“Abdul Ghaffar”

16 January 1885, Jeddah

He spoke the words, and from his own letters a historian would later conclude that he believed none of them.

Ash-hadu an laa ilaaha ill-Allah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasulullah. I bear witness that there is no god but Allah ﷻ, and I bear witness that Muhammad ﷺ is His messenger. The formula was twelve hundred years old, as simple as it was deliberate, as brief as it was far-reaching. The witnesses heard him and acknowledged him as a Muslim, and from then on they knew him as Abdul Ghaffar: servant of the Most Forgiving.

This is the moral heart of the story of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje. It is not a nuance, not a grey area, not a complex ethical dilemma over which reasonable people might judge differently. The historian P. Sj. van Koningsveld, who examined Snouck’s letters, concluded that he pronounced the shahada as a means to an end and not out of belief. He deceived the umma that welcomed him as a brother. What he gathered was not knowledge; it was intelligence.

The shahada and its weight

There are few acts in human experience as charged as the pronouncement of the shahada by someone who truly believes. For the believing Muslim the confession is not a formula but a reality that changes everything: the recognition that there is no sovereign power other than the power of Allah ﷻ, that the authority of the Prophet ﷺ is indivisible, that life will henceforth be organised around this surrender. Whoever pronounces the shahada enters a community that regards its members as brothers and sisters, bound by faith, duty and mutual responsibility across all boundaries of language, nationality and culture.

The umma that received Snouck as Abdul Ghaffar acted according to its nature, and it welcomed him. The Meccan ulama who would teach him opened their knowledge to him with the hospitality that the Islamic scholarly milieu has always shown towards students who come to learn. The scholars into whose homes he was invited spoke with him as with an equal in faith, as a seeking mind who sought further depth in the sources of the Islamic tradition. They shared with him their knowledge, their stories, their insights into the living practice of the Islamic sciences, the fiqh, the hadith, the tafsir.

They did this because the shahada meant to them what it always means: the induction of a fellow believer into the community of Islam. The Sunna knows no underground loyalty test, because the shahada itself is the test. Whoever pronounces the words with witnesses present is taken in, and the community does not subject him to a secret interrogation. This is not naivety; it is a principle. The trust that the shahada presupposes is constitutive of the community built upon it.

Snouck held the key, and if Van Koningsveld reads his letters correctly, he knew that he had forged it.

A lie of the first order

It is necessary to call this by its name, not out of polemical zeal but out of the intellectual honesty the subject demands. What Snouck did in Mecca was a deception of the most fundamental kind. He deceived not only about his name, though he did that too, for Abdul Ghaffar was an assumed name that concealed his European identity. He deceived not only about his nationality or his professional affiliation, though he did that too, for he hid his ties to the Dutch consulate and thereby to the Dutch state. He deceived about his faith.

He entered a community that reserves its most intimate spaces, its holy city, its religious knowledge, its social trust and its spiritual transmission for those who truly believe, and he did this under the false claim to that belief. The Islamic ethic of testimony is clear and consistent. The Qur’an speaks of it more than once, most directly in the context of the covenant and faithfulness to the given word.

The verse speaks in the context of the ethics of war, but the underlying norm is universal in Islamic ethics and confirmed in the exegesis of the classical commentators. Whoever concludes a covenant, whoever enters a community, whoever pronounces the promise of fidelity, is bound to that promise. Deception is not the first option, not the quiet exception, not the clever manoeuvre. Deception is what Allah ﷻ abhors. The shahada is the deepest covenant a person can conclude with the Islamic community: the recognition of Allah ﷻ as the only god, the recognition of the Prophet ﷺ as His messenger, the surrender that the name Islam itself expresses. Snouck concluded this covenant, he knew that he was concluding it, and in Van Koningsveld’s reading of his letters he had no intention of keeping it.

This is not a technical violation of an administrative procedure. This is a betrayal of the very core of what gives the Islamic community its moral foundation.

