(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.

CMR 17: Dean Mahomet, Edward Lane and more British authors from the 19th century

The great CMR project (Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History) has now published volume 17, on Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia in the 19th century. Volume 16 was on (Southeast) Asia and had 5 entries written by me. For volume 17 I wrote on Bilderdijk, Salomon Keijzer, J.B.J. van Doren and Snouck Hurgronje. Herewith a cooperation of more than 10 years has come to an end.

Volume 17 has been dedicated for 490 of its 605 pages to Britain with a fine selection of scholars. On the cover is Edward Henry Palmer, professor of Arabic in Cambridge, dressed in Arab style. There is a good introduction to Edward Lane, the giant in lexicography and description of common Egyptians. Pages 330-355 offer the stories of five Victorian ladies travelling in the Ottoman world. A special entry gives an analysis of novelists: not the Arab scholars alone or theologians, but quite a mixed genre of authors. It is also not all about Muslim-Christian relations. In fact, an author like Edward Lane lived and showed as a Muslim, but about his personal faith not much can be said, at least he was not the quite negative and proud 'orientalist' as suggested by Edward Said (who maybe never read his work but wrote about him!)

 A quite intriguing figure is Dean Mahomet (1759-1851), born in Bihar, India. He became as a young boy of 11 the private servant of an English Officer. So he came to Cork, Ireland in 1786, where he was baptised an Anglican and married a local lady. A grandson even became an Anglican priest. In 1800 he moved to London where he opened Indian restaurants. In 1815 he opened in Brighton 'Mahomet's Bath' on King's Road. He wrote in the first years after his arrival in Ireland a book with the long title of The travels of Dean Mahomet, a native of Patna in Bengal, through several parts of India, while in the service of the  Honourable the East India Company written by himself, in a series of letters to his friend. The book was published in 1794, but his conversion to Anglcanism nor his Irish marriage are mentioned here. He only gives a sophisticated and elegant introduction to his native country to British people. His biographer, Michael H. Fisher, who also wrote the CMR entry compares him to Oloudah Equiano (1745-1797), the abolitionist who converted to Christianity as an instrument for his fight against slavery and also wrote an autobiography. For Fisher, Dean Mahomet felt himself a 'member of several cultural communities, with expertise in traditions associated with Muslims, Christians, and Hindus.' So to say: an early, proud and well-informed product of global culture.

From hero to criminal and the other way round: De Kock/Diponegoro and Van Mook/Soekarno

 Concluding his great work on rise and fall of Dutch colonialism, Bossenbroek writes that 'in the 21st century heroes of colonialism like  General De Kock and Governor-General Van Mook once were considered as heroes in their country, The Netherlands, but now they are blamed as criminals. On the other side, also in Dutch perspective, Diponegoro and Soekarno are now seen as great fighters for independence of their country. That is the inevitable fate of writing (and reading) history.

Writing now about the second part of the book by Bossenbroek, the period 1925-1950 (pp. 329-682), I feel it as a strange exercise. The outcome of the historical struggle is clear: the Dutch did not like to allow and acknowledge independence for the Indonesians, but the final result is clear: independence recognised by the international community, finally also accepted by the Dutch. Many smaller aspects in this history were not yet known and they are mentioned, elucidated here. On 1 and 2 December 1930 Soekarno defended his political work in a famous speech in court: Indonesia menggugat! (= Indonesia accuses, Dutch translation Indonesië klaagt aan.) The Dutch translation has on its front page the harsh general Van Heutz with a number of coffins and a prison showing the fate of his enemies. This was published in 1931 by a Dutch Socialist Party! Bossenbroek writes in a vivid style, but has no images or pictures in his book.

Colijn is in this book the personification of the dream of Dutch politicians opposing Indonesian independence. The Indonesian organization, strongly defending contnuation of Dutch presence was the Vaderlandsche Club. Governor General De Jonge (1931-6): 'we have ruled here for 300 years and will continue this for another 300 years'. They receive also much attention, besides the Indonesian protagonists for independence, as well as some Dutch supporters. The anti-hero here is Hubertus van Mook, high official from 1920-1942 and Lieutenant Governor General 1945-8: he started as a progressive man, willing to give Indonesians more responsibility. But he remained someone who wanted to remain the deciding leader. He was the architect of the idea of a federal Indonesia, with strong states in Borneo and East Indonesia.

