Lodewijk Willem Christiaan van den Berg

Education and career Van den Berg was born in Haarlem, Netherlands, on October 19, 1845. His father was Simon van den Berg and his mother was Sophie Charlotte Immerzeel. He married Françoise Steup in 1884.

After completing the gymnasium, he studied at Taal-, Land- end Volkenkunde in Leiden University,

Van den Berg continued his exploration of Muslim law by publishing De Beginselen van het Mohammedaansche Recht, Volgens de Imâm's Aboe Hanifat en Sjâfi‘i (The Principles of the Mohammedan Law, according to the Imams Abu Hanifah and Shafi'i) in 1874. Second and third editions followed in 1878 and 1883. Van den Berg's interest in the Arab communities of Java led him to complete an important work on this subject.

His book on ranks and titles on Java and Madura should also be noted among several other contributions, but his book which has been most referenced and cited for topic of Indonesian Hadhrami is Le Hadhramout et les colonies arabes dans l'archipel Indien ("The Hadhramaut and Arab settlements in the Indian archipelago")

Many times van den Berg had opposite opinions with another Dutch orientalist, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje. Van den Berg's first exchange with Snouck concerned van den Berg's own paper publication on Imam al-Nawawi's Minhâdj at-talibîn . Snouck stressed that including the original Arabic text was superfluous as excellent copies were available throughout the Muslim world. While complimenting van den Berg on the smoothness of the French text, Snouck also questioned whether the various terms found in the Fiqh books should be translated because the Arabic words were critical technical terms, "the pillars" of knowledge and wisdom.

A state commission was established in 1890 for revision of colonial legislation in the field of private law and van den Berg was appointed as its secretary.

Van den Berg returned to the Netherlands in 1887 to accept a professorship at the Indische Instelling Delft, a college for colonial administration. His tenure at the institute moved along smoothly while he continued to publish. In his later life, he also was active in politics for the Anti-Revolutionary Party, serving on the municipal council of Delft from 1901 to 1904 and as mayor of the same town between 1910 and 1920. He was member of the Provincial Council of South Holland from 1902 to 1911 and a member of the Senate between 1911 and 1923.

Van den Berg died on March 2, 1927, in Delft. Although the name of L. W. C. van den Berg is not as famous as his successor, Snouck Hurgronje, on researches on Islam and Arabs in East Indies, but van den Berg still has been a very important orientalist.