Dr. I. Goldziher’s Die Zahiriten was published in Leipzig in 1884. This is cited to support the historical view of Habib Seunagan’s teaching that one might handle the Quran even when in a state of ritual impurity.
Expanded account from The Achehnese, Vol. I — Germany
Germany — the German Empire of the late nineteenth century — appears in The Achehnese Vol. I only in a single comparative aside, but the reference is significant as an index of Snouck Hurgronje’s polemical purpose and of his own position within the European Orientalist republic of letters. Germany is mentioned in The Achehnese Vol. I only in a comparative aside, but the reference is significant as an index of Snouck Hurgronje’s polemical purpose. In the Introduction, while protesting against the legend of the Acheh War which foreigners had constructed for themselves in spite of the abundant Dutch writings on the subject, Snouck remarks that “the most absurd errors are accepted in Europe for the truth regarding events that concern the minor states; even in Germany, the land of learning, savants take each other more seriously to task over an error in an edition of a Pushtu text or in an essay on the ethnography of Corea than over the most monstrous misstatements regarding events that have happened, and are still happening, before their eyes in Acheh.”
Snouck’s Polemical Introduction
In the Introduction, while protesting against the legend of the Acheh War which foreigners had constructed for themselves in spite of the abundant Dutch writings on the subject, Snouck remarks that “the most absurd errors are accepted in Europe for the truth regarding events that concern the minor states; even in Germany, the land of learning, savants take each other more seriously to task over an error in an edition of a Pushtu text or in an essay on the ethnography of Corea than over the most monstrous misstatements regarding events that have happened, and are still happening, before their eyes in Acheh.”
The passage is at once a complaint against the indiscriminate reception of anti-Dutch accounts of the Achehnese War and a sally at the expense of German Gelehrsamkeit — that elaborate learning which, in Snouck’s ironic formulation, could expend more critical energy on a faulty Pushtu reading or an ethnographical slip concerning Korea than on the misrepresentations of contemporary colonial history then current in the European press.
Germany as the Centre of Orientalist Philology
Germany in the 1890s was the recognised centre of Orientalist philology. The great seminaries of Berlin, Leipzig, Göttingen, Halle, and Tübingen trained successive generations of Arabists, Sanskritists, and Islamicists, and the journals published from those universities set the standard for textual criticism throughout Europe. Snouck himself, a careful Arabist trained partly in the German tradition, was thoroughly at home in that world, and the “land of learning” tag was a conventional tribute paid to it by foreign scholars. He turns the tribute into a satirical jab by contrasting its minute textual exactness with its broad indifference to the political realities of European colonialism in the Indian Archipelago.
The Pushtu and Corea References
The reference to Pushtu and to the ethnography of Korea is itself characteristic of the German Orientalist horizon. The former points to the then-flourishing study of the Pathan languages, especially in connection with the Afghan frontier of British India; the latter to the curious ethnographical literature that had begun to gather around the still-little-known Korea of the late nineteenth century. By selecting these two examples Snouck picks out fields in which the German savant was wont to display an exactness that he refused to extend to the affairs of Netherlands India.
The Rhetorical Function of the Reference
The mention of Germany is otherwise incidental to the argument of The Achehnese. It belongs to that rhetorical opening in which Snouck justifies his decision to publish, in English translation, a work originally composed for Dutch readers — a decision motivated in part by the determination to refute at the bar of European, and especially of British, opinion the legends that had grown up around the Achehnese War. The book itself, as subsequently unfolded, is overwhelmingly concerned with the internal constitution of Achehnese society, and Germany reappears in its pages only as the source of a few technical references to Orientalist scholarship.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. II, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.