Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje

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Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) was a Dutch scholar of Oriental cultures and languages and Advisor on Native Affairs to the colonial government of the Netherlands East Indies.

Born in Oosterhout in 1857, he became a theology student at Leiden University in 1874. He received his doctorate at Leiden in 1880 with his dissertation ‘Het Mekkaansche Feest’ ("The Festivities of Mecca"). He became a professor at the Leiden School for Colonial Civil Servants in 1881 and visited Mecca in 1884-1885 as one of the first Western scholars of Oriental cultures. In 1889 he became professor of Malay at Leiden University and official advisor to the Dutch government on colonial affairs. He wrote more than 1,400 papers on the situation in Aceh and the position of Islam in the Dutch East Indies, as well as on the colonial civil service and nationalism.

As the adviser of J. B. van Heutsz, he took an active part in the final part of the Aceh War. He used his knowledge of Islamic culture to devise strategies which significantly helped crush the resistance of the Aceh inhabitants and impose Dutch colonial rule on them, with the price variously estimated at between 50,000 and 100,000 inbitants dead and about a million wounded.