Murder in Amsterdam

by Ian Buruma

  YORAM STEIN IN TROUW, MAY 6, 2005

  Ifirst saw Afshin Ellian at his home, a modern two-story family house in a suburb between Amsterdam and Utrecht. The only sign of anything untoward was the patrol car that passed by every so often to keep an eye on things. Our second meeting was at Leiden University, where he teaches law. A bodyguard guided me to his office and watched while we had lunch in the canteen. I noticed many female students wearing Muslim headscarves. The last time I saw Ellian, a team of bodyguards carefully checked out the café where we met and kept our table under close surveillance.

  And all this because this thirty-nine-year-old scholar, born in Tehran, acquired the “dangerous hobby” of writing a newspaper column that is harshly critical of political Islam. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he is seen by some as a dangerous agitator, and by others as a hero who arrived from the Muslim world to shake the Dutch from their deep sleep. This is what he believes: Citizenship of a democratic state means living by the laws of the country. A liberal democracy cannot survive when part of the population believes that divine laws trump those made by man. The fruits of the European Enlightenment must be defended, with force if necessary. It is time for Muslims to be enlightened too. European intellectuals, in their self-hating nihilism and utopian anti-Americanism, have lost the stomach to fight for Enlightenment values. The multicultural dream is over. The West, except for the U.S., is too afraid to use its power. The European welfare state is a disastrous, patronizing system that treats people like patients. The Dutch government must act to protect those who criticize Islam. No religion or minority should be immune to censure or ridicule. The solution to the Muslim problem is a Muslim Voltaire, a Muslim Nietzsche—that is to say, people like “us, the heretics—me, Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.”

  The tone of his columns is sometimes strident, even shrill. In person, Ellian is more humorous, but his wit is barbed, and can be sarcastic in the somewhat heavy manner of a Marxist pamphleteer. Ellian was once a man of the far left, a member of the Tudeh Party in Iran. Even he, a political refugee, who arrived in the Netherlands only in 1989, cannot resist an allusion to World War II. Observing the way Dutch authorities have dealt with the Islamist danger, he told me, made him understand why so many Dutch people had collaborated with the Nazis. He thinks the Dutch are hopelessly weak.

  Under the roly-poly demeanor and the dry chuckle runs a hard current of anger. In a television program broadcast hours after the murder of Van Gogh, Ellian couldn’t contain himself when a Moroccan-Dutch writer expressed the view that Bouyeri’s deed could not be explained by Islam alone, and pointed to the general “polarization” of Dutch society. Jabbing his finger at the man like an interrogator, Ellian shouted that Bouyeri had gone to the mosque, had an imam, had read the Koran—“He murdered in the name of a perverted prophet!”

  Afshin Ellian is angry first of all at the Islamist revolutionaries, whose brutality he witnessed as a teenager in Ayatollah Khomeini’s Tehran. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who experienced religious fundamentalism in Saudi Arabia and then joined the Muslim Brotherhood in Kenya, Ellian saw the violence of political Islam firsthand. This has shaped—some might say warped—his view of Islamism ever since. When Ellian sees Mohammed B., he sees a history of torture, prisons, executions, and mass slaughter in holy wars.

  Of course, a suburb of Amsterdam, however receptive some of its inhabitants may be to the call of murder and martyrdom, is not Tehran. Things are different in the flat, prosperous land of green polders and dykes, where conflicts are solved through compromise and negotiation. Ellian might be seen as an excitable foreigner, flying off the handle “in a tone that does not exist among Dutch writers.” Then again, that is what people resting in the comfort of liberal democracies said about refugees from the Third Reich and dissidents under Communism. Amsterdam is different from Tehran, to be sure, but Ellian is neither a politician nor a diplomat, but a lifelong dissident, for whom compromise spells weakness.

