Murder in Amsterdam

by Ian Buruma

  It was intended to be a comedy. That is what Van Gogh had suggested to Ayaan when they met in Amsterdam to discuss her plans. She had something else in mind, to design an exhibition with life-sized puppets, illustrating the brutalities in the Koran. But perhaps with the Veiled Monologues in mind, Ayaan ended up writing Submission. It was always her idea. Van Gogh gave her technical assistance, but lamented the lack of humor. It was too preachy for his taste. But even as a sermon, it didn’t really work. Ayaan made it too easy for people to miss the point.

  Even Samir, the sophisticated young architect I met in Rotterdam, missed the point, but in a revealing way. Ayaan’s take on the role of women in Islam was totally wrong, he said. “Just look and see what happens if anyone insults our mothers; any Moroccan male would go berserk.” True enough. But this is something a Sicilian might have said too, or indeed anyone from a clannish, rural society where men rule and women are either holy mothers or whores. Samir was probably right, also, when he observed that Ayaan’s criticisms were more about culture than religion per se, and he conceded that she had some valid points. But to him, religion was a distraction; to her, it was the main point.

  Nora, the head of the Union of Islamic Students at Nijmegen University, was watching television at home with her mother on the night of the broadcast. While zapping from channel to channel, her mother heard the sounds of Muslim prayer. Astonished to hear this on Dutch TV, she was curious. “But as soon as she saw the naked body of a woman with texts from the Koran, she was stunned. I know that Ayaan wanted to shock. But my mother wasn’t even ready for that. She just thought it was uncouth for a woman to be praying in that state.”

  Nora was not so much offended herself, she claimed, as “embarrassed,” embarrassed for her mother’s sake, so she switched to another channel. Perhaps, she said, “we will be ready to have a debate like this in twenty years’ time, when we are on a more equal footing. But it’s too soon. The first generation isn’t ready to face this kind of thing.”

  This was the most generous assessment I heard from any Muslim of Ayaan’s film, and Nora was more religious than many I spoke to. But she was wrong about the generational aspect. It was precisely the children of immigrants, the second generation, people of Nora’s age, who couldn’t contain their rage. The sense of inequality is part of this, inequality common to all minorities. But the problem goes deeper, to another inequality: between immigrants who have the education, the intelligence, the social connections, and the ambition, to do well as individuals and assimilate, and the more vulnerable ones who need a collective identity to cling to. This has been true of Jews. It has been the story of new immigrants in the history of the United States. You can see the same story being played out in Europe today.

  Critics of Ayaan Hirsi Ali usually quote one particular television program to show what they believe is wrong with her approach. Ayaan has always shown a great interest in women who seek refuge from their abusive men in secret shelters, known as “lay off my body homes” (blijf van m’n lijf huis). These women have already taken a bold step that passive victims cannot face; they had the courage to escape. If Ayaan has a natural constituency anywhere for her battle against Muslim machismo, these bruised housewives and battered daughters should be it.

  A well-known news program decided it would be a good idea to show Submission at one of these shelters and then film a discussion with Ayaan. Four young women watched the film together. A number of them had seen it before. Only one would show her face; the others feared repercussions. They all spoke perfect Dutch.

  Their first reaction was defensive: How could Ayaan be so deliberately insulting, they asked. The naked women were a sign of disrespect. Ayaan was only “using” the film, they believed. She was only “playing with Islam” to further her own ends. Working with a man like Van Gogh, they all agreed, was bound to cause offense.

  Ayaan answered, very politely, that it was her right as a Muslim, indeed her duty, to criticize what was bad about Islam, and the oppression of women was one of those bad things. The unveiled woman sitting next to Ayaan got agitated, tugging at her yellow sweater. One of the women agreed that women were oppressed, but this was because of culture and education, and had nothing to do with the Koran. Ayaan repeated that she had quoted from the sacred texts. But that’s not the point, cried the women: “You’re just insulting us. My faith is what strengthened me. That’s how I came to realize that my situation at home was wrong.”