The city from within

Mecca in 1885 was a small yet exceptionally complex society, of a cosmopolitanism that far exceeded its size. It had a permanent population of tens of thousands, swelled during the month of the Hajj by pilgrims from across the Islamic world. The permanent residents were largely of Arab descent, but there were also large communities of Malays, Javanese, Indians, Afghans, East Africans and people from the Hadrami diaspora who had settled in the city, sometimes after the pilgrimage and then deciding not to return, sometimes through the trade networks that connected Mecca with the rest of the Islamic world.

The city was organised around the Ka’bah as its geographical and spiritual centre. The Masjid al-Haram, the Great Mosque, dominated the middle, and the quarters of the city spread out around it like circles around a stone dropped into water. The religious function of the city, as the destination of the Hajj and the seat of Islamic scholars, determined its social structure. The ulama, the religious scholars, were the most respected class; the merchants who served the pilgrim economy were the wealthiest; and the ordinary inhabitants lived in a city that drew its reason for existence from faith.

Snouck moved through this city as Abdul Ghaffar, a learned Muslim who had come to study with the Meccan ulama. This was no unusual category, for Mecca had always been a centre of Islamic learning, and scholars from distant lands traditionally came there to hear the shaykhs of the Hijaz, to gather the traditions, to study fiqh under masters who had received the knowledge directly from their own masters in a chain that reached back to the first generations of Islam. Snouck had prepared his role thoroughly. He spoke fluent Arabic, with an accent he could explain as European origin. He knew the prayer rituals and performed them correctly. He could debate Islamic jurisprudence. He knew enough not to alarm his interlocutors.

In the circles of the scholars in Mecca he was welcome, sincerely and warmly welcome. He studied under several shaykhs, came to know the living tradition of the Islamic sciences from within in a way no European library could have given him, attended lessons in which the tradition was passed on orally, and took part in the religious and social activities of the community. And he wrote everything down.

A study lesson, evocatively reconstructed

The following moment is not a documentary quotation. It is a reconstruction, an evocation of the tone and the social grammar of the Meccan scholarly milieu as Snouck himself describes it in Mekka II. The names are invented, but the pattern is authentic.

The shaykh meant what he said. It was the hospitable invitation of a scholar who welcomes a seeking mind into his circle, the opening of the Islamic tradition of transmission in which the knowledge of teachers passes to students in a chain that reaches back to the Prophet ﷺ himself. This chain is called the isnad. It guarantees the authenticity of the knowledge and connects it with its origin. Snouck was taken into that chain, insofar as the shaykhs admitted him, as Abdul Ghaffar, as a believer, as a student with a seeking heart.

But the isnad is more than a list of names; it is a moral relationship. The master who passes on his knowledge does so in the trust that his student will be a bearer of that knowledge, in the same spirit. Abdul Ghaffar was no credible bearer. He was a fiction. And the knowledge that was passed on through him to European scholarship lost, through his mediation, the spiritual continuity that gave it its value in the Islamic tradition.

What he gathered

The yield of Snouck’s Mecca sojourn of nearly half a year was, intellectually speaking, enormous. His notes on the social structure of Meccan society were detailed and accurate. He described the religious hierarchy of the ulama, their mutual relations and relations of authority, the manner in which knowledge was transmitted and the student was formed. He analysed the economic structure of the pilgrim city: how trade was organised, how the various ethnic communities had found their own economic niches, how the Hadrami diaspora maintained the connections between the holy city and the far corners of the Islamic world.

He gave particular attention to the Indonesian community that lived permanently in Mecca, the so-called Djawa community. This community had its own quarter, its own shaykhs, its own social networks. It maintained intensive contacts with the Indonesian archipelago: pilgrims came and went, letters were sent, ideas and books circulated. Snouck identified which shaykhs from the Indonesian community exercised the most influence over the returning pilgrims, which theological and political orientations they passed on, how the religious and political ideas flowed via the Hajj route from Mecca to Java.

This was intelligence gathering in the direct and unmistakable sense of the word. He mapped which Islamic influences flowed via the pilgrimage route to Indonesia, which shaykhs spread the potentially dangerous notions, how pan-Islamic solidarity worked organisationally and through which channels it was maintained. This information he would use years later, in his role as adviser to the colonial administration, to determine which Islamic networks were dangerous and which manageable, which shaykhs had to be suppressed and which could be tolerated.

