museum of Paris, Metropolitan Museum of New York, but also Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: there is no place for Indonesian art in the Islamic section (also not in the new building, the tent-shaped section of the Louvre), but much can be seen  amongst Indian art. 

The Dutch (KITLV) scholar Marijke Bloembergen recently published a long article on The politics Greater India, a moral geography (in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 63 (2021), 170-211), where she starts with the foundation in 1926 in Calcutta of the Greater India Society with Rabindranath Tagore as the great star. The idea has been promoted also by Michael Wood in his famous quote: 'History is full of empires of the sword, but India alone created an empire of the spirit'.  The idea that there was once a 'colonial' empire from India, which caused the spread of Indian religions, Buddhism and Hinduism in Southeast Asia, from Thayland to Indonesia, this idea has proved to be not true. There was, however, in literature, in religious art a very refined and elaborate tradition also in Indonesia, since the 4th-5th centuries (Dieng), culminating in the Buddhist Borobudur and the Hindu Prambanan temples of the 8th century. Visiting the museums mentioned above we can now enjoy master pieces of Indonesian products as well, that can be called fruits of the Greater India. Their arrival in Europe and America nowadays is also called roofkunst or 'robbery, plunder'. Bloembergen has a large number of cases where some 43 out of the 504 great statues of the Buddhha have disappeared, mostly through people connected to the colonial elite. Recently a Dutch report was written: 'Colonial Collection and the Recognition of Injustice', with the promise that much of these should be sent back to the country where they were stolen, with one Von Saher as an intriguing example.

While reading this interesting article on the idea of Greater India, between 1890-1960s, I was also thinking about the decline of wayang theatre, where Muslim also celebrated holidays with the performance of parts of the epic stories of Mahabharata and Ramayana. Much of this was also practised by outspoken Muslim leaders like Diponegoro. Also the first President Soekarno like to mention the heroes of the Indian epic stories for his mostly Muslim audience. Therefore I like to show here an image, given to me in 1983 by my former colleague Dr. Abdurrahman of the UIN Sunan Kalijaga of Yogyakarta. It is the tree of life, painted on buffalo leather, the symbol opening the wayang performances. But here we see the confession faith: Ashhadtu an la ilaha illa Allah, wa ashhadtu anna Muhammadan Rasulu Allahi. This Islamic university tried to stimulate students to read classical Javanese texts where we  can see this Islamic use of Hindu art tradition, like its founder did, Sunan Kalijaga. In 2015 there was a movement trying to strengthen this way of a distinct Indonesian Islamic spirituality, labelled as Islam Nusantara. It has always been my dream that something like this combination shoud be continued and elaborated.