By Ian Buruma
It was already a dreary, late-autumn morning in Amsterdam when Mohammed Bouyeri made it that much drearier by blasting filmmaker and provocateur Theo van Gogh off his bicycle. He then slashed van Gogh’s throat, planted the knife in van Gogh’s chest, and used another to pin a note to him, a rambling tract calling for a holy war against unbelievers. Then Bouyeri kicked the corpse. He was arrested after a gunfight with police.
“Murder in Amsterdam” is Ian Buruma’s exploration of the event, its context and fallout. It is a work of philosophical and narrative tension, strikingly sharp and brooding, frank and openly curious. Which is apt, for here is the Netherlands—home to the Enlightenment, bastion of tolerance—experiencing an act of mortal intolerance. The Netherlands, where multiculturalism is worn on its sleeve, meets its evil twin.
Just how elastic is tolerance, asks Buruma? If the Netherlands wears multiculturalism on its sleeve, it doesn’t necessarily follow that untold numbers of sober, conformist Netherlanders find the garment a comfortable fit. Tolerance has its limits, he writes. “It is easy to tolerate those who are much like ourselves, whom we feel we can trust instinctively, whose jokes we understand, who share our sense of irony. … It is much harder to extend the same principle to strangers in our midst, who find our ways as disturbing as we do theirs.”
The rows in the multicultural garden proved more and more difficult to hoe, for the Dutch and for, in particular, the significant immigrant population of Muslims. With their radically different worldview, many Muslims were not about to be absorbed willy-nilly into Dutch democratic liberalism. They would stick to their own institutions, especially after the resentment of having one too many doors shut in their face, or when Dutch freedoms—sexual, religious, artistic, political, you name it—were perceived as a threat. These Muslims would seek comfort in the reinvention of tradition on new turf.
What is multiculturalism in this instance if not the ideal of a complacent elite, a tolerance of intolerance? asked some high-profile Dutch. Buruma, a Dutch native living in the United States, draws sharp portraits of three: Pim Fortuyn, the gay, populist outsider who almost became prime minister; the anti-Islam, Somali-born politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali; and van Gogh, “with his unfailing instinct for the low blow.”
Fortuyn voiced sentiments of cultural homogeneity and a loathing of religious strictures, writes Buruma, concocting a dreamy family-state, with a shared language, culture and history. Foreigners rocked the family-state boat. ” ‘How dare you!’ he fulminated. … ‘This is our country, and if you can’t conform, you should get the hell out.’ ” Campy, mocking, aggrieved, Fortuyn’s popularity attested to touching a raw Dutch nerve. He was assassinated by an animal-rights activist who objected to his vanity, opportunism and fur collars.
Ali has pulled no punches in her excoriation of Islam. She suffered firsthand the torments that can be visited upon females living in a fundamentalist Islamic state. Such Islam is a force of darkness, she says, inimical to the health of an enlightened country like the Netherlands. Widely respected, Ali has also made enemies across the spectrum in her role as Islam’s Voltaire: a heretic, a “filthy indigenous clone,” a snake in the multicultural Eden. Van Gogh was her friend, with whom she made the short film “Submission,” a contentious broadside at Islam as a cage imprisoning women.
This was van Gogh’s cup of tea. A self-ordained “village idiot,” the court jester with license to spill Truth, he loved a good row. He epitomized a rude, free-spirited anarchism of poking fun at convention. Catholic, Jew, Muslim — all felt his barb. Living in the Netherlands, he believed that he could give unlimited offense without fear of physical retribution. He was mistaken.
Buruma does his most vigilant probing of Mohammed Bouyeri, a textbook on the retreat into fundamentalism. The pot-smoking youth gave way under a series of setbacks and rejections. His Islamic upbringing was tugged from the shadows. He became uncomfortable with all the choices in Dutch society, and disgusted by its value system. Increasingly priggish and moralistic, he fashioned a world out of fantasy, paranoia, tribal honor and religious rectitude. Islamic purism provided sustenance and authenticity amid the earthly evils.
“Submission” stuck in Bouyeri’s craw. He would become a knight of Allah, a destroyer of the civilization that tormented him, a dispenser of divine law — the ordinates of a murderous narcissism — with violent death his cleansing agent. “The impulse to seek oblivion, to be intoxicated and overwhelmed by a great force, is not rare,” writes Buruma. Life in jail is a great place to find oblivion.
Readers can draw their own conclusions about the limits of tolerance. Burma is wary to provide pat answers, though perhaps operating within a nation’s rules of law is a sensible starting point. Still, as Ali might warn, try being a girl in Somalia. National rules of law may well be the death of you.
(from the San Francisco Chronicle)