  What enraged Ellian was not just the inability of other non-Western immigrants to understand and abide by the laws that guaranteed their liberty but, worse in his eyes, the inability of Europeans to appreciate what they had. Ellian, and others like him, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, are sometimes called “Enlightenment fundamentalists.” This might sound like a contradiction. Thinkers of the Enlightenment, after all, rejected all dogmas. But Ellian’s penchant for denunciation in the name of freedom and democracy is marked by earlier, more brutal experiences.

  When things get rough, Ellian said, after I had asked him how he put up with living dangerously, he reaches for books by Friedrich Nietzsche. Why should Westerners be the only ones to dissent from their traditions, he wondered. “Why not us? It is racist to think that Muslims are too backward to think for themselves.” He spoke with passion, and more than a hint of fury. I admired his passion, but there was something unnerving about his fury, something that reminded me of Huizinga’s idea that dangerous illusions come from a sense of inferiority, of a historical wrong. Ellian likes to wonder aloud, throwing up his hands in despair: Why did the great civilizations of Persia and Araby not produce a Nietzsche or a Voltaire? Why not now?

  The battle is both centuries old and relatively new. Until recently not much attention was paid outside the universities to the currents and crosscurrents of the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment. It was the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an act of mass murder that was random as well as precisely targeted, that brought the Enlightenment back to the center of political debate, especially in Holland, one of the countries where it all began more than three hundred years ago.

  Not just academics but politicians and popular columnists saw the Enlightenment as the fortress to be defended against Islamist extremism. The jihad in which Mohammed Bouyeri served as a mere footsoldier was seen, not just by Ellian and Hirsi Ali, as our contemporary Counter-Enlightenment, and conservative politicians, such as the former VVD leader and European commissioner Frits Bolkestein, jumped into the breach for the freethinking values of Spinoza and Voltaire. One of the main claims of Enlightenment philosophy is that its ideas based on reason are by definition universal. But the Enlightenment has a particular appeal to some conservatives because its values are not just universal, but more importantly, “ours,” that is, European, Western values.

  Bolkestein, a former business executive with intellectual interests that set him apart from most professional politicians, was the first mainstream politician to warn about the dire consequences of accepting too many Muslim immigrants, whose customs clashed with “our fundamental values.” Certain values, he claimed, such as gender equality, or the separation of church and state, are not negotiable. We met on several occasions in Amsterdam, and when it was time to part he would invariably say: “We must talk more next time about the lack of confidence in Western civilization.” Like Afshin Ellian, he frets about European weakness. That is why he worries about the possibility of Turkey, with its 68 million Muslims, joining the European Union. For it would, in his view, spell the end of Europe, not as a geographical entity, but as a community of values born of the Enlightenment.

  Fifteen years ago, when Bolkestein first talked about the threat to fundamental values, he was a hateful figure to the Left, a fearmonger, even a racist. The main focus of his attack was the idea of cultural relativism, the common notion among leftists that immigrants should be allowed to retain their own “identity.” But something interesting happened along the way. There is a long and frequently poisonous history in European politics of left-wing internationalism and conservative defense of traditional values. The Left was on the side of universalism, scientific socialism, and the like, while the Right believed in culture, in the sense of “our culture,” “our traditions.” During the multicultural age of the 1970s and 1980s, this debate began to shift. It was now the Left that stood for culture and tradition, especially “their” cultures and traditions, that is, those of the immigrants, while the Right argued for the universal values
of the Enlightenment. The problem in this debate was the fuzzy border between what was in fact universal and what was merely “ours.”

  But the real shift came when a well-known sequence of events drove many former leftists into the conservative camp. First came the Salman Rushdie affair: “their” values were indeed clashing with “ours”; a free-spirited cosmopolitan writer was being threatened by an extreme version of an alien religion. Then New York was attacked. And now Theo van Gogh, “our” Salman Rushdie, was dead. Leftists, embittered by what they saw as the failure of multiculturalism, or fired up by the anticlericalism of their revolutionary past, joined conservatives in the battle for the Enlightenment. Bolkestein became a hero for people who used to despise him.

