by Ian Buruma
Although he still attended meetings of his neighborhood committee, Mohammed’s moods darkened. He shouted people down, refused to shake hands with women, broke up meetings with loud prayers or incantations to Allah, and blamed the failure of getting a subsidy for Mondriaans Doenia on prejudice against Muslims. He changed his appearance as well. Not only had he grown a beard, but a Moroccan djellaba and prayer hat were now part of his usual dress, instead of jeans. Old friends were dropped. A curt “salaam” was all they got when they encountered him in the street. New friends, such as an illegal immigrant from Morocco named Nouredine, came into his life. There was also a younger man, called Samir, who had attended the same school as Mohammed. Samir had left for Chechnya, aged seventeen, to join the holy war, but soon came back because he couldn’t stand the cold. Perhaps assuming that the sun shone everywhere south of Holland, he had taken only summer clothes. One of his teachers at school called him a “doltish Robin Hood.”
It was Nouredine who introduced Mohammed to a new source of authority, one that seemed more welcoming, more authentic, more sustaining, than anything he had experienced before. His father was now an estranged figure, who represented weakness and defeat. Officials of the Dutch welfare state, Mohammed felt, had all let him down, out of impotence or treachery, or possibly even hatred of Islam. But here, finally, was the real thing: a wise man from the East, who would give meaning to his life, and justification to his resentments.
Mohammed Radwan Alissa, also known as Abou Khaled, was a radical Muslim preacher who had fled Assad’s secular dictatorship in Syria in 1995. Flying to Frankfurt on a false passport, he failed to get asylum in Germany. He had heard that Holland was a easier place to operate illegally, so he quickly crossed the border and began to preach to small groups in the backrooms of provincial shops, or in private apartments. His message was an extreme form of Islamic purism known as Takfir. According to this doctrine, Muslims who depart from the true faith and fail to live by divine laws must be declared infidels, and deserve to be killed by true believers. Since democracy, or indeed any form of secular government, is an affront to true belief, Muslims who take part in such systems are by definition infidels.
Abou Khaled, a tall man who wore a black jacket over his white djellaba and spoke Dutch with a German accent, was preaching in a store called the Internet Phonehouse, in Schiedam, a small town near Rotterdam, when Mohammed was introduced to him by Nouredine. The fact that Abou Khaled preached only in Arabic, which was hard for Mohammed to follow, might have added to his mystique. For here was a man from the heartland of Islam, and not some traditionalist graybeard from the Rif mountains who went through the motions of Islam and barely spoke Arabic, or some wishy-washy immigrant imam currying favors with the Dutch authorities. Abu Khaled was a man of pure faith, a revolutionary, a modern prophet who could show him the way to the Truth.
The disciples who clustered around the Syrian preacher at these secretive get-togethers were mostly little more than kids, like Samir and Mohammed, confused kids who were so impressed that they called him “the Sheik.” Once they got acquainted, Mohammed asked the Sheik to come to his apartment in Amsterdam and talk to his circle of friends about the Koran. The Sheik, said one of these young disciples, was “so wise that he knew five times as much as Mohammed Bouyeri.”
By the middle of 2003, Mohammed had retreated into the narrow world of a few like-minded friends and his computer. Dutch intelligence would brand this group, which also included two brothers, Jason and Jaime, born of an American father and Dutch mother, the Hofstad Group, or Royal Court City Group, after the common name for The Hague, where several of the members lived. Jason and Jaime had plans to blow up the houses of parliament. There were possible links with jihadist organizations in Spain and other European countries. Mohammed became the house intellectual, as it were, of the Hofstad Group. He posted ideological tracts on websites, using the name Abu Zubair.
