Murder in Amsterdam

by Ian Buruma

  Even though religion is his own business, Aboutaleb sees no reason why he shouldn’t be openly critical of it. What prompted the history teacher’s particular ire was a famous episode involving Aboutaleb and a book compiled in the thirteenth century. One day, in the radical Tawheed Mosque, where Mohammed Bouyeri used to pray, a book was spotted, entitled Fatwas on Women, by the Sunni scholar Ibn Taymiyah (1263–1328). The book, sold at the mosque, included decrees about the duty of men to beat their women with rods if they should be caught telling a lie. But this was not the worst. It also contained a passage about homosexuals who should be dropped to their deaths from five-story towers. Aboutaleb wrote a letter to the mosque warning that such inflammatory material was “contrary to the letter and spirit of the law.” The mosque protested that there was nothing wrong with the book, but it was withdrawn nonetheless.

  Ahmed Aboutaleb is tired of the Tawheed Mosque and its zealots. He is angry at the ignorant and violent youths who, in the name of Allah and his Prophet, make it so much harder for peaceful Muslims to become accepted citizens in a European democracy, and to feel at home there, without drawing undue attention to themselves, like the Jews who came before them. And so, Ahmed Aboutaleb, councillor, bridge builder, and good Muslim, is called a Bounty, a zindiq, and a traitor, who deserves nothing less than death.

  5.

  They are called Ryan Babel, Urby Emanuelson, Prince Rajkomar, Dwight Tiendalli, Kenneth Vermeer and Gianni Zuiverloon, and are of Surinamese descent. Or they have Antillean blood and bear such names as Kemy Agustien and Hedwiges Maduro.

  Quincy Owusu Abeyie’s parents come from Ghana, and Ibrahim Afellay could choose to play either for Morocco or Holland. Then there are the refugees, Collins John (Liberia) and Haris Medunjanin (Bosnia).

  When the national team coach, Foppe de Haan, surveys his players in “Orange Under-20,” he sees “a cross section of the Dutch population.”

  VOLKSKRANT, JUNE 10, 2005

  The day I went to see the history teacher Abdelhakim Chouaati in Rotterdam was the occasion for a major postwar national ritual: Holland was playing Germany in a soccer match. These games are often more than games. Especially when a World or European Cup is contested, they are a ceremonial reenactment of World War II. Germany must be defeated. No doubt the Poles feel the same way, and even the English, although they never suffered under German occupation. This is partly a result of changing political mores. Open displays of patriotism have become a taboo in post–World War II Europe, except on the soccer field. It is as if there, and only there, all the forbidden tribal sentiments are allowed to be vented in massive displays of flag waving, anthem singing, and primitive warrior worship. When Holland plays Germany, thousands of men, women, and children don their royalist orange uniforms to do battle with the traditional foe, the enemy whose very existence allows the Dutch to adopt a self-regarding national identity: the liberal, open, tolerant, free-spirited Dutch, versus the mechanical, disciplined, authoritarian Teutons. When Holland beat Germany in the European Cup finals in 1988, more people came out to celebrate in the streets of Amsterdam than on the day of liberation in 1945.

  Abdelhakim, sitting in a café near the central railway station, gazed at the supporters in their orange suits, orange scarves, and orange hats, sometimes adorned with plastic replicas of clogs, or windmills, or great yellow cheeses, with an air of supreme indifference, like a bored Western tourist watching an interminable display of folk dancing in some Third World country. The orange men, almost all white, and many on the wrong side of thirty, danced jigs on the station square while breaking into snatches of the national anthem, or an old children’s song celebrating Dutch valor in the face of seventeenth-century Spanish rule.

  Since national history has been more or less wiped off the Dutch history curriculum, many children would not know much, if anything, about the war of independence against the Spanish crown. Songs celebrating it are now as quaint as those clogs and windmills, sported as national badges on top of the supporters’ hats, clichés of a legendary past, recycled for soccer matches and the tourist trade. They certainly hold no attraction for Abdelhakim.