  At first sight, the clash of values appears to be straightforward: on the one hand, secularism, science, equality between men and women, individualism, freedom to criticize without fear of violent retribution, and on the other, divine laws, revealed truth, male domination, tribal honor, and so on. It is indeed hard to see how in a liberal democracy these contrasting values can be reconciled. How could one not be on the side of Frits Bolkestein, or Afshin Ellian, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali? But a closer look reveals fissures that are less straightforward. People come to the struggle for Enlightenment values from very different angles, and even when they find common ground, their aims may be less than enlightened.

  Hirsi Ali and Ellian are often accused of fighting the battles of their own past on European soil, as though they had smuggled a non-Western crisis into a peaceful Western country. Traumatized by Khomeini’s revolution or an oppressive Muslim upbringing in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya, they turned against the faith of their fathers and embraced a radical version of the European Enlightenment: Hirsi Ali as the heiress of Spinoza, and Ellian as Nietzsche’s disciple. They are warriors on a battlefield inside the world of Islam. But they are also struggling against oppressive cultures that force genital mutilation on young girls and marriage with strangers on young women. The bracing air of universalism is a release from tribal traditions.

  But the same could be said, in a way, of their greatest enemy: the modern holy warrior, like the killer of Theo van Gogh. The young Moroccan-Dutch youth downloading English translations of Arabic texts from the Internet is also looking for a universal cause, severed from cultural and tribal specificities. The promised purity of modern Islamism, which is after all a revolutionary creed, has been disconnected from cultural tradition. That is why it appeals to those who feel displaced, in the suburbs of Paris no less than in Amsterdam. They are stuck between cultures they find equally alienating. The war between Ellian’s Enlightenment and Bouyeri’s jihad is not a straightforward clash between culture and universalism, but between two different visions of the universal, one radically secular, the other radically religious. The radically secular society of post-1960s Amsterdam, which looks like the promised land to a sophisticated refugee from religious revolution, is unsettling to the confused son of an immigrant from the remote countryside of Morocco.

  But not every pious Muslim is a potential terrorist. To see religion, even religious orthodoxy, as the main enemy of Enlightenment values is misleading. For even though the modern terrorist has latched onto a religious faith, he might as well have chosen—and in different times did choose—a radically secular creed to justify his thirst for violent death. Besides, there is a difference between the anticlericalism of Voltaire, who was up against one of the two most powerful institutions of eighteenth-century France, and radical secularists today battling a minority within an already embattled minority.

  There is also a difference between the eighteenth-century philosophes and conservative Dutch politicians of the twentyfirst century. The pioneers of the Enlightenment were iconoclasts, with radical ideas about politics and life. The Marquis de Sade was a typical man of the Enlightenment, as much as Diderot. In terms of Islam, Ellian and Hirsi Ali are certainly iconoclasts. It is harder to see a link between a respectable conservative EU commissioner and the great chronicler of sadism. But then, of course, a desire to smash sacred icons is not why many conservatives joined the battle for the modern Enlightenment in the first place.

  The sacred icons of Dutch society were broken in the 1960s, as elsewhere in the Western world, when the churches lost their grip on people’s lives, when government authority was something to challenge, not obey, when sexual taboos were publicly and privately breached, and when—rather in line with the original Enlightenment—people opened their eyes and ears to civilizations outside the West. The rebellions of the 1960s contained irrational, indeed antirational, and sometimes violent strains, and the fashion for such far-flung exotica as Maoism sometimes turned into a revolt against liberalism and democracy. One by one the religious and political pillars that supported the established order of the Netherlands were cut away. The tolerance of other cultures, often barely understood, that spread with new waves of immigration, was sometimes just that—tolerance—and sometimes sheer indifference, bred by a lack of confidence in values and institutions that needed to be defended.

