Murder in Amsterdam

by Ian Buruma

  6.

  Few people in Holland remember how recently emancipation of women came to the Dutch, or to other Europeans for that matter. In 1937, the Catholic minister for social affairs, C. P. M. Romme, wanted to prohibit all married women from working. Until 1954, women in government jobs were automatically fired when they got married. These were thought to be necessary measures to protect family life. Change came around the same time that Christian churches began to lose their grip. Perhaps because these shifts are still within living memory, another shift occurred more recently, among “progressives”—from a position of automatic, almost dogmatic advocacy of multicultural tolerance to an anxious rejection of Islam in public life.

  I was told a fascinating story by a friend of mine named Jolande Withuis, a historian, writer, and well-known feminist with impeccable left-wing credentials. Her father was for many years an editor of the Communist Party newspaper. She told me her story over lunch in Amsterdam, when we talked about the response to Islamist terrorism, which she described as rather mild compared to the way Communists were harassed in the past. She recalled how Dutch Communists were persecuted after Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956. “Compared to how they suffered,” she said, “Muslims are treated very gently.”

  When I pointed out that Islam, as a highly diverse religion with no central organization, could not really be compared to parties that took their orders straight from Moscow, she agreed, but still believed that there was a fundamental problem with Islam. She then told me a personal story about a well-known liberal doctor in Amsterdam who had fired his assistant for refusing to take off her headscarf at work.

  This was seen by many people at the time as an intolerant act, unbecoming a liberal living in a multicultural society. But Jolande defended the doctor. The relationship with a doctor, she argued, especially for a female patient, is a very intimate one based on trust. When a medical assistant refuses to remove her scarf, trust is undermined, because it implies that women who reveal their hair are immoral. That is why women should not be allowed to wear a headscarf in any public capacity, not as a doctor’s assistant, certainly not as a judge, and not in schools either.

  I wondered about this. Muslim headscarves are worn for a variety of reasons, and do not necessarily imply disapproval of women who don’t. As long as the medical assistant’s faith did not impinge on her professional duties, the scarf should not be a problem. If, for example, she were unable to deal with male bodies, that would be a problem. Otherwise, why not treat the scarf as a personal matter, like a cross or Star of David worn around the neck?

  We continued our discussion in e-mails. Meanwhile, I had met another former leftist who had turned against the multicultural faith: Paul Scheffer, who wrote the famous, and to some people notorious, essay “The Multicultural Drama,” in which he had argued that the benign neglect of Muslim immigration by Dutch politicians was turning into a disaster. Like Jolande Withuis, he too saw Islam as a problem. Allowing large communities of alienated Muslims to grow in our midst was a recipe for social and political catastrophe.

  I did not know Scheffer personally when we met at his house in south Amsterdam. It was a large house on a pleasant, leafy street, a mere five minutes’ walk from a famous street market where Moroccans, Turks, Asians, Surinamese, and people from many other parts of the world plied their wares, surrounded by the sights and sounds and smells of a multicultural casbah: couscous, fresh red peppers, spicy sausages, vats of yogurt and cucumber, humus and tabouleh, tropical fish, mangoes and great spiky durians. Egyptian pop songs, Hindu film tunes, and Surinamese rap were blasted from CD and DVD stores. A slogan daubed in white paint on a red brick wall advocated the freedom of the Kurdish people.

  Scheffer, with his jeans, wild curly hair, and casual shirt, looked every inch the progressive Dutch journalist, the kind who would have been a Provo in the 1960s. Once a Communist, he has had a serious impact on liberal public opinion with his writings on immigration. We met in his comfortable study, surrounded by books. After pouring me a glass of white wine, he sat back in his chair and gave me his views. Social life, he said, echoing Jolande’s story about the doctor, has to be based on a certain degree of trust, on being on the same wavelength. When you have too many people whose cultures and values are utterly different from your own, that trust can no longer be sustained. Even with his closest Muslim friends, he said, he felt that he could never be sure they had the same understanding, the same references, the same sense of humor. It was wrong of past Dutch governments to hand citizenship to foreigners without giving any thought to the consequences. He told me how on one occasion he had stood in line at the international airport in Istanbul, and of the ten Dutch citizens in front of him, none spoke Dutch. “That,” he said, “was when I felt a deep sense of betrayal.”