  “This must stop!” said one of the women, whose face was disguised. “You must stop.” Ayaan said she would never stop. “You must stop! If you can’t see that you’re hurting me, I can’t continue this discussion!” Okay, said Ayaan, with a dismissive wave of her hand, “so long then.”

  It was this wave, this gentle gesture of disdain, this almost aristocratic dismissal of a noisome inferior, that upset her critics more than anything. Recalling the meetings with Ayaan and other Muslim feminists, Funda said that Ayaan was incapable of listening. With Ayaan, she said, “I sensed aggression, a hatred almost, for the kind of people she was trying to save.”

  This is going too far, but there is perhaps, in this recent immigrant, this daughter of the Somali elite, something that is quite regent-esque, despite her objections to the pampering welfare state. Ayaan is, in her way, a bit like a Dutch notable, who would not have looked entirely out of place in a portrait by Frans Hals—apart from being black, that is. Her words bear repeating: “We must … give migrants what they lack in their own culture: individual dignity.” The sentiment is good, even noble, but rather too much de haut en bas. You cannot “give” people individual dignity. It is theirs by right, even if they find it in their faith.

  And so Ayaan Hirsi Ali ended up preaching to those who were already convinced, and further alienating many of those whom she needed to engage. Although only eleven minutes long, and shown just once, Submission had an impact that was at least as important as that of Zo is het, the television program that outraged so many Christians almost exactly forty years ago. But Submission was no joke, nor did it challenge the beliefs of a complacent majority, the mainstream of a secure and prosperous European nation. It did not even speak for a generation. That it would cause offense was clear, but even those who agreed with its sentiments could not predict its murderous consequences. Certainly not Theo van Gogh.

  Interviewed after the showing of the film, Van Gogh hailed the courage of Ayaan. “People who call her reckless,” he said, “are cowards. Bombs haven’t gone off. I haven’t been threatened. I don’t feel threatened in the least.” But he also said something else to Ayaan, which was at once weirdly insouciant and perceptive. Nobody would harm him, he assured her, “because I’m just the village idiot. It’s you who should be worried, for you’re the apostate.” What he hadn’t realized was that the jester can lose his license, that he wasn’t living in a village anymore, even in cool, swinging Amsterdam.

  *

  Part II was never made, but Hirsi Ali still insists that one day it will be.

  SIX

  A Promising Boy

  Wow,” he said. It was July 12, 2005, the last day of Mohammed Bouyeri’s trial. “Mohammed B.” in the Dutch press, “Mo” to his friends, was charged with the murder of Theo van Gogh, the attempted murder of several policemen, threatening Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and terrorizing the Dutch population.

  “Wow” was almost the first word Mohammed, a pudgy man in a dark djellaba, had uttered during his trial. He refused to be defended or to defend himself in a court whose authority he didn’t recognize. Only God’s laws, the Shariah, were the true laws. At the beginning of the trial, he confirmed his name. The rest of the time, in the stark, modern courtroom in an Amsterdam suburb, Mohammed smiled thinly, tugged at his wispy beard, adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, and fiddled with his pen. Just once, when the presiding judge, Udo Bentinck, wondered why the defendant had turned his back on a society that offered him complete freedom to follow his faith, did he allow himself to snap into a moment of anger
. He shouted: “In the the name of Allah, the merciful bringer of mercy.” And then in Dutch: “I worship Allah every day and pray that he protects me from ever changing the way I think now.”

  That was it, until that “wow,” an Americanism that crept into the language of the young in the 1960s and somehow got lodged there. “Wow” was like the Nike sneakers that Mohammed wore under his black djellaba, the badge of global youth, nurtured on American street culture. Wrapped around his head like a turban was a black and white kaffiyeh, the Palestinian scarf made famous by Chairman Arafat. Theo van Gogh had posed in a similar scarf for the cover photograph of one of his books, entitled Allah Knows Better. Van Gogh meant to mock, while Mohammed, perhaps no less theatrically, was mimicking the style of the seventh-century prophet.

