The Acheh mission of Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje began in July 1891, when the Dutch Orientalist — then already known for his first-hand study of Mecca and the Hadhramaut — proceeded to Acheh in pursuance of instructions from the Netherlands-India Government to make a special study of the religious element in the political conditions of that country. The mission was a direct response to the prolonged stalemate of the Achehnese War, which had drifted since 1873 into a costly containment around the Dutch “line” without any prospect of subjugation. Snouck Hurgronje’s task was to diagnose why the resistance continued, and his conclusions — gathered in less than seven months on Achehnese soil — were to reshape the entire Dutch conduct of the war.
Background and preparation
Snouck Hurgronje had spent the years 1884–1885 in Arabia, where at Mecca he obtained intimate knowledge of the influence of Mohammedan fanaticism upon the obstinate resistance of the Achehnese to Dutch rule. Some time spent in direct relations with Achehnese on their own soil was nevertheless required to round off the knowledge gained from literature and from his experience in the sacred city of the Arabs. In Acheh he soon saw that the available data regarding the language, country and people fell far short of what was wanted, so he extended his enquiry beyond the limits of his commission. In order to get at the very foundations of the influence of Islam upon the political, social and domestic life of the Achehnese, he took — so far as local conditions allowed — that life in its entire range as the subject of his research.
Outcome: the 1893–94 treatise
By February 1892 Snouck Hurgronje had got together enough preliminary matter for compiling a book; he worked up his materials at Batavia, and in 1893–1894 the first edition of his treatise on the Achehnese appeared — the work now offered, in English translation, as The Achehnese (Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906). His central thesis was that the dogmas of Islam on the subject of religious war, fanatical in their terms, supplied the principal stimulus to the obstinate rebellion, and that the teungkus, or religious leaders, had come more and more during the war to be masters of the country, terrorizing the hereditary chiefs as well as the populace wherever these last were disposed to peace. This diagnosis, contested at the time by many, was confirmed in all material details by the events that followed.
Influence on the conduct of the war
When, in early 1899, the translator A.W.S. O’Sullivan informed Snouck Hurgronje of his project of rendering the work into English, it was precisely the moment at which the real conquest of Acheh was being commenced under General Van Heutsz, and Snouck Hurgronje himself — spending a great deal of his time in that country — was in an incomparably better position to investigate the old pirate-state than he had been in 1891 and 1892. Under his advice the Dutch abandoned the concentration scheme and turned to the active subjugation of the country through lightly equipped native troops under European officers, operating in small detachments against the guerrilla bands of the ulamas. Within six years this new policy had brought about the submission of almost all chiefs of mark, including — in January 1903 — the Pretender-Sultan Tuanku Muhamat Dawot himself.
The mission thus proved decisive not merely as an episode of colonial scholarship but as the intellectual precondition of the Dutch victory. The period separating the Dutch edition of 1893–1894 from the English translation of 1906 placed, as Snouck Hurgronje himself observed, the seal of truth upon the diagnosis of the disease made by him in 1892, when many doubted him, while other doctors thought that the complaint was beyond healing.
See Also
- C. Snouck Hurgronje
- Acheh War
- Dutch policy of ‘concentration’
- Governor Van Heutsz
- Submission of Tuanku Muhamat Dawot
- Holy war against the Dutch
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.