The friends, and sometimes the Sheik himself, met at Mohammed’s apartment and played DVDs on his laptop, downloaded from Islamist websites or passed on by other enthusiasts. They showed executions in the Middle East, foreign infidels having their throats cut by holy warriors wrapped in scarves and balaclavas. Mohammed, according to a man who attended these sessions, got visibly excited by these grisly spectacles. Nouredine spent his wedding night on a mattress in Mohammed’s apartment, together with his bride, watching infidels being slaughtered.5
Mohammed’s language became steadily more violent. “The Shariah,” he wrote, “is a sacred independent sovereign system for life that cannot be under the authority of a false human system. Indeed, the Shariah has come to wipe this type of system from the face of the earth.” This was in October 2003. In February 2004, his tone was even fiercer: “To withdraw from the infidels means hating them, being their enemy, being revolted by them, loathing them, and fighting them.” Even a good Muslim, he said, who prays, eats halal food, goes on pilgrimage to Mecca and calls for jihad, even such a person, “if he feels no hatred for the enemies of Islam, becomes an infidel, even if he only loved one of them and this person was a relative.”
This is the upside-down world of Takfir, where to love is a sin, and to hate is a virtue. The Dutch police, tipped off about the Hofstad Group, raided some of their usual meeting places and arrested five members, including the Syrian. Mohammed was not among them, for the secret service saw him as nothing more than a peripheral figure. So Mohammed delivered pizzas to the jail where his friends were held and shouted abuse at the guards. Since no actual crime had been committed, the prisoners were soon released. In the spring of 2004, Abou Khaled was a regular visitor again at Mohammed’s apartment. But there was a difference between the Sheik and his disciple. Abou Khaled had no direct interest in the Netherlands. His mind was in the Middle East. Mohammed, in a perverse way, remained remarkably Dutch.
6.
There are people who believe that the terror of political Islam would go away if only the problems of the Middle East were solved. If only the Americans would withdraw their troops from Iraq, and Israel would be forced to allow Palestinians to reclaim their land, if only Western governments and corporations would stop propping up dictators, if only the bloody stain of colonialism could be wiped out, then the holy war would be over.
It is unlikely, however, that those who want God’s kingdom on earth are going to be satisfied just with a better deal for the Palestinians, or a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Mohammed and his friends were certainly galvanized by events in the Middle East. Samir, the “doltish Robin Hood,” did go to Chechnya after all. Others left for Pakistan and Afghanistan. And Mohammed’s atrocity DVDs were compiled somewhere in the Middle East.
I asked the prison imam, Ali Eddaoudi, how he assessed the link between Middle Eastern politics and European terrorism. He thought “the root of the problem” ran deeper. Sure enough, he said, the situation in the world fueled aggression. The Netherlands was an ally of the U.S. in Iraq. That couldn’t be denied. And the Palestinian conflict was one good reason for Muslims to oppose the West. But “deep in their hearts,” he said, most Muslims “don’t have a strong connection to Iraq.” The real problem, he thought, was the lack of integration in European societies. “I can distinguish between Dutch people who are anti-Islam and those who are not, but a twenty-year-old boy often can’t.” Instead of accepting people as citizens who have lived in the Netherlands for forty years, Dutch politicians too often “stirred things up” and encouraged hostility by blaming the immigrants for all kinds of crimes. “Every accusation hits us hard,” he said. “This activates the bombs.”
I asked him about the Muslim critics of Islam, such as Afshin Ellian and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Weren’t they right about the dangers of political Islam? He waved his hand, as though to dismiss the thought. Ayaan, he said, was “hypnotized by all the attention. I feel sorry for her. Ellian is more dangerous.” How so? “Ellian is more thoughtful,” he replied, “but he’s also a Shiite. He doesn’t understand anything about Moroccans,
or Turks, or Sunnis.” After all, he said, Shiism was really a different religion: “Ellian talks about political Islam. But I don’t know anything about that. He may be right that they have that kind of thing in his native country, Iran, but he shouldn’t project it onto the Netherlands.”