  “What did you say?” asked the judge.

  “I said ‘wow,’ you wrote very nicely. So I can say something now, and you won’t interrupt me? Can I say critical things here too?”

  The judge told him to go ahead. And Mohammed made one of the most astonishing speeches ever heard in a Dutch courtroom. He spoke slowly, in halting sentences, in an accent that was mostly Amsterdam with a Moroccan-Dutch lilt. First he addressed Theo van Gogh’s mother, Anneke. He could not “feel her pain,” he said, for he didn’t know what it was like “to lose a child born through such pain and so many tears.” Because he was not a woman, and because she was an infidel.

  It was not his intention, he said, to give a political speech. But he wanted her to know that he didn’t kill her son because he (Theo) was Dutch, or because he, Mohammed, felt insulted as a Moroccan. Theo was no hypocrite, he continued, for he had simply spoken his mind. “So the story that I felt insulted as a Moroccan, or because he called me a goat fucker, that is all nonsense. I acted out of faith. And I made it clear that if it had been my own father, or my little brother, I would have done the same thing.” As far as his state of mind was concerned, he could assure the court that “if I were ever released, I would do exactly the same, exactly the same.”

  He explained to the court that he was obligated to “cut off the heads of all those who insult Allah and his prophet” by the same divine law that didn’t allow him “to live in this country, or in any country where free speech is allowed.” Alas, there was no country where people like him could seek refuge, so he had had no choice but to live in the Netherlands.

  To the policemen who arrested him, he said that he had shot at them “fully intending to kill them, and to be killed.” This statement unleashed an extraordinary outburst of emotion among the policemen. Tears ran down their cheeks as they fell into each other’s arms. Heads were stroked and backs patted. They were traumatized, so it was reported, kept awake by nightmares, and had frequent fits of crying. The idea of a suicidal killer in the middle of Amsterdam was just too much to bear.

  Unperturbed, Mohammed finished his speech with the following words: “You can send all your psychologists and all your psychiatrists, and all your experts, but I’m telling you, you will never understand. You cannot understand. And I’m telling you, if I had the chance to be freed and the chance to repeat what I did on the second of November, wallahi [by Allah] I’m telling you, I would do exactly the same.”

  “That is all you wanted to say?” asked the judge.

  “I’m not here to feel sorry for myself,” Mohammed concluded, “or to blame anyone. Perhaps this could be a small consolation to Mrs. van Gogh. That is all. For the rest, I really don’t care.”

  “Every little bit helps,” muttered Anneke van Gogh after the trial.

  The judge had no choice but to sentence Mohammed Bouyeri to a lifetime in prison.

  It had been a most peculiar trial, which invited odd behavior. Theo’s ex-wife, on her first sight of Mohammed, exclaimed to her husband’s murderer: “Look, Mo, the same scarf!” and pointed to Van Gogh’s cover photo.

  Mohammed’s lawyer, Peter Plasman, looked glum most of the time. It cannot have been easy to defend a client who didn’t wish to be defended and told the judge he would commit murder again at the first opportunity.

  The Friends of Theo gave their impressions of the trial on television. They were disappointed, they said, for the killer was clearly unworthy of his victim. Theodor Holman thought it “was a tragedy that the man who killed Theo was such a lackluster fellow, so devoid of any spirit.” Theo’s producer, Gijs van de Westelaken, added that Mohammed was so small.

  The most emotional declaration in the courtroom came from Anneke van Gogh, who also pointed out the killer’s lack of stature. “A loser,” she called him, “but a loser who committed homicide.” Not just that, but a loser who “had lived on welfare for three years,” a loser who got off on watching videos of murder and mutilations, a loser who was convinced that his god commanded him “to kill the pig.” Well, there would be no paradise for him, she said, and no seventy-two virgins either.