The community of faith that had welcomed him as a brother unknowingly financed the knowledge that would feed the policy by which its Indonesian allies would be contained. This is no rhetorical figure of speech. It is a line of attribution that runs from the sitting room of a Meccan shaykh in 1885 to the desk of the Adviser for Oriental Languages and Muhammadan Law in Batavia, an office he held from 1891.

Mekka I and II

What he had seen and studied in Jeddah and Mecca, supplemented by what his contacts in the Hijaz later sent him, became the raw material for Mekka I and Mekka II, the two volumes that appeared in 1888 and 1889 and that definitively established his reputation as the foremost Islamologist of his generation. The first volume described the city and its society. The second volume described the daily life, the customs and the learning of the city, and the Muslims from the East Indian archipelago who lived there, as Snouck had found them; the Hajj itself he had not witnessed there.

Mekka is an extraordinary work of its kind. That can be said without reservation. The precision of the observations, the quality of the analysis, the richness of the material described are unusual, certainly for someone who had visited the city for only six months. Its reception in the European scholarly world was overwhelmingly positive: Mekka gave European scholarship something it had never had before, a detailed, accurate, from-within description of the holy city and its community.

Goldziher praised the work in the highest terms. The Leiden faculty was proud. The Ministry of Colonies noted its importance for colonial politics.

Mekka is also, inseparably bound up with this, a work built on betrayal. Every insight it contains, every description of social life, every analysis of the religious community: all this material was obtained by entering the community under false pretences, by abusing the trust the umma grants to whoever has pronounced the shahada. The knowledge and the method of its gathering are inseparable. Whoever reads Mekka reads the spoils of a breach of trust, however brilliantly edited.

The defence that does not convince

Snouck defended and normalised his Mecca sojourn in his later work and correspondence. In his Verspreide Geschriften and in letters to Goldziher he argued that his religious position was complex but not simply fraudulent. He wrote that he was not unbelieving in the sense of an atheist who rejected Islamic doctrine. He acknowledged its depth, he respected its value, he admired much of what he had seen and heard. His conversion to Islam was, he suggested, more than an academic trick. It was an intellectual and even, in a certain sense, a spiritual approach.

Van den Doel analyses this defence carefully. He points out that Snouck later married a Muslim woman in Indonesia, that he applied Islamic marriage law to his family, that his relation to Islam in his personal life was more nuanced than the caricature of the cold-blooded deceiver. He argues that there is a difference between the public Snouck who treats Islam as an object of study, and the private Snouck who in his daily life was more closely bound to Islamic culture than his official position let show.

These are legitimate nuances that one must take seriously if one wishes to understand Snouck as a historical figure. But they do not make the core of the matter any less clear.

The question is not whether Snouck had an interior life that complicated his official position. The question is whether in January 1885 he pronounced the shahada with the intention of a believer. Van Koningsveld answers that question in the negative: according to him, several of Snouck’s own letters confirm that the conversion was feigned, that he spoke the words not as the expression of a conviction of faith but as a means to cross a boundary. Other historians, among them the Leiden scholar Jan Just Witkam, hold that his true intentions cannot be known with certainty. Whoever follows Van Koningsveld’s reading sees the deception here. The nuancing of his later religious position changes nothing about the intention at the moment of the act. The intention, the niyya, is in Islamic ethics precisely the most essential measure of the deed.

The hurried departure

After nearly six months in Mecca, where he had arrived on 21 or 22 February 1885, his stay came to an abrupt end. In early August 1885 the Ottoman governor of the Hijaz ordered Snouck to leave Mecca and Arabia. The trigger was a false accusation: he was said to have been involved in the theft of the Tayma stele, an ancient inscribed stone from the north of Arabia over which the French and the Germans were competing in those years. According to Witkam, who studied Snouck’s diary from Jeddah, that accusation was fed by intrigues from the French consulate.

What is certain is that Snouck had to leave Mecca hastily in August 1885. The departure was not planned, not orderly, not in the calm manner of a student who has completed his studies and looks back with satisfaction. It was an expulsion, and he was given no time to arrange his departure.