  The conservative call for Enlightenment values is partly a revolt against a revolt. Tolerance has gone too far for many conservatives. They believe, like some former leftists, that multiculturalism was a mistake; our fundamental values must be reclaimed. Because secularism has gone too far to bring back the authority of the churches, conservatives and neoconservatives have latched onto the Enlightenment as a badge of national or cultural identity. The Enlightenment, in other words, has become the name for a new conservative order, and its enemies are the aliens, whose values we can’t share.

  Perhaps it was a necessary correction. Islamist revolution, like any violent creed, needs to be resisted, and a nationstate, to be viable, must stand for something. Political institutions are not purely mechanical. But an essential part of Enlightenment thinking is that everything, especially claims to “nonnegotiable” or “fundamental” values, should be open to criticism. The whole point of liberal democracy, its greatest strength, especially in the Netherlands, is that conflicting faiths, interests, and views can be resolved only through negotiation. The only thing that cannot be negotiated is the use of violence.

  The murder of Theo van Gogh was committed by one Dutch convert to a revolutionary war, who was probably helped by others. Such revolutionaries in Europe are still few in number. But the murder, like the bomb attacks in Madrid and London, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and the worldwide Muslim protests against cartoons of the Prophet in a Danish newspaper, exposed dangerous fractures that run through all European nations. Islam may soon become the majority religion in countries whose churches have been turned more and more into tourist sites, apartment houses, theaters, and places of entertainment. The French scholar Olivier Roy is right: Islam is now a European religion. How Europeans, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, cope with this is the question that will decide our future. And what better place to watch the drama unfold than the Netherlands, where freedom came from a revolt against Catholic Spain, where ideals of tolerance and diversity became a badge of national honor, and where political Islam struck its first blow against a man whose deepest conviction was that freedom of speech included the freedom to insult.

  * Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie

  ** Lijst Pim Fortuyn, or Pim Fortuyn’s List

  TWO

  Thank You, Pim

  Yesterday evening I read on the front page of the NRC Handelsblad that Ayaan Hirsi Ali was going into hiding. Fortunately my name wasn’t mentioned. I’m still living at home, thank you very much, and hope to keep it that way.

  THEO VAN GOGH, SPEAKING ON LOCATION WHILE MAKING HIS LAST FILM, 06/05

  1.

  On the morning that Theo van Gogh was shot, he was cycling toward his office in the south of Amsterdam to do some postproduction work on 06/05, a Hitchcockian thriller about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, the populist outsider who almost became prime minister. The movie was a departure for Van Gogh. Thr
illers hadn’t been his thing. But he had long been obsessed with Fortuyn, whose murder on May 6, 2002, provoked an extraordinary outburst of shock, grief, anger, and quasi-religious hysteria. The man who would soon become prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, not a man blessed with great imagination, reached for appropriate words to describe the situation. All he could come up with was “un-Dutch.”

  Van Gogh’s movie spins an elaborate conspiracy theory involving the secret service, led by a fat gay man wearing lipstick, American arms dealers, far right politicians, and a sexy animal rights activist of Turkish descent. Van Gogh never saw the film in its final version. The conspiracy is implausible, to say the least. But the picture of Dutch society, in all its post-multi-culti confusion, is convincing. It may look “un-Dutch” to a small-town Calvinist prime minister, but it shows what life is like in the urban triangle of Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam, an area of mass immigration, American pop fashions, and green fields disappearing rapidly under more and more layers of concrete. What Van Gogh got was the air of menace simmering under the placid surface, menace that could suddenly erupt in an act of senseless violence.

  It was the most sensational political murder in the Netherlands since 1672, when the brothers Jan and Cornelis de Witt were literally ripped to pieces by a lynch mob in The Hague. During its Golden Age, the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic was split by a power struggle between a paternalistic republican merchant elite, known as regenten, and the monarchists, led by the House of Orange and backed by the interfering Calvinist Church. The mob, especially at a time of economic crisis, was on the side of monarchy and church. The regenten were regarded as haughty, self-interested, and dangerously liberal. The De Witt brothers, friends of Spinoza, were typical regenten.