  One of the admirable things about Scheffer is his political enthusiasm. He isn’t just a talker. He feels so strongly about the Dutch crisis that he wants to go into politics, perhaps even lead the Social Democratic Party. I mentioned the fact that Michael Ignatieff, the well-known Canadian writer and scholar, was planning to do something similar in Canada. “Right,” said Scheffer, “you see, that’s what I mean: you and I meet for the first time, yet you mention Ignatieff as though I’ve naturally heard of him. You are right, of course. I have heard of him. That’s because we share the same culture. We can assume a common understanding.”

  I didn’t say so at the time, but I couldn’t help thinking that Michael Ignatieff’s name would mean as little to most Dutch natives as to the bearded Moroccans in the nearby street market. I sensed a certain nostalgia in Scheffer’s talk, a longing for an earlier age when the young intellectuals of Amsterdam felt like world pioneers in a new age of sexual and religious liberation, pioneers who shared the same ideas, the same values, the same references. The Muslims are the spoilsports, unwelcome crashers at the party. Scheffer’s politics are not the same as Pim Fortuyn’s. Yet the two share a certain yearning for something that may never really have existed, but whose loss is felt keenly nonetheless.

  When I mentioned to Jolande Withuis the name of a conservative Dutch academic who believes we should combat Islamic intolerance by returning to the spirit of the classics, the values of ancient Athens, she was quick to reject that notion. She certainly didn’t share the fond feelings many conservatives have for the 1950s either, although “the country was certainly less full and less violent then.” No, her concern was for “the precarious gains of gender equality and gay rights. I find it terrible that we should be offering social welfare or subsidies to people who refuse to shake hands with a woman.”

  Tolerance, then, has its limits even for Dutch progressives. It is easy to be tolerant of those who are much like ourselves, whom we feel we can trust instinctively, whose jokes we understand, who share our sense of irony and might even have heard of Michael Ignatieff. It is much harder to extend the same principle to strangers in our midst, who find our ways as disturbing as we do theirs, who watch fearfully as their own children, caught in between, slip from the paternal grasp into a new and bewildering world. Jolande Withuis and Paul Scheffer, like Theo van Gogh, are quite ready to extend their hands to those children, so long as they renounce the same things that Dutch progressives renounced not so very long ago. But this will not help those who go the other way and seek salvation, or at least a degree of comfort, in the reinvention of tradition.

  7.

  M.L., a young woman born in Morocco, was dressed in a blue T-shirt and jeans, the summer uniform of most Dutch women in their twenties. She joined her father in the Netherlands when she was six, and was raised in The Hague. I had been given M.L.’s e-mail address by Jolande. M.L. worked in a home for battered women, mostly immigrants. She had also made a documentary film, together with three other Moroccan-Dutch women, all in their twenties, about violence against women. Inspired by Samira Bellil’s autobiographical book, In the Hell of the Tournantes, about being gang-raped by Arab men in a Parisian ghetto, M.L.
and her friends traveled to Paris to talk to activists for female rights. One reason Bellil, the daughter of Algerian immigrants, and other young women like her, got treated like whores, or worse, was their refusal to wear headscarves or veils—their preference, in other words, to look like other European women of their age.

  I asked M.L. and her friend and colleague B.F. what they thought of the headscarf issue. M.L. talked about her old neighborhood in The Hague, an area I remember from my childhood as dank and gray, a place that combined the cramped quarters of the inner city with the lifelessness of a suburb. The streets are now, in M.L.’s phrase, “dominated by headscarves.” For that reason alone, she doesn’t much like hanging out there. But when I cited the opinion of Jolande and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, among others, that headscarves are a symbol of female oppression, M.L. cried: “Bullshit!”