He returned to Jeddah, which he left on 19 September 1885, and travelled back to Europe via Egypt. He would never return to Arabia. He had what he sought, and it was not his conversion that had cost him the city. And the community that had welcomed him as a brother would never see him again. Abdul Ghaffar disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared. He left behind in the city not only the shaykhs but also his notes, his books and his camera, and the distance between what he had seen and what he had to leave behind would define the rest of his career.

Participant and observer at once

Snouck was not in Mecca during the month of the Hajj. The Day of Arafat, the heart of the Hajj of the Islamic year 1302, fell around 18 September 1885, and by then he had already been expelled from the city and was about to leave Arabia for good. The rituals he had described in his dissertation from the Leiden library, the wuquf on the plain of Arafat, the stoning at Mina, the sacrifice, he never performed as a pilgrim. What he did do in the months before was take part, as Abdul Ghaffar, in the religious life of the city: he offered the prayers a Muslim offers and moved among the scholars and their students.

He did this from two simultaneous positions that stood in fundamental tension. As a participant, who performed the prayers and customs as a believer performs them, and as an observer, who wrote everything down in his notebook. The tension was not only epistemological; it was moral. The participation was the lie. The observation was the aim. Whoever follows Van Koningsveld’s reading of his letters sees a man who was not there to pray but to understand. And his understanding was that of the outsider who is temporarily inside, not that of the believer who is at home.

This double consciousness, simultaneously playing believer and being a scholar, is an untenable position. One may wonder how Snouck endured it psychologically. His later writings give no direct access to his inner life during the Mecca period. He writes about the city and its inhabitants, not about his own state of mind. But it is difficult to imagine that an intelligent and sensitive man who had mastered Arabic and admired Islamic culture, who had spent those months in the most intense religious environment the Islamic world knows, was not touched by it to some degree.

His later suggestion that his “conversion” was more than purely instrumental, that he had in a certain sense “experienced” Islam in Mecca, is perhaps not wholly insincere. But this changes nothing about the structural lie of his presence. Whether he was personally touched or not, the deception was planned, carried out and crowned with success. Any emotional resonance does not alter the intention.

A boundary that protects a community

The boundary around Mecca is, as argued earlier, not administrative caprice but a theological boundary that protects the holy community in its most vulnerable dimension: the space where its innermost religious practice takes place, where it pronounces prayers not intended for outsiders, where it builds a social cohesion that draws its strength from the exclusivity of the shared confession.

When that boundary is crossed by someone who does not mean the confession, not only is the space violated but the social foundation of the community is undermined. The umma is a community based on trust. The trust that whoever has pronounced the shahada also means it. The trust that whoever performs the rituals performs them out of faith. The trust that the community which welcomes its members as brothers and sisters is recognised and respected as a community by those members.

Snouck violated this trust on the most fundamental level. He was not a bad Muslim who neglected the duties while meaning the confession sincerely. He was not a doubter who holds on to faith with difficulty. He was not a sinner who knows that he falls short. He was, in the conclusion Van Koningsveld drew from his letters, a non-believer who used the confession as an access pass to a space that wishes to remain protected for those who mean it.

Islamic jurisprudence has no adequate sanction for this kind of infiltration, because in its classical formulation it did not foresee it. Who would pronounce the shahada for strategic ends. The question was scarcely posed for classical fiqh, for the scenario was scarcely conceivable in the context of the Islamic community as it had historically functioned. Snouck opened a new chapter in the relation between the Islamic world and European scholarship: the chapter of infiltration in the name of knowledge.

The involuntary sources

The Meccan ulama who received Snouck as Abdul Ghaffar were people of great knowledge and deep piety. They preserved the living tradition of the Islamic sciences, the isnad that connected the knowledge with the first generations of Islam, the methods of textual interpretation refined over centuries. They taught not only information but also a way of being, a religious attitude, a relation to knowledge as a sacred responsibility.

When Snouck sat with them and listened, he was not only a student taking in knowledge. He was an observer documenting the method, the content, the social structure of Islamic teaching for external use. Every lesson given to him became a testimony in the dossier he was building. Every opinion a shaykh voiced about Indonesian Islam, about the political situation in the Islamic world, about the role of the Hajj in Islamic unity, became part of the material that would later appear in Mekka and that would feed information to colonial politics.

