A Brill Calendar: June 26

Few tasks were as vital for Leyden – first in the Republic, later in the Kingdom – as providing public servants of all kinds: from lawyers, judges and barristers, burgomasters, to bureaucrats and politicians.

When the vast Indonesian archipelago came under the colonial control of a minor European power after the Napoleonic era, this entailed a seismic shift for Dutch Academe. The antiquated and defunct United East-Indian Company (VOC) had to make way for a regime run from The Hague, and ‘Oversees Parts of the Realm’ were supposed to contribute substantially to prosperity of the Kingdom as a whole. The arrangement was supposed to last for an indefinite period of time. However, the Second World War and its aftermath in South-Eastern Asia destroyed this colonial dream.

However, it was a burgeoning dream throughout the life of the legendary Arabist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (Oosterhout, February 8 1857 – Leyden June 26 1936. Snouck’s voyage of discovery to Mecca, when a young man (1884 – ’85) had earned him world-wide fame. It is seldom that a scholar became so prominent outside lecture-halls, class-rooms and libraries. During the last decade of the 19th century and the first six years of the 20th , Snouck acted as key-adviser to Dutch colonial government on Islamic culture ‘in situ’, with an eagle-eye on Atjeh, recently ‘pacified’ by the Dutch general Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz (1851 – 1924). Rather abruptly, the Arabist returned to his Alma Mater in 1906, whilst burning all private ships of affiliation and kinship behind him.

A century later, Islamic cultures, religions and involvements have ceased to be restricted to ethnography and back-waters of the world-at-large; while Snouck Hurgronje must be seen as Founding Father of a new awareness of interdependencies. His book on Mecca during the second half of the 19th century, including the magnificent photographs, is back in print at Brill.