  Theo, her beloved son, was murdered because of his ideas. She quoted from one of Mohammed’s tracts: “No discussions, no demonstrations, no petitions, no marches. Only death will separate lies from truth.” This didn’t bode well, she said, for a country “where the works of Voltaire, Molière, Victor Hugo, and Jonathan Swift were published during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, because they were banned in their own countries.” Theo, she said, was a brave exponent of that tradition, our contemporary Voltaire or Swift.

  So it was back to the Enlightenment again. Leon de Winter, the Jewish novelist who had so often borne the brunt of Van Gogh’s personal venom, declared in the Wall Street Journal that the nation of Spinoza and Erasmus was dead. When we had tea in her Wassenaar garden, Anneke van Gogh gave me a short exposition on the nature of Islam. It was “a fossilized religion,” she believed, which had “never had an Enlightenment.” Moroccans were in a “state of denial” after the murder, because “that’s in their culture, their macho culture. They are incapable of self-criticism.”

  This had become the received opinion, repeated like a mantra by a large number of public commentators, experts, and politicians. But it hardly addressed the question that was on everyone’s mind during the trial of Mohammed Bouyeri. Why did a young man, who was neither poor nor oppressed, who had received a decent education, a man who had never had trouble making friends, who enjoyed smoking dope and drinking beer, why would such a man turn into a holy warrior whose only wish was to kill, and perhaps more mysteriously, to die? It was the same question people asked after the bombings in the London underground, set off by similar young men, who played cricket, had girlfriends, went to the pub. All we know is that they murdered in the name of Allah and his prophet. Quite why they did it is harder to explain.

  2.

  The expert witness on Islam during Mohammed Bouyeri’s trial was Professor Ruud Peters. He had analyzed Mohammed’s writings—letters, articles in his neighborhood paper, texts posted on Internet websites. The story he uncovered is one of an increasingly disturbed young man whose conversion to jihadism took place over little more than one year. Peters explained that Mohammed had begun by rejecting “Western values.” This would have been around February 2003. The next stage, reached in October, was his rejection of the democratic state and its legal institutions. Then, in March 2004, he called for a global jihad against democracy. Finally, in July, he advocated violence against individuals who had insulted Islam or the Prophet.

  Much of Mohammed’s writing has the air of childish fantasy. In March 2004, he announced that soon “the knights of Allah” would march into the houses of parliament and raise “the flag of Tawheed [God’s sovereignty]” and transform the parliament into a Shariah court. Other effusions, such as one entitled This Is the Way, are soaked in the lurid images of advanced paranoia: “The battle against the Truth has been waged since the beginning of mankind, but it has never been as fierce and massive as in our time. The monsters of the army of satanic powers are ready everywhere to arrest the pronouncers of absolute truth and throw them into their bestial dungeons. Some monsters g
o so far as to kill the tellers of truth in their own homes. The masses, who seem to be dulled and hypnotized by the great media offensive unleashed by the enemies of Islam on the spirits and souls of the people, are part of the great [in]visible battle.”1

  Most of the religious extremism—snatches of revolutionary texts, calls for jihad, glorifications of martyrdom—was translated from English-language websites. Professor Peters did not think that Mohammed was proficient in Arabic. If he translated anything at all from Arabic, he must have had help, he said.

  Peters’s report, prepared for the court, makes for strange reading, because he attempts to find coherence in these violent ravings where often there is none. “Ideological and religious development” is a rather grand description of Mohammed’s thinking. But the report is worth studying nonetheless, not so much for what it says about Islam, but for what it says about the revolutionary fantasies of a confused and very resentful young man. These are not so different from the fantasies of other confused and resentful young men in the past. You can find them in the novels of Dostoyevsky or Joseph Conrad, desperadoes who imagine themselves as part of a small elite, blessed with moral purity, surrounded by a world of evil. They are obsessed with the idea of violent death as a divinely inspired cleansing agent of worldly corruption. Mohammed Bouyeri is like the Professor in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, the suicide bomber who is “terrible in the simplicity of his idea,” the bomber who will always overcome his enemies, because, in his words, they “depend on life … whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident.”