Hatta, Sjahrir are here sometimes depicted as the 'rivals' of Soekarno (501-2), but very few attention is given to opposition from Muslim side (Kartosuwiryo, Darul Islam in West Java) and the Communist uprising in Madiun, 1948 comes out of nothing (and leads to nothing!).

Australia is in 1945 the strongest supporter for Indonesian Independence. The British were also willing to recognise Soekarno, until General Mallaby was  shot in Surabaya by pemuda (p. 564), followed by the killing of British pilots and Gurkan/Indian army in Bekasi.

Quite much attention is here given to Nasution: from his education (at a KNIL military academy under Dutch supervision) to the strongest military man under Sudirman, leading the Siliwangi division. At many places in this book we see developments that could have directed towards different developments in the future, but the study of history cannot do much with suggestions like 'what if..',  Bossenbroek manages to keep his book clear  and leading towards understanding how the fight and war between the Dutch and the Indonesians was determined by the strong will for independence on the Indonesian side and the strong support finally from the UN and the USA.

The 2d 'police action' or overall attack on the Republic in Java of 19 December 1948 is mentioned on p. 646-653, It mentions that Soekarno and Hatta had promised to flee from the capital of Yogyakarta to the mountains and join the guerilla fight against the Dutch. Soekarno and Hatta did not run away, but in fact were taken prisnoer to the island ofBangka. They are followed here in some detail, but it is not mentioned, that some six ministers fled to the mountains and lived for six months the life of guerilla warriors. Because of my own interest I only mention here the Catholic Minister Kasimo (Catholics in Independent Indonesia, p. 160). In this way no history is complete and all have their preference, in the case of Bossenbroek very much information is about the negotiations between the Dutch and the Americans.

A personalized and more dramatic history of Indonesia: Martin Bossenbroek

Besides the two books mentioned in December, a third book has appeared: De Wraak van Dipenogeoro (=The Revenge of Diponegoro), by Martin Bossenbroek (Amsterdam: Atheneum, 2020, 798 pp.) On the cover of the book it is written that Bossenbroek 'has brought the writing of history on a higher level with his book on the Boer war in South Africa (about 1900-1902), which sold 80,000 copies in the Netherlands and was translated into English and Afrikaans. What is a 'higher level'?  Only in higher number of people buying this book? In this new book Bossenbroek has on pages 19-20 an analysis of Dutch historiography especially at Leiden University (with the most eminent example  in Cees Fasseur) of a neutral, nearly indifferent style of writing history. They did not take position in the debate about the meaning of its course, did not write about the ethics and traditions of the period. Different from Multatuli and Alfred Birney (De tolk van Java) this Leiden tradition declared cruelty as an exception, something that 'also' happened in history. 

Bossenbroek wrote a 'short history' of Indonesia in two acts: first Diponegoro and General Hendrik Merkus de Kock as the two most important figures of the Java War (1820-1825) and then he switches to the struggle for an independent Indonesia with Huib van Mook and Soekarno as the two leading figures for the period 1925-1950. For him this is the beginning and the end of the Dutch East Indies.

The tiger of the picture on the cover is the Dutch side, the buffaloe is Indonesia, on a hugh painting by Raden Saleh (12 m2!). With Diponegoro fighting against the Dutch true colonialism has started (therefore we should not talk about the Java War, but the Diponegoro War). The photograph is from a painting by Raden Saleh only discovered in 2007 in a Dutch royal palace, sold in 2013 by the younger generation of the Oranje Royal family to the national gallery of Singapore.

