Murder in Amsterdam

Published Sunday, November 19, 2006 by Kevin Breathnach | E-mail this post

Ask any drunken Dutch holidaymaker what he thinks of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, argue against his opinion and you are guaranteed an evening of emoted, irrational and often angry discussion. This, tellingly enough, is how I came to learn Dutch insults which go far beyond our petty little C-word: cancerous Nazi, for example, gets bandied about with seeming insouciance. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for those who don’t know, is a Somali-born, anti-Islamist politician who wrote the script to filmmaker Theo Van Gogh’s polemic on domestic abuse in Islam, Submission. She required round-the-clock police protection, until she departed for America in this year.

On November 2nd, 2004, Theo Van Gogh - the thuggishly iconoclastic filmmaker and nephew of Vincent - was killed as he cycled to work by Mohammed Bouyeri, an Islamic fundamentalist. First he shot Van Gogh. Then he slashed his throat with a curved machete. Then to Van Gogh’s corpse he pinned a letter addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He made no serious attempt to escape, shooting arbitrarily at police. Misplaced insouciance: a Dutch thing, perhaps.

Once the shrapnel of any expression of Islamic fundamentalism has settled, there usually arrives a reasonable analysis of the preceding and proceeding events. Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism is required reading as far as I’m concerned for anybody who claims a reasonable grasp on Islamism. Michael Gove’s Celsius 7/7 offers much the same, though it’s certainly not as extensive, nor as good, while its context naturally leans towards Britain’s experience of political Islam. Clive James’ Meaning of Recognition carries an intelligent essay on the Bali bombings, though on the Madrid bombings, I’ve happened upon shockingly little. My fault, probably.

Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam poses as that intelligent, comprehensive account with regards to Van Gogh’s death, his killer’s motivations and both character’s respective lives. It’s paired too with a study into the growing crisis of identity and societal harmony in the author’s native Netherlands. “No drunken holidaymaking here,” its sober white cover calmly asserts.

Holland - Amsterdam, in particular - has for years posed as the quaint, liberal utopia of tolerant, internationalist minds; a melting-pot like New York or London, with weed and hookers and unkempt roadside verges thrown in. Holland is now a nation of voluminous immigration - first, second and third generation. In 1999, 45% of its population was of foreign origin, the majority of whom were Muslim. Over the edge of that pot, Holland’s broth has started to spew.

Holland, home of Erasmus and Spinoza, sees itself as a home - the home - of the Enlightenment and its governmental extension, liberal democracy. Islam, many argue, is entirely incompatible with liberal democracy on an issue or ten too many: women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of speech and belief, representative government, and even the law. Says Afshin Ellian, for instance: “A liberal democracy cannot survive when part of the population believes that divine laws trump those made by man.”

Despite this, Buruma delves not into the world of radical and political Islam (that is ‘Islamism’) as explicated by Paul Berman. Not once do we read of Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al-Zarahiri, Hassan al-Banna, Abu al-Mawdudi or even Osama Bin Laden. These are the key figures in the history of fundamentalist Islam; to know them is to at least begin to understand the threat the West faces. Al-Qaeda too goes without mention, and don’t think the Muslim Brotherhood will be considered, not in any case beyond Hirsi Ali’s one-time membership thereof. Buruma, in other words, ignores the entire history of Islamism, the cause under whose name Mohammed Bouyari unrepentantly murdered Theo Van Gogh. How telling it is then that the book’s index throws everything germane under the one title (“Islam and Islamism”) as if one - a religion - was the same as the other - a fascistic political ideology based on that religion.

This is a conscious move, it seems. Buruma writes in the first person (“I first saw Afshin Ellian at his home,” “I was told a fascinating story by a friend of mine” etc.). This is appropriate to the task Buruma, I think, tries to fulfill: to investigate the personal history of someone who was converted within the space of one year from an intelligent, dope-smoking Dutch youth into a religious moralist, zealot and nonchalant killer. In this sense, Murder in Amsterdam is a valuable study into the root causes of fundamentalism which should be fought at home - discrimination, exclusion, poverty, etc. - but it should not be read in isolation to Paul Berman’s study of, as it were, the problem other end - the end in which all too often disillusioned Muslim immigrants find refuge. For it is in Islamism and Islamist theory that disillusionment turns to nihilism, that a frustration with societal restrictions becomes a wish not for liberation in any normal sense but a desire for, as Buruma himself puts it, “a liberation of death.”

Berman remains required reading on an international scale; Buruma, for all his scrupulous research, remains firmly within the realms of reportage, and as such on only a strictly local, specialised scale can Murder in Amsterdam be considered required reading.

Labels: books, holland, islamism, liberalism, politics

Murder in Amsterdam

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