I wondered about the difference between Shiite acts of terror and the acts of 9/11—or indeed the murder of Van Gogh—all committed by Sunnis. Were they indeed so different, despite the distinct traditions? A moment of confusion swept across Eddaoudi’s handsome, bearded face. “Well, no, not really.” So perhaps tradition was not so important, after all, when it came to violence in the name of faith? He brushed his hand across the surface of the Formica table, as though to wipe away a stain. After a few moments of silence, he had an answer, which was both interesting and quite disturbing: “Traditions can be like shackles. If you get rid of tradition, you still have Islam.” The purity of a faith, stripped of customs and traditions, a faith to which all can be born anew, is especially attractive to young people who feel culturally and socially unhinged. “Culture,” said Eddaoudi, “is made by human beings. But Islam remains.”
7.
Islam remains. This appears to have been what Mohammed was hoping for when he said he prayed to Allah to preserve him from ever having to think differently. Islam was his new identity, unassailable, secure, a snug shell that would protect him from all the hostile forces around him. It gave him a sense of power, of meaning, of Truth. He would live for Islam alone. And yet even in his most ferocious writings there were unmistakable marks of Mohammed’s culture, that is to say, his Dutch culture.
His angriest and perhaps most bizarre piece of writing, posted on the Internet, was entitled To Catch a Wolf. The title refers to an old Eskimo technique for hunting wolves. They would plant a bloody knife in the snow. The wolves, lured by the smell of blood, would approach the knife and lick the blade, cutting their tongues. They continued licking, without realizing that they were drinking their own blood, until it was too late and they had bled to death. People in the modern world, he wrote, are just like those wolves. We who live in the “democratic circus” of the West are slaves of the “fake lollipops” of our entertainment culture, and the pernicious seductions of cafés, dance bars, and gambling halls.
The Muslim people, equally enslaved by those Western lollipops, had reached the lowest point in their history, he continued, but luckily rescue was at hand. The knights of Islam would rise from … the Netherlands. Holland would be the cradle of religious revolution, made possible by precisely those political liberties that Mohammed affected to despise. He explained his weirdly paradoxical view: “Since the Dutch political system encourages its citizens (especially the allochtonen, that is, the Muslims) to take an active part in the problems of society … people did indeed rise to take on social responsibilities. Such people not only shouldered responsibilities for the Netherlands, but for the whole world. They will liberate the world from democratic slavery.”6
There are echoes here of an old Dutch conceit, rooted in a zealous type of Protestantism, the idea that Holland is the world’s moral beacon. Christians used to believe this. Just so, it was widely believed, until not so long ago, that the Dutch model of liberalism, multicultural tolerance, sexual permissiveness, and so forth, was like a ray of light shining brightly as an example to the rest of the world that was still shrouded in darkness. Mohammed, in a very Dutch delusion of grandeur, expanded his youthful enthusiasm for neighborhood politics to encompass the fate of mankind. His moralism, though couched in Islamist terms, was part of this tradition. The problem with democracy, in his view, was those sinful lollipops, the immoral pleasures of the flesh. But he had gone to an extreme that Protestants had rarely, if ever, reached. He couldn’t bear the freedom to choose that attracted Ayaan Hirsi Ali. What was liberation to her was a source of unbearable frustration and confusion to him. And so he had to destroy the civilization that tormented him.
“Liberate yourself!” he admonished young Muslims, in a weird echo of 1960s Provo rhetoric. “Come out of that coffeeshop, out of that bar, out of that corner. Listen to the cry of LA ILAHA ILLA ALLAH [Forsake all others and worship only Allah]. Join the caravan of martyrs.” In fact, of course, it was not at all like Provo. For the liberation preached by Mohammed was the liberation of death, of oblivion, the kind of heroic sacrifice that inspired European fascists in the 1930s.
To claim that there are similarities between Mohammed’s Islamism and other kinds of extremism is not to say that they are the same. But the death wish in the name of a higher cause, a god, or a great leader is something that has appealed to confused and resentful young men through the ages and is certainly not unique to Islam. Mohammed’s views on the U.S., expressed in the same document, also have a deeply European provenance, to be found in the right-wing politics of the 1930s as well as in a long left-wing tradition of anti-Americanism. “If we take the example of the mother of all democracies, America,” he wrote, “and compare its social statistics (crime, violence, etc.) with those of other nations, we can only conclude