  But I was curious to know what he, as a teacher of the subject, made of Dutch history. So I asked him about his education in a small Calvinist town near Rotterdam, where his father had found work in a steel factory. Abdelhakim, a slim man in his twenties, looked at me askance, past his aquiline nose, a look that reminded me of radical Maoists or Trotskyists in my student days, arrogant and defensive at the same time. It was a look that said: All people who haven’t seen the light are idiots, barely worth speaking to, but idiots are dangerous, so one has to be vigilant, and be prepared to combat idiocy at every turn.

  Dutch history? Abdelhakim shrugged. “Just a lot of self-congratulatory guff. A lot of whining about the Jews. Well, Muslims didn’t invent the gas chambers. So why did the Jews have to be dumped in Palestine?” His answer was a sad reflection of how much history had become narrowed down to only one or two themes. Anne Frank’s shadow falls heavily on the school curriculum too. But I felt we were getting off the subject a little too fast, so I asked him what children were taught about history in his school.

  “Lies,” he said, one eye peering at me intently. “All lies. Darwinism, for example. They don’t say anything about creationism. They’re too scared to attribute evolution to God.” He gave a barely perceptible snort of derision. “Perhaps they’re afraid of looking too much like Muslims.”

  In fact, Abdelhakim did not seem very interested in history, certainly not in Dutch history, which he found trivial. “I only teach history to make money,” he said. What did interest him were conspiracies. His theories were conventional enough, in certain circles: 9/11 was a Jewish plot. Why else did four thousand Jews in New York stay home that day? More surprising to me was his view that the first landing on the moon was faked by CIA agents in Hollywood. It never happened, he maintained. The filmed images were made by Stanley Kubrick, the famous Jewish director. The agents were later murdered to erase the evidence of this great fraud.

  Abdelhakim does not come from a religious family. When he relaxed a bit, he said that his parents, both moderate people, were worried about him. He was “a bit of a black sheep,” who “went my own way.” None of his sisters wears a headscarf. His politics are a mixture of Third World resentments—“The West thinks it can do anything it likes in the world, and it’s all about making money”—and religious conservatism—his anti-Darwinist views, his puritanical attitudes to sex. He said he would marry an Arab woman and bring his children up as strict Muslims.

  I wanted to know how he felt about being Dutch. How did he fit in? Nationality, he said, meant nothing to him. Islam is all that matters. He is a Muslim living in Holland. What about the Dutch laws? Was there any tension between the secular constitution and the Shariah? No problem, he said. He could abide by the constitution. He obeys the laws. He stops at a red light. It is true that the Shariah, “being divine, is outside time, and thus for all time.” But, he observed, “90 percent of Dutch law matches the Shariah.” As far as the remaining 10 percent is concerned, Islamic criminal law is stricter. “Pedophiles get the death penalty under Shariah. In Holland they get their own association.” He found this rather amusing. His sneer softened into a mocking smile.

  There can be no doubt: Abdelhakim is an uncompromising believer. He says so himself. That is why his parents are worried about him. But this in itself does not make him unusual. In the sense that the Koran is believed to consist of God’s own words, most Muslims are fundamentalists. But some are prepared to live peacefully in secular societies, and some are not. Abdelhakim counts himself among the former. Being a fundamentalist does not make him a revolutionary. As long as he is allowed to practice his religion, he says, he is happy to live in Holland, certainly happier than he would be anywhere in the Middle East. Indeed, he thinks Muslims “have a very good life here.” He does not condone killing anybody for his beliefs, or the lack of them. “We are st
ill guests here. The majority is not Muslim and the Shariah can only be introduced if the majority wants it.” He would certainly welcome it if everyone shared his faith, but then so would most Christians.

  In some ways, Abdelhakim may be more Dutch than he thinks. His idea of helping young Muslim delinquents mend their ways through faith is what Christians would favor too. The idea of using the mosque to keep angry young men on the straight and narrow is conservative, but hardly alien to a society that rested on religious “pillars” until a few decades ago. Abdelhakim did not vote himself, he said, because of his orthodox faith, but it came as no great surprise to me when he mentioned the names of conservative Christian Democrats as the politicians he most admired. In an eccentric way, Abdelhakim is spiritually akin to an older, more orthodox Dutch society, which was mostly swept away by the cultural tide of the 1960s.

