Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje was born on Sunday, 8 February 1857 in Oosterhout, Brabant, in his family home on the Heuvelstraat. His parents were the former preacher Jacob Snouck Hurgronje and Anna de Visser, who had started a secret relationship in the Zeeland town of Tholen and were eventually married after the death of Snouck's wife. Chris Snouck Hurgronje attended the H.B.S. school in Breda and studied in Leiden. His father had died and his mother went to live on the Hooigracht in Leiden to help him so that he could continue his studies. On 24 November 1880, at the age of 23, Snouck Hurgronje obtained his PhD with his dissertation on Het

Mekkaansche feest [The Festivities of Mecca]. To this end, he had studied both the Qur'an and various Arab writers from the first centuries after Muhammad's appearance to find out the original nature of the ceremonies in Mecca. He then tried to outline the reasons for the survival of the ceremonies in Islam and the exact form that everything would subsequently take. However, Snouck wanted more: not only to study ancient texts, but also to observe the Islamic society of his own time. That's why he travelled to Mecca and stayed in the city in 1885. In his masterpiece Mekka [Mecca], published in 1888 and 1889, he wrote about what he had seen and studied.