The shaykhs were involuntary sources. They had shared their knowledge freely, in the trust that they were speaking with a fellow-believing student. But the context of that willingness was built on a lie, and a consent based on a lie is no valid consent. What they gave, they gave not to Snouck but to Abdul Ghaffar. And Abdul Ghaffar did not exist.

This is a legal and ethical paradox that the Orientalist tradition never adequately answered. The knowledge in Mekka was obtained from people who did not know to whom they were giving it. The sources were interviewed without their consent as sources. They thought they were speaking with a student, not with a scholar who would publish everything. In modern research ethics this work could not pass an ethical review. The consent of the sources was not informed. It was built on deceit.

Three levels

It is possible to judge Snouck’s Mecca episode on three levels, each of which carries its own moral weight and which together give a complete picture of the extent of the wrong.

On the first level: the act itself. He pronounced the shahada without belief, as Van Koningsveld inferred from his letters. He deceived the umma that welcomed him as a brother. He used the openness of the Islamic community as access for observation and intelligence gathering. This is a deception. Not a technical deception about a small matter, but a deception about the most fundamental matter: faith itself, the community built on that faith, the trust that community grants a fellow believer on the basis of the shared confession.

On the second level: the consequences. What he gathered became not only Mekka I-II, an academic work of scholarly merit. It also became the raw material for colonial politics in Indonesia. The knowledge that the Meccan ulama shared with him in the trust that he was a believing student was deployed to map their networks, to understand how their influence worked and through which channels it operated, to provide the instruments with which the colonial administration could undermine and control Islamic mobilisation. The shaykhs who taught him contributed unknowingly to the knowledge that would harm their allies in Indonesia. Knowledge, trust, hospitality: everything the Islamic community offered him was converted into policy instruments that curtailed its freedom.

On the third level: the systemic pattern. Snouck was not merely an individual who made a clever but unethical choice. He was a link in a system, the Orientalist system that produced knowledge about the Islamic world in the service of European power. His act in Mecca was the most extreme expression of that system: the European scholar enters the holy space of the Islamic world, extracts its knowledge from it, and returns to Europe with that knowledge as capital that can be deployed for political and military ends. The object of study is plundered. The studying subject departs with the spoils, unpunished, honoured, promoted.

The irony of the name

The name Snouck assumed, Abdul Ghaffar, means in Arabic servant of the Most Forgiving. Al-Ghaffar is one of the beautiful names of Allah ﷻ, the attribute that denotes His capacity for forgiveness, the quality that gives the believer the comfort that even the gravest sin can be forgiven by the infinite mercy of Allah ﷻ, provided the repentance is sincere.

It is unlikely that Snouck chose this name from any theological consideration. Most probably it was a name that sounded fitting and was not unusual. But the irony is sharp and unavoidable. The man who deceived the umma, who infiltrated the community under false pretences, who used the knowledge of the ulama as intelligence material for a colonial state, called himself the servant of the Most Forgiving.

The Islamic tradition teaches that forgiveness is available to whoever sincerely repents, to whoever acknowledges his act as wrong and does not continue with it. Snouck never sincerely repented for his infiltration of Mecca. On the contrary: he defended it. He justified it. He was proud of the knowledge he had thereby obtained and of the work that had come from that knowledge. The name Abdul Ghaffar was, in this respect too, a lie.

The camera and the gaze

In the Hijaz Snouck also had a camera with him. Taking photographs was, in 1885, a rare skill and a rare undertaking. Photography was young and the equipment heavy and unwieldy. He took many of his own photographs in Jeddah, among them pictures of the pilgrim groups passing through the port city, and when he had to leave Mecca, his camera stayed behind there. The outdoor photographs of Mecca and of the Hajj in Bilder aus Mekka are the work of his Meccan friend, the physician al-Sayyid ʿAbd al-Ghaffār, who took them at Snouck’s request and who is a different person from the Abdul Ghaffar whose name Snouck assumed. They were among the first photographic images of the holy city to circulate in Europe.