  This is not to say that there is nothing disturbing about him. The anti-Semitism is vile. And I’m not sure he would be so tolerant of infidels if he lived in a society under Shariah law. But he did not strike me as a dangerous man. Not yet. The fact that he wants to teach the history of Islam on a popular Dutch television channel is a sign of where he thinks his home is. He told me something that sounded sinister, but may actually be the beginning of a solution: “The body of Islam,” he said, “is in the Middle East, but the mind is in Europe.” Europe provides the freedom to explore, to reform, and to challenge. Olivier Roy, the famous French scholar of Islam, has argued that Islam must be accepted as a European religion.4 The only chance for a peaceful future is for European Islam to accommodate itself to liberal democracy. Abdelhakim, in his confused, defensive, prickly way, may be groping toward such an accommodation.

  The website elqalem.nl, for which he writes, is provocative, sometimes offensive, and often plain wrongheaded, but it is still a forum for debate. There is an attempt to engage with society with words, and not violence. Much of what goes on in the chatrooms of this website, and others like it, such as marokko.nl, revolves around a serious question: how to be a Muslim in a secular European society, how to be a Dutch citizen without losing pride in a separate identity that is so often reviled. Marokko.nl once ran a discussion between young Muslims about anal sex; what did the Koran have to say about this practice? Far from being frivolous, the subject showed precisely the conflict of modern identities. Young Muslim girls, like most Europeans of their generation, want to have sex with their boyfriends, but still feel the pressure to enter marriage as virgins.

  Religion provides rules of behavior. It answers questions of moral right and wrong. It can offer people a sense of pride. The rules may be questionable and the answers open to challenge. But people should be free to work these issues out for themselves. An illiterate villager in the Rif mountains might not have been able to use this freedom. All he or she knew was village custom and the word of God. Educated Europeans, such as Abdelhakim, are better placed to make their own choices. In modern society, religious orthodoxy, though by definition closed to reasonable argument, is often a choice. And as such it should be accepted, as long as the choice is not foisted on others.

  Religion can also fuel hatred and become a source of political violence. Amsterdam, like any big city in Europe and beyond, is now linked, through a network of instant communication, to a global revolutionary movement based on an extremist, and largely modern, interpretation of Islam. To join this movement was the choice of Mohammed Bouyeri. Like all forms of political violence, this is indefensible, not only from the perspective of secular law-abiding citizens, but from the perspective of most Muslim believers as well. Revolutionary Islam is linked to the Koran, to be sure, just as Stalinism and Maoism were linked to Das Kapital, but to explain the horrors of China’s man-made famines or the Soviet gulag solely by invoking the writings of Karl Marx would be to miss the main point. Messianic violence can attach itself to any creed. Abdelhakim is not Mohammed Bouyeri. He, and others like him, could yet choose to join his murderous cause, but such a choice depends partly on the way they are treated by the country in which they were born. And this depends on another choice: whether to accept an orthodox Muslim as a fellow free citizen of a European country.

  I boarded the tram to the soccer stadium in Rotterdam, in a rush of orange supporters. Inside the tram, grown men in carnival costumes were jumping up and down with a fervor that blurred the borderlines between ecstasy and fury. I tried to bury my face in the newspaper. Spotting my standoffishness, one man started bellowing the Dutch national anthem into my ear. When I looked up from my paper, he screamed: “Don’t you love Holland?” His face was flushed with what looked to me like rage. I mouthed a somewhat cowardly “sure I do,” hoping that he would go away. Others around him were shouting “Germany is finished, Germany is finished!” And then, as an afterthought: “We haven’t forgotten the war!”