  She continued: “Women who don’t wear headscarves are also fucking oppressed—perhaps more so than those who do. What’s the fucking problem? Those headscarves? My sisters wear them, but they don’t give a shit that I don’t. It means nothing, that headscarf.”

  M.L. had a tendency to sound more sure of herself than she really was. She would quickly qualify her statements with doubts. On the link between Islam and violence against women, for example, she differed with her friend, B.F., who blamed Islam. M.L. thought it had more to do with Moroccan village culture, where “it’s normal for women to be beaten.”

  This is a question that comes up again and again. After showing their documentary film in Amsterdam, M.L. and her friends encouraged people to “break the taboos” and have a public debate on the abuse of women. A Moroccan-Dutch woman named Loubna Berrada told the audience that “culture and religion are used to justify violence. If a girl calls herself a victim, she is blamed. If she goes to the police or social workers, she is a traitor. All my Turkish and Moroccan girlfriends have had to cope with domestic violence.”

  This statement from a woman who had suffered herself was met with agreement as well as anger. “It’s good that you came here,” said a girl in the audience, “but leave our culture out of it. Then nobody will see you as a traitor.”2 Many people applauded her for this. The defense of one’s culture or religion is understandable in a hostile environment, but it’s hard to see how these issues can be discussed without reference to culture.

  M.L.’s father, like most fathers who came to find work in the Netherlands, is religious in a customary way. That is, he tries to stick to the traditions of his native place without making a fetish of them, or even giving them much thought. When M.L. is home and her father comes back from the mosque, she asks him “what nonsense the imam was talking this time.” The answer usually comes in a comment about his daughter’s habits. It’s always about the daughter, said M.L., “the daughter, the daughter, the daughter—how we dress too provocatively, blah blah blah.”

  Her mother, on the other hand, is more reflective. She began studying religion and consequently, in M.L.’s words, “became a fanatic.” She wants M.L. to wear a headscarf. “She knows how to play on my guilt. My father only cares about forms, about what the outside world will think. For the rest, he’s cool. But my mother is different. I have one sister and six brothers. We all rebelled against our parents. My mother thinks she’s being punished by God…. We were raised with the idea that everything is forbidden, that you go to hell if you do this or that. Of course, you do these things anyway, secretly, but I’m still frightened of those punishments. You’re not allowed to have any doubts about faith. When I tell my mother about my doubts, she goes crazy.” B.F., who had been listening to this with a knowing smile, added in her thick Amsterdam accent: “My mother taught us a lot that has nothing to do with Islam—those old village ways that have nothing to do with me.”

  Yet even B.F. said she felt guilty: “When I make love to my boyfriend, I get into a panic. But it feels so good that you still do it, even though it’s forbidden by God.” M.L. giggled: “The most important thing is virginity. We carry the family honor. I was terrified of getting pregnant, even after just kissing a guy.” Both women collapsed in laughter, slapping hands. M.L. remembered wearing her brother’s jeans one day, and when her period was late, she thought that maybe the jeans had made her pregnant. “You know,” said M.L., suddenly looking serious, “you think you’re living the way you want. But actually, without realizing it, you’re still living the way your mother wants.”

  After going to a “black” high school that was composed almost entirely of immigrant children, M.L. took a course at a hotel school. It was her first confrontation with native Dutch kids. “I felt so free! Suddenly I could talk about anything. This gives you the illusion that Holland is perfect. Your expectations are so high that you can be easily disappointed. I think I have a more balanced perspective now. But I still don’t always know what the hell I’m doing. It’s so hard to make choices. To do what you have to do, you have to be at war with your parents.”