The photographs were later published in the Bilder-Atlas accompanying Mekka (1888) and in Bilder aus Mekka (1889). They gave the European public a visual access to a city they had never seen and, according to Islamic law, were never permitted to see. The photographs of the Masjid al-Haram, of the Ka’bah, of the streets of Mecca: these were images that at once acknowledged the sanctity of the city, for they showed it as a special place, and desecrated it, for they made it accessible to the gaze of the unbelieving observer.

There is something disquieting in the idea of the man who had pronounced the shahada to gain access to the holy city, and who used that access and the trust of his Meccan friends to have photographic images made for European use. The photograph carries the gaze of the outsider inside. The camera is the instrument of the observer, not of the participant. Snouck was in Mecca as an observer, disguised as a participant. The camera made this visible in a form his notes could not.

The knowledge he did not receive

There is also a question worth pausing over: what Snouck did not learn in Mecca, what he could not learn, because his relation to the community was fundamentally compromised by the deception on which it rested.

Islamic transmission of knowledge, the transmission of religious knowledge through the isnad, is not only an intellectual but also a moral and spiritual process. The master who teaches his student does this not as a mere transfer of information but as an act of trust, of amanah, in which the knowledge is entrusted to someone who will bear it and pass it on in the spirit in which it was transmitted. The knowledge a shaykh shares with a student he trusts as a fellow believer has a dimension that is not present when that same knowledge is shared with an outsider who observes the community.

Snouck did receive the information but not the knowledge in the full Islamic meaning of the word. He heard the words, wrote them down, analysed them. But the context of trust, of a community of faith, of spiritual continuity, that context was absent, for it was not transferable to someone who, as his own letters suggest, had spoken the confession without believing.

This is no mystical remark but a practical one. Whoever understands the Islamic transmission of knowledge as a moral and spiritual process understands too that the knowledge Snouck took from Mecca lacked something the shaykh had meant to give it. The information was present. The context was absent. And Mekka I-II is, however richly informative, a work without that context, a description of a community from the outside, however deep the infiltration had gone.

The long memory

The Islamic world was in 1885 unable to respond adequately to what Snouck had done. The Ottoman authorities in the Hijaz did expel him from the country in August 1885, but on the grounds of the false accusation concerning the Tayma stele, and, as far as the sources show, not because they had seen through his conversion. They could not prosecute him in Europe, could not prevent the publication of Mekka, could not undo the damage his work wrought in the domain of colonial policy.

The Islamic scholars in Mecca who had taught him as Abdul Ghaffar may have learned later who he truly was. Van den Doel mentions no Arabic sources on how the Meccan community judged his departure and his true identity. But it is not difficult to imagine. The hospitality they had shown, the knowledge they had shared, the trust they had granted: all of this had been answered with deception. This is the wound that the infiltration left in the relation between the Islamic community and the European scholar who claimed to understand it.

The trust that the umma grants its members is a moral good of great value. It is the social cement of a world community that has no central authority but only the shared confession as its binding principle. When that trust is abused, when the confession is used as an access pass for deception, not only is an individual harmed but the community itself in its most essential capacity: the capacity to welcome strangers on the basis of the shared surrender to Allah ﷻ.

What it cost the Indonesian umma

The most concrete and most painful dimension of the Mecca deception is the impact it had on the Indonesian Islamic community, the community about which Snouck had made his most targeted observations and whose interests were most directly harmed by the knowledge he gathered.

The Indonesian Muslims who performed the Hajj each year did so at great cost. The journey was long, expensive and dangerous. Not everyone returned. Whoever returned brought back knowledge, religious formation, social connections that bound the community of the archipelago with the broader Islamic world. The Hajj was for the Indonesian Muslim community a vital connection. With Mecca, with the broader umma, with the sources of the Islamic tradition.

Snouck had observed, analysed and mapped precisely this connection in Jeddah and Mecca. He knew how the networks worked, which shaykhs exercised which influence, how the ideas and impulses flowed from Mecca to Java. And he used this knowledge, in his later career as colonial adviser, to advise the government how it should monitor the returning pilgrims, how it should assess the influential shaykhs, how it should curb pan-Islamic solidarity before it took political forms.

The Indonesian Muslim who performed the Hajj in the trust that the holy community of Mecca was a safe space, who returned with religious deepening and social connections, who experienced his journey as the fulfilment of a divine command: he did not know that a European who had been in that same space as Abdul Ghaffar had noted his connections and identified his shaykhs for colonial use.

This is the deepest deception. Not the deception towards the shaykhs of Mecca, grave as that is. It is the deception towards the ordinary Muslim of the archipelago, who performed his Hajj in the conviction that the holy space was holy, and who did not know that the knowledge he acquired there, the networks he maintained, the religious identity he strengthened, had already been observed and documented by someone who would convert all of this into instruments for his control.

A final question

There is a painful question that the reader of this story may have. What did Snouck feel at the moment he pronounced the shahada. He was an intelligent man who knew the formulation, who understood the meaning, who knew what he was doing. Had he no hesitation. No moment of doubt about the moral implications of his act.

The sources give no answer here. Snouck was not someone who documented his emotions in his correspondence. His letters are intellectual, analytical, businesslike. But his later defences of his Mecca sojourn suggest that he did not regard himself as someone who had committed a moral offence. He was a scholar who had used methods the knowledge required. The knowledge was the aim. The method was the means. The moral judgements of outsiders, including the Islamic community, reflected in his eyes the incomprehension of scientific necessity.

This is the psychology of the man who justifies his aim by placing it higher than the rules that apply to others. It is a psychology not unique to Snouck. It is characteristic of the European scholar and the colonial functionary of that period, the man who believes that his mission is of sufficient importance to transgress the normal moral restrictions.

The umma that welcomed Snouck as Abdul Ghaffar judged otherwise. It had not asked to be studied. It had heard the shahada and granted trust. That trust was betrayed. And the fact that Snouck could see this not as an offence but as a scientific act is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the story of Abdul Ghaffar. Not the lie itself, but the inability to acknowledge it as such.

The Meccan shaykhs and their sense

It is tempting to picture the Meccan ulama of 1885 as guileless, as naive, as a community that did not see through what Snouck was doing. That is incorrect. The scholars of Mecca knew the modern world better than many a present-day observer realises. They dealt with pilgrims from every conceivable country, with British, French, Russian and Dutch consular agents in Jeddah, with the Ottoman bureaucracy and its internal politics, with the growing awareness that in Europe a scholarship had arisen that approached their holy traditions in a new way.

What they did not have was an instrument to unmask a man like Abdul Ghaffar without violating the Sunna. They could test his language, and his Arabic was fluent. They could examine his knowledge of the rituals, and that knowledge was correct. They could question his background, and he had answers prepared. But they could not, and would not, drag him before a secret inquisitorial tribunal to verify the inside of his faith. The Sunna knows no underground loyalty test, because the shahada itself is the test. And precisely that principled openness was the mechanism Snouck exploited.

Here lies a tragedy rarely acknowledged in the European historiography of Snouck. The Meccan shaykhs were not fooled by their ignorance. They were embraced in their fidelity to their own ethical principles. Whoever closes his gate to one who pronounces the shahada violates the umma in a different register than whoever keeps the gate open for a deceiver. The former is a loss of who one is. The latter is a suffering through what the other does. The shaykhs chose, without experiencing the choice as a choice, the latter. That was magnanimous. It was also precisely what Snouck needed.

Back to Leiden

Snouck travelled back to Europe via Egypt. In his cases not the notes from Mecca, nor his books and his camera: those had stayed behind in the city. In his head the names, the networks, and the work that was already beginning to order what he would publish as Mekka I and Mekka II. And behind him, in a city whose threshold he had just violated, a community that had welcomed him as a brother and that would slowly discover whom it had truly received.

The Leiden hall awaited him. The lecture room lay ready. And within two years the generation of officials who would apply his method in Batavia stood at his door.

Sources

• Wim van den Doel, Snouck, Boom (2021)
• C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka, 2 vols., Martinus Nijhoff (1888-1889)
• C. Snouck Hurgronje, Verspreide Geschriften, 6 vols., K.F. Koehler (1923-1927)
• P. Sj. van Koningsveld et al. (eds.), Scholarship and Friendship: The Goldziher-Snouck Hurgronje Correspondence, Brill (2021)
• Edward Said, Orientalism, Pantheon Books (1978)
• The Holy Qur’an, Surah al-Anfal 8:58