(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.