Bossenbroek does not give us the full story of the struggle of Dipenegoro and Soekarno. In the first 325 pages much space is given to De  Kock and his family, friends: much about Raffles, Dutch politics. Much space is given to the colonial policy of King William I (1813-1840) who did not want to spend money to the colonies, but instead they should give money in return, they were to be seen as an investment. Only through the Cultuurstelsel, the forced production of agricultural products like sugar, coffee, indigo, for the international market this plan worked. Diponegoro did not like to live in the palace, the kraton, but ina more religious context. Therefore his ultimate ideal was an Islamic society under his leadership. During the war he called himself Sultan Abdulhamid. The ideal of De Kock has not become clear: just a reliable military leader?

Bossenbroek makes easy reading, but his emphasis on personal anecdotes, does not give us enough information to come close to the psychology of the major persons. As to the first part I found S. van Praag (Onrust op Java) much more relevant for the personal history of Diponegoro (and of course the writings of Merle Ricklefs and the 900 pages book by Peter Carey). The various Dutch people are pictured with sharp contrast: Resident Smissaert only as lazy, not really interested in his job; Huib Nahuys as a smart man, full of energy, mostly for his own profit. De Kock as a man with much discipline, patient, not really sentimental about the many deaths he caused through his actions, also not really a believer in the new order he had to create in Central Java. Finally: this is more interesting reading, but I am not sure about the higher level of historiography claimed here.

Amsterdam and Slavery: also in Asia

During the last months at least three important books have appeared on the history of Indonesia. I will later write some words on the comprehensive and rather literary works of Van Reybrouck and Bossenbroek. All three books under discussion start with (quite negative) judgments about the past. Of course, there is an opinion that academic study of history should explain how a development grew, how it must be explained against the background of its own time, not as seen by modern, critical observers some centuries later. That is value-free writing of history. It seems that there is a tendency, where ethical values of the 21 century may play a role as well. This is definitely true for this book on Slavery in East and West: the Amsterdam Research, published by Pepijn Bradon, Guno Jones, Nancy Jouwe and Matthias van Rossum in Amsterdam, Spectrum, 2020, 448pp. The book was ordered by the city council of Amsterdam, in preparation for  public apology to be expressed in 2021 for the active role people and institutions in Amsterdam had in support of the absolutely despicable institution and practice of slave-making, slave-trade and related matters. In 38 chapters here, besides introduction and conclusion, more than 40 authors write some kind of indictment of past aspects of Amsterdam history.

The book is part of the long process of growing consciousness about the global practice of slave-making and Dutch participation in it. Most studies in this field are related to the Dutch part of the trade in slaves in the Atlantic area: African people, taken slave by raids and wars in West Africa who were brought to the Caribbean and areas of North and South America, where the Dutch town on the island of Curacao and its colony of Surinam played their roles, where plantations after the 1670s until the early 1860s worked with slaves.

People are seldom absolutely free: they work for other people in order to receive salaries, they worked because they were in debt, but the most drastic loss of self-control and freedom is seen where not only labour can be asked and ordered, but where human bodies and persons are sold as if they are things: that is the ethical and philosophical anger behind this book. Pages 24-25 give all kind of definitions of slavery.

In the town of Amsterdam few real slaves were found, but institutions like the United East India Company (VOC) and the West India Company (WIC) were responsible for the practice of slavery. Matthias van Rossum (chapter 1: on the VOC) has a short review of the easy adaptation of the Dutch VOC traders in societies of Asia, where slaves were part of transport and trade. As early as 1603 Cornelis de Houtman published a Malay-Dutch dictionary with words like slave (hamba) and 'to catch people' (tawan orang), while the word mardeka was used for free persons, who were not slaves. The nutmeg culture on the Banda Islands was served by slaves, after Jan Pieterszoon Coen had killed nearly the full original population in a holocaust of 1621 (p. 58). Wim Manuhutu wrote about Amsterdam (called here Mokum) and the Moluccas, where the VOC defended a monopoly on the production and trade of cloves. In the 19th century in Java the cultuurstelsel was common, a system of obligation for villages to produce specific products (sugar, indigo,tea, coffee) for the world market and where some kind of slavery became part of the system (forced labour up to 200 days per year). There was for many time also a debate about freedom of human beings and the necessity to abolish slavery. Nowadays there is a plea for a society of memory, resulting in monuments, books like this, moral and even financial recompensation.