M. Laffan Raden Aboe Bakar; An introductory note concerning Snouck Hurgronje's informant in Jeddah (1884-1912) In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 155 (1999), no: 4, Leiden, 517-542 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:21:18AM via free access MICHAEL LAFFAN Raden Aboe Bakar An Introductory Note Concerning Snouck Hurgronje's Informant in Jeddah (1884-1912)1 Introduction The nineteenth century brought the Arabian peninsula more fully into the global economy, first with the introduction of steam shipping and then, in 1869, with the opening of the Suez Canal. Coupled with this, the increasing economie prosperity of elites in the Dutch East Indies, particularly in Java and Sumatra, made the pilgrimage to Mecca a more commonly performed religious duty among Southeast Asians (Vredenbregt 1962). In Mecca the pil- grims came into contact with Muslims from every part of the world and also interacted with a sizeable community of their own people in residence there. There would have been a sharp difference between long- and short-timers, between pilgrims and resident scholars {'ulama'), who had a greater oppor- tunity to integrate with the wider Muslim community. In legal matters, these 'ulama'' were the final arbiters for their countrymen by virtue of their physical location and their ability to consult with other 'ulama' of the Muslim world. Letters came to them from every part of the archipelago, where local 'ulama' would have already tried to resolve the important matters touched on in them and finally pronounced themselves 1 This research note is a preliminary introduction to Raden Aboe Bakar Djajadiningrat, whose relationship with C. Snouck Hurgronje, whilst he was employed by the Dutch consulate in the Hijaz from 1884 to 1912, intersects with aspects of my dissertation, The umma below the winds, currently in progress at the University of Sydney. A preliminary version of this paper was pre- sented at the conference 'Emerging trends in Islamic thought' at the University of Melbourne, 11- 12 July 1998. I would especially like to thank Dr Jan Just Witkam and Drs Hans van der Velde for their unstinting advice and help in the course of my research at the Leiden University Library, as well as Dr Nico Kaptein of the International Institute for Asian Studies, which I would like to thank also for making a room available for me - at the generous suggestion of Jos van Lent - during my stay in The Netherlands. MICHAEL LAFFAN, a graduate from the Faculty of Asian Studies at the ANU, is currently a doc- toral candidate at the University of Sydney. Having a special interest in Islam and nationalism in colonial Indonesia, he has previously published 'Watan and negen; Mustafa Kamil's "Rising Sun" in the Malay world', Indonesia Circle 69 (1996):156-75. Mr Laffan may be contacted at 5/51 Freda Bennett Cct., Nicholls, ACT 2913, Australia. BK] 155-4 (1999) Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:21:18AM via free access 518 Michael Laffan unqualified to give a juridical opinion (fatwa, p\.fatawa).2 Whereas we might imagine that these letters carried the seeds of rebellion and contained calls to Holy War, most of them centred on far more domestic, though equally im- portant and contentious, issues. One result of this constant correspondence is a published bilingual com- pendium of fatawa relating to bilad al-Jawa (Southeast Asia), entitled al- Muhimmat al-nafa'is. This compendium was first published in 1892 and remained in print until the 1920s or 1930s (Kaptein 1997:17). That it remained available for so long is a testament to the continuing relevance of the issues resolved by 'ulama' in the 1870s and 80s, when the Dutch were starting to 'round off' their island empire. The majority of these fatawa were the out- come of disputes in the wider Indies involving legal points on which clari- fication of the law was required. Whilst many of the questions concerned are set against a colonial back- drop, resistance to (established) Dutch rule is not a marked characteristic of the Muhimmat al-nafa'is. Nonetheless, the Dutch figure prominently as the cause of some disputes and clearly remain the infidel (kafir) other. This other- ness is emphasized in Ahmad Dahlan's fatwa that Muslims should avoid wearing any article of dress that was connected specifically with infidels (kuffar) (Kaptein 1997:71-2, 199). Even so, the validity of no decision by a Muslim in authority where that authority derived from appointment by (Dutch) infidels, or directly from them, was contested, as long as it did not contravene the shari'a (Kaptein 1997:193,198). Meanwhile, for European colonial society Mecca, as the one place closed to Europeans, became the focus of fears 0aquet 1980:289). No doubt these fears were deepened by the