  Rotterdam’s magnificent stadium was a sea of orange, waving the national red, white, and blue. I saw one person with the replica of a cow on top of his orange jester’s hat. There were banners with the names of supporter groups from various Dutch towns. I saw people in clogs dancing to an old-fashioned brass band. Like all carnivals, this patriotic feast, with shades of a Brueghel painting, was a fantasy, the celebration of an imaginary community, rural, joyous, traditional, and white. It was a return to an invented country, no more real than a modern Dutch Muslim’s fantasy of the pure world of the Prophet.

  Both fantasies contain the seeds of destruction. The orange men seem relatively harmless. Their patriotism, by and large, is a festive holiday from postwar political pieties. But on November 2, 2004, the violent fantasies of a Dutch Muslim ended in the murder of a fellow citizen. I have described some of the responses to this deed over the course of a year, some sensible, some vicious, some plain silly. But the story is not over. What happened in this small corner of northwestern Europe could happen anywhere, as long as young men and women feel that death is their only way home.

  Postscript

  In April, 2006, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was informed that she could no longer stay in her apartment on the eleventh floor of a quiet, well-guarded residential building in The Hague. Before moving into that apartment, acquired for her by the Dutch state, she had been passed on from one shelter to another, like a fugitive in an occupied country. Her new neighbors complained that they no longer felt safe with her in the building, and took their complaints to court. They lost in the first instance but won on appeal. Hirsi Ali was given four months to move. She decided to move to the United States.

  Her reaction was entirely in the spirit of modern Dutch public discourse. She talked about the war. No wonder, she said with a bitter smile, that the Dutch had failed to stand up to the Nazis: “A terror regime of political correctness is ruling over our country.”

  A few weeks later, another bombshell. Rita (“Iron Rita”) Verdonk, the minister for immigration and integration, had decided that Holland was not even Hirsi Ali’s country. It never had been, for Ayaan had lied about her name and provenance when she had applied for asylum. She was not Ayaan Hirsi Ali but Ayaan Hirsi Magan. This cannot have been news to the minister, since Ayaan had said as much to many people, including me. But she repeated it in a television documentary in April, just as “Iron Rita” was running for the leadership of the conservative party, the VVD. The same woman whose handshake was refused by the orthodox imam, the same sturdy symbol of the Dutch confrontation with an alien creed, had now turned on her own colleague.

  And so Ayaan Hirsi Ali became the latest victim of a hard line on refugees and immigrants. Holland would no longer be a soft touch. Rita would “keep a straight back.” An Iraqi family was sent back home despite warnings of great danger. Terrified refugees had been returned to Syria and Congo together with their personal files, which would lead to further persecution. Others were locked up in prison cells after their shelter at the Amsterdam airport went up in flames and eleven people died. A schoolgirl from Kosovo was more or less dragged out of her school just before completing her e
xams. The midnight knock on the door was becoming a real threat in a society that was proud of its tolerance.

  This was never what Ayaan had wanted. She was neither a xenophobe nor opposed to immigrants (how could she be?). But she had called the Dutch cowards, like those people during the war who looked away while their neighbors were being deported. She had lamented their weakness in not standing up to the Islamist threat. She and Rita Verdonk were allies. Verdonk, a former deputy prison warden, simply lacked the subtlety or the imagination to draw a clear line between getting tough on political Islam and on refugees who fell foul of petty bureaucratic rules.

  Hirsi Ali will not be sent back to Somalia, or even Kenya. The minister’s treatment of her colleague caused such an uproar that Ayaan’s citizenship is probably safe. But it was a melancholy end to an extraordinary odyssey that started with a white lie to escape an arranged marriage. No one in the last few hundred years has managed to stir up so much in the Netherlands as this “bogus asylum seeker.” She could not stand the liberal platitudes and anxious consensus-building that obscured what she saw as a lethal threat to civil liberties. So she went to war, dogmatically perhaps, a little zealously even, but always armed with nothing but her own convictions. It resulted in a lethal battle, fought first with words and then with bullets and knives. Theo van Gogh is dead. Mohammed Bouyeri is locked up in prison alone with the words of his holy books. And Ayaan Hirsi Ali has had to leave the scene. My country seems smaller without her.