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This chapter looks at Snouck Hurgronje's interventions in the field in Holland, his criticisms of the juridical and missiological attacks on the orthopraxy of Islam in the Indies, and his alliance with those whom he deemed to have a more scholarly interpretation of Islam, and whose views he therefore promoted as beneficial to public well-being within a still Netherlandic Indies. In particular, the chapter will consider the distaste of Snouck and his allies for the varieties of populist mysticism that rival—and rather less juridically concerned—Muslim teachers could turn to their own purposes. Trained in the field of religious studies, Snouck had a decided aversion to legalistic scholarship that prioritized text over context. He urged instead that the observations of his academic and churchmen forebears should be twinned to a more professionally developed Orientalism, such as would more effectively service an empire contending with Islam as its primary threat.

This chapter examines how Snouck's successors, trained in the history of Islam through the use of manuscripts he had collected, favored a particular strand of Muslim activism in what people were now increasingly calling “Indonesia.” Snouck may have been physically absent from Indonesia in the second decade of the twentieth century, but the advisors he had trained were very much on hand. Their mission was to further Snouck's work by overseeing the transition of Indonesia into the modern world. They thought that they would guide a movement of Indonesians into the orthodox public sphere and away from the otherworldly personal control of mystical teachers. They still cultivated links with elite scholars, but they would have been pleased by the independent yet collaborative voices of Sarekat Islam and the egalitarian tone of the Irshadi movement that was allied with it.

This chapter continues the study of the previous chapter, following Snouck as he arrives in Batavia in 1889 and conducts fieldwork in Java and Aceh, and examining his place in both Dutch and indigenous society. Building on his field-defining venture in Mecca, Snouck took advantage of both the connections he had formed there and the political storm of Cilegon to tour the pesantrens of Java. He did this as a conscious servant of empire, albeit one who believed that he could play a part in the elevation of its subjects. It was also in the course of this journey, and the ones to come in Aceh's troubled borderlands, that he threw off the mantle of doomsayer and began to counsel greater patience with, attention to, and even respect for Islam as the faith of a distressed people.

It explores the different approaches to Islam and local traditions as they were expressed in Dutch and British writings and research institutions. The Dutch were concerned with the political manifestations of Islam in Indonesia whereas the British addressed the cultural expressions of their Malay subjects. There was no unified, monolithic Orientalism, and it is important to consider their diverse backgrounds, approaches and positions regarding Islam and Muslims.

This chapter discusses the position of those who opposed Snouck's authority, seeing his “ethical” policies for the modernization of the Muslim Indies as a part of a longer-term project of Christianization. In his role as unofficial mufti of the undeniably Muslim Netherlands Indies, Snouck was perceived as servant to state and Islam alike. Such services would irritate the missionaries who had originally provided the scholar with his ethnographic data and a warm welcome. They also angered those Muslims who were not the direct beneficiaries of his policies, most especially those with an interest in connecting with the Ottoman Empire and its periodicals. To that end, it is ironic that their globally oriented attacks on the Dutchman were framed in terms of policing the boundaries of Sufi practice supposedly transgressed by Hasan Mustafa. Moreover, while the missionaries thought Snouck was Islamizing Java, some Arabs feared that his projects were geared to easing a path for Christianity.