Foul deeds in Amsterdam

Ask any drunken Dutch holidaymaker what he thinks of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, then argue vehemently against his opinion. Guaranteed is an evening of emoted, irrational and often angry discussion. This, tellingly enough, is how I came to learn the Dutch C-word, which goes far beyond ours: cancerous Nazi gets bandied about with seeming insouciance.

As he cycled to work on November 2nd, 2004, Theo Van Gogh ’ the late iconoclastic filmmaker and nephew of Vincent - was murdered by an Islamic fundamentalist named Mohammed Bouyeri. He shot Van Gogh. He slashed his throat. Then, to Van Gogh’s corpse, he pinned a letter addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He made no serious attempt to escape, shooting only 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 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 measured, nor as extensive. Clive James’ Meaning of Recognition carries a very worthy essay on the Bali bombings. On Madrid, unfortunately, international bookshelves remain largely without the intelligent account. Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam poses as the comprehensive account of the Theo Van Gogh’s murder and the climate in which the murder was committed.

This climate, Holland - or Amsterdam, in particular - has for years posed as a quaint, liberal utopia of tolerant, internationalist minds: a melting-pot like New York or London. Since the massive influx of immigrants into Holland’s cities, though, over the edge of that pot, Holland’s broth is spewing.

Home of Erasmus and Spinoza, Holland sees itself as a home - the home - of the Enlightenment and its extension, liberal democracy. Islam, argue many, 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 ideas of law. ’A liberal democracy,’ says Afshin Ellian, ’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 to say Islamism) as explicated by Paul Berman. 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 label (’Islam and Islamism’) as if one - a religion - was the same as the other - a fascistic political ideology based on the religion in question. Key figures in international Islam are ignored: not once do we read of Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al-Zarahiri, Hassan al-Banna, Abu al-Mawdudi or even Osama Bin Laden. In a book about an Islamist murder. Not once.

The book is composed almost entirely in the first person, a bad start, but a move apt to Buruma’s seeming unwillingness to condemn (or, perhaps, justify) disregard for enshrined Western values, like free expression, held by a sizeable proportion of Holland’s immigrants. Despite his evident diligence, there’s nothing at all clinical about this expos’, which reads as if composed under a cautionary cloud of political correctness.

Despite this, Murder in Amsterdam remains a valuable ’ if fluffy ’ study into the roots of fundamentalism to be fought at home- discrimination, exclusion, poverty, etc. - but it should not be read in isolation to Paul Berman’s laudable study of, as it were, the problem’s other end - the end in which all too often disillusioned Muslim immigrants find refuge. For it is in this end - Islamism and Islamist theory - that disillusionment turns to nihilism, and that a frustration with societal restrictions becomes a wish not for freedom in any normal sense, but a desire for ’ to paraphrase Buruma - liberation in 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 should Murder in Amsterdam be considered required reading.

By: Kevin Breathnach