Missions Resources - Bibliography
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
Authors: Ian Buruma
ISBN: 1594201080
Publisher: Penguin
Number of pages: 288
Type of cover: Hard Cover
Summary:
reviewed by Paul Grant, May 7 2007
For generations Amsterdam has presented itself to the world as a model of civic graciousness, religious tolerance, and hospitality to strangers and refugees. But three years ago, a religious murder threw the city into an identity crisis: how did this happen here? What kind of place are we becoming?
After filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s November 2004 murder—in broad daylight—at the hands of a young Moroccan-Dutch man, one world-traveling Dutch scholar decided to spend some time in his home country, to figure out what was really going on.
The result is Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam. It’s a political discussion, a travelogue, and a criminal history at once. It is a story about the Netherlands and beyond. Buruma is a wonderful writer, and manages to bring a deep sense of place to the Netherlands, if only show his country’s failure to adequately share that sense of place with the thousands of Muslim immigrants who began arriving in the 1960s.
Initially hired as guest workers to clean toilets and change light bulbs, these North African men toiled for decades, crammed into substandard apartment blocks as they remitted their paychecks to their extended families in Morocco and Algeria. Along the way, quietly and unnoticed by the Dutch mainstream, they began take Dutch citizenship, and fetch wives and children from the old country—and eventually wives and husbands for their children as well. Bit by bit, a sizeable minority of North Africans materialized in the cities of the Netherlands (up to 45% of Amsterdam’s population), out of sight and mostly out of mind of the natives.
The North Africans stayed out of sight for two closely related reasons: they weren’t welcomed by the Dutch as fellows; and they segregated themselves. By the turn of the century thousands of ethnically-North African citizens lived in so-called “dish cities,” connected to Morocco by satellite television, while remaining peripheral members their actual cities of residence.
There were some rumblings of trouble—Moroccan youth gangs etc.—and even some reports of international terrorists being nurtured in-country, but nothing really appeared as a threat to Dutch society and democracy itself. The Dutch prided themselves on being a tolerant people, unlike, say, the French, or the Americans, or the Germans. After all, the Netherlands had a person like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Ms. Hirsi Ali is a Somalia-born Muslim apostate, an activist for Muslim women, a onetime member of the Dutch parliament, and an all-around compelling character. Granted asylum to, and eventually citizenship of the Netherlands after she fled an arranged marriage, Hirsi Ali learned fluent Dutch, studied Western intellectual history, and rejected Islam.
But even as she embraced Western secular public values, she did not add to her new life the social glue of public tolerance. Rather, she became a shockingly vocal opponent of all things Muslim—shocking for its un-Dutch religious intolerance. Hirsi Ali felt no need for dialogue with Muslims. Islam was wrong, and that was that. Muslims needed liberation, not accommodation. Some people, Buruma notes, began calling her an “Enlightenment fundamentalist.”
Hirsi Ali’s quest culminated in a documentary film she made with Theo van Gogh. Submission is a ten minute film intended to provoke Muslims. It’s rude, vulgar and blasphemous, and probably would have ended up a footnote to history if the film’s director hadn’t been murdered, while riding his bicycle home from the office.
When Mohammed Bouyeri killed Theo van Gogh, the Dutch mainstream asked how this came to happen. Ian Buruma asked a different question: how did the mainstream not see this happening?
What makes Murder in Amsterdam so fascinating is Mr. Buruma’s conversations with diverse groups of people: bourgeois and petty aristocrats; small-town Calvinists; Muslim college students; and immigration activists. Mr. Buruma goes about the country, asking how an immigrant population could attain citizenship without attaining real belonging, and how one could spend a lifetime in a place without sinking down meaningful roots.
Toward the end of the book Buruma blows past an obvious answer but doesn’t linger long enough: the repellent decadence of the native society. He spends several months at a friend’s house on the edge of Amsterdam’s notorious red-light district (tangent: from twenty years ago, here is an Urbana 87 message by a missionary working in the same neighborhood).
After glorying for a few days in the public raunchiness of the district’s streets, he gets bored and moves on, although he hints that there may be a little truth to the Muslim assessment of Amsterdam as an immoral city. Still, for the book’s dust-jacket picture he poses in front of a neon-lit sex-shop.
As with an abstract painting, for which the title inverts the viewer’s experience of the work, Mr. Buruma’s subtle celebration of Dutch decadence sheds light on the book as a whole. Even as he considers whether Amsterdam may indeed be wrong in certain moral regards, he does not take the question seriously. Still, something very foul is afoot, Buruma feels, but can’t put his finger on it.
Obviously, the presence of strip-clubs in Amsterdam didn’t kill Theo van Gogh. But Ian Buruma’s book isn’t about Theo van Gogh. The crude and crass filmmaker called himself the “village idiot,” as if that justified his offensiveness. Van Gogh chose long-term insignificance over public responsibility, and Buruma grants his wish. Murder in Amsterdam, then, is more about Dutch society at large. His conclusions are not entirely satisfactory.
The book’s subtitle (“The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance”) hints at where he wants to go. Dutch tolerance is an old virtue, and it predates by centuries the relativism of the contemporary west. Dutch tolerance is grounded in historical memory—the memory of senseless slaughter from the wars of the Reformation through to WWII. Add a population of millions of outsiders, who don’t share such memories, and something will have to give. That something, Buruma suggests, may be nothing less than the Dutch way of life.
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