The Islamic scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) was in 1884 the first westerner to take photographs in the ‘forbidden city’ Mecca. He did so by converting to Islam so that he could take part in the Hajj.  

The Amsterdam Rijksmuseum publishes his photos in Rijksmuseum Studies in Photography (Durkje van der Wal, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje: The First Western Photographer in Mecca, 1884-1885).

Now, for the first time, we learn about the obstacles that Snouck Hurgronje had to overcome in order to take his photographs. He took those in his first book himself, while the second is filled with photographs by his assistant, the Meccan doctor ‘Abd al-Ghaffar. His share in Snouck Hurgronje’s books and their remarkable collaboration have never been studied before.  

One of the high points is an exceptional circular, six-shot photograph taken with a homemade ‘detective camera’. It was made with the ‘revolver method’ of a rotating glass plate that enabled six photographs to be taken in succession without changing the plate. 

From Mecca to Indonesia

In 1889 Hurgronje became professor of Malay at Leiden University and official advisor to the Dutch government on colonial affairs.  

As the adviser of J. B. van Heutsz, he took an active role in the final part (1898–1905) of the Aceh War (1873–1913). 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, ending a 40 year war with varying casualty estimates of between 50,000 and 100,000 inhabitants dead and about a million wounded. 

His success in the Aceh War earned him influence in shaping colonial administration policy throughout the rest of Indonesia. He returned to the Netherlands in 1906 where he continued a successful academic career.