A Brill Calendar: February 22

Hugronje's Ivory Tower

Few people speaking Dutch as a matter of course would be at a loss when the idiom ‘ivoren toren’ (ivory tower) is employed; although it is perhaps seldom heard.

It is a pejorative for a sheltered, comfortable setting combined with a blindness for happenings outside; applied to academic scholarship particularly, an activity generally supposed to be lavishly financed by government. However in most metaphorical phrases surviving through the ages there is some truth; and some exaggeration.

Understanding the essence of a slowly developed new theory concerning megalith building, for instance, is not normally enriched by taking the year of publication also into account. A different example is the weak grasp of most scientists on the history of their discipline as a whole. Intense mental focussing on efforts to reduce mysteries to riddles, and riddles to methods tends to invite blinkers of all kinds.

When the brilliant young Leyden alumnus and Arabist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857 – 1936) arrived February 22 1885 in Mecca he accomplished a personal mission: to get out of the ‘ivory tower’ inhabited by sedate Leyden professors like Professor de Goeje, and other arm-chair lecturers who had educated & enlightened him without ever setting eyes on the Arab world and Islam ‘in situ’. However, this first Western scholar and expert photographer to investigate the heart of a world-religion couldn’t have cared less that four weeks earlier, not far from the Arab peninsula, in Sudan, the British General Charles Gordon was killed in combat, while he defended Khartum against a Muslim rebellion led by a fanatic, the ‘Mahdi’. Snouck may have been fully occupied in building a new scholarly ivory tower of his own.

It is seldom that a prolonged and wide view of the past proves totally barren - ivory being not only a smooth, but also a soft building material - and Osama bin Laden is not the first of his ilk. Nor the great Snouck Hurgronje, for that matter.