  Since their parents couldn’t tell them how to live in a European society, the girls had to find other channels of instruction. “This might sound stupid,” M.L. said, “but I learned how to behave, how to talk to people, from television. Even sexual things we learned from TV. At home we never talked about such things. The biggest barrier to integration is not Dutch society; it’s our parents.”

  One of M.L.’s brothers has a native Dutch girlfriend, with whom he had a child. They live together. This was not easy for his mother to accept. But now she dotes on the baby. Her brother is unusual, M.L. explained. Mostly, she said, Moroccan guys take Dutch girlfriends for sex, because Dutch girls are easy, but then marry a girl from Morocco. “Mountain goats” was M.L.’s phrase for these imported village girls. Most of the battered women in the shelter where she works are “mountain goats.” Moroccan guys, she said, prefer them because they want to marry virgins, who’ll do as they’re told. Moroccan guys, she said, are “fucking unreliable.”

  8.

  M.L. and B.F. might be exceptional cases, but I’m not sure that they are. They may in fact be articulating very common experiences, and headscarves are not a reliable guide to what young women are thinking. Some wear them just to please their parents, and take them off whenever the parents are out of sight. Others wear them as protection against harassment from Muslim men. And some wear them because their faith gives them comfort. Perhaps the most impressive young woman I ran across during my time in Holland was Nora Choua, a law student at Nijmegen University and the head of the Union of Islamic Students. Nora wore a black chador that left only her round, friendly face, with a touch of lipstick and mascara, open to the eyes of the world.

  Nijmegen, where Nora was born, is a small town on the border of Germany rich in European history. Traditionally a Catholic town, it was also an ancient Roman settlement. Drusus used it as an army camp for his expeditions against the German tribes. Charlemagne once resided in Nijmegen. And Frederick Barbarossa built a castle on the site of Charlemagne’s palace. A chapel is all that remains of Barbarossa’s castle, overlooking the River Waal, whose bridge was captured by Allied paratroopers in 1944, before they embarked on their fatal attempt to take Arnhem.

  My grandfather was posted in Nijmegen after World War I as a minister for the small and highly liberal Mennonite community.

  My father attended the public Gymnasium in the 1930s. It was a secular oasis in this largely Catholic town, where Protestants and Jews, as well as a smattering of Catholics from the upper middle class, shared the same classrooms. Walking around Nijmegen one Saturday afternoon with my father, we found the old Gymnasium exactly as it had been when he was a pupil, the bronze school name still embedded in the red brick wall above the elegant art deco entrance. A number of disheveled men stood around talking. When we stepped inside to take a look, a black man with bloodshot eyes waved us back. “You can’t go in,” he said. Why not? “Don’t you know?” he said. “This is a Catholic center for drug addicts.”

  And so we walked back toward the town center, a pl
easant hodgepodge of nineteenth-century storefronts and a few sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings, blighted by developments from the 1960s. It was market day. I heard a lot of Dutch spoken in the unmistakable accent of the south, as well as Turkish, Arabic, Cantonese, and Berber.

  Nora and I met at a café on the Waal within sight of the bridge that the Allies took from the Germans. She told me about her family. Both her brothers were living with Dutch girls, which is a problem because the girls can’t really communicate with her parents. But Nora has no problem visiting them. She doesn’t condemn her brothers, or her sister, who doesn’t wear a veil, and once even dyed her hair blond.

  It was the usual story: Nora’s father left Morocco and came to Holland in 1963, after working in Spain, France, and Belgium. He took the hardest factory jobs, often working the night shifts. Although he had wanted to learn to speak Dutch properly, his boss dissuaded him. Unnecessary for his line of work, he said. Now he is semi-retired, suffering from hernias, diabetes, and a stomach disease. Nora’s mother is more religious than her husband, but with a lot of common sense. There is not a lot of talk about burning in hell in Nora’s family. But when Nora wanted to study law, her parents had little idea what that meant. The law was not a familiar concept, at least not as something one would study.