recent memory of the events of 1857-58 in British India, together with the massacres of Christians in Jeddah in 1858 (Ochsenwald 1977) and Damascus in 1860 (Hourani 1983:63). Officials like the Dutch Consul in Jeddah, J.A. Kruyt (1878-85), saw a connection between such disparate phenomena as the Sanusiya tariqa of North Africa and the Wahhabi movement in the Arabian peninsula and worried about the influ- ence of the former in the East (Kruyt to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, 15 August 1883, ARA A.74, box 148) - particularly in Aceh, where a Dutch force remained effectively prisoner behind its lines on the coast. In the Indies, the Dutch press was relatively free to spread increasingly wild and shocking tales of rising fundamentalism. In 1885, two leading Indies papers, the Java-Bode and De Locomotief, reported that the 'ulama'of Cianjur and Sukabumi had formed a secret society in order to plan a revolt 2 The report of the Dutch Consul in Jeddah of 18 December 1882 mentions several deliveries of such letters with the arrival there of 'Saëed and Joesoef Katan with letters for the oelama of Mecca from the panghoeloe of Batavia; Mohamed Said Mehebat and Shaykh Abdul Wahab with letters as per above from Semarang; [... ]' (ARA A.74, box 148). Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:21:18AM via free access Raden Aboe Bakar 519 along the lines of the Sepoy Mutiny (Steenbrink 1993:80). At the same time the press in general was under close restriction when it came to any reports that might be critical of colonial policy, public officials, or the traditional aris- tocracies in partnership with those officials. This is not to say that Dutch anxieties were entirely without foundation. Ibrahim (1996:158) has observed that many of the Jawa living in Mecca stud- ied at the Sawlatiya madrasa. This institution was founded in 1874 by Muhammad Khalil Rahmat Allah Kayrnawi (1818-90), an activist from the Sepoy Revolt of 1857-58 who later enjoyed the favour of the Turkish Sultan for a work (Izhar al-haqq) attacking the inconsistencies of Christian theology (Snouck Hurgronje 1906 11:345 note 1; Ochsenwald 1984:89). In addition, Muhammad Nafis al-Banjari - a Jawi3 then living in Mecca - had urged jihad against all colonial powers (Ibrahim 1996), and at that time there could be no safer place to make such a declaration. The monitoring of Islam was now seen by the Dutch as the key to their continued control of the Netherlands East Indies. What the Dutch govern- ment needed to know in the 1880s was the precise nature of the influence of the pilgrimage on its Asian subjects, little serious study having been done on the pilgrimage up till then. Hence Kruyt, who met the young Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) while on leave in The Netherlands in 1884, requested that he be appointed to do research on the pilgrimage in relation to pan-Islamism and the mystical orders in the Indies. What Snouck Hur- gronje was to produce was not simply a statistical survey of the raw numbers of pilgrims, but a description of the function of these pilgrims as a commun- ity and the currents to which they gave rise back in their homelands. Snouck Hurgronje arrived at the small Dutch consulate in Jeddah to com- mence his research in August 1884. From this base he set about interviewing groups of pilgrims as they passed through the consulate with their passports. Here he would have interviewed the pilgrims and local informants whilst continuing his studies of Malay, which was considered crucial for the suc- cessful completion of his mission (Van Koningsveld 1988:60). A profitable encounter: Aboe Bakar Djajadiningrat becomes established in Jeddah Shortly after his arrival in Jeddah, Snouck Hurgronje made the acquaintance of Aboe Bakar Djajadiningrat, who had been living in Mecca for about five years, whom he engaged to teach him Malay. For both men this meeting was 3 In conformity with Arabic practice I have used the name Jawa (a) for the island of Java and (b) for people from Java or Southeast Asia in general, and Jawi as (a) an adjective and (b) the sin- gular noun for a person from this area. Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:21:18AM via free access 520 Michael Laffan to prove crucial to their future. It brought Aboe Bakar life-long employment and security in the Hijaz and ensured Snouck Hurgronje's enduring reputa- tion. Two years previously, in September 1882, foliowing a visit to the newly established quarantine station at the mouth of the Red Sea, Consul Kruyt had suggested that East Indies pilgrims be required to register with the Nether- lands consulate and had made a request to his superiors for the appointment of a dragoman to help cope with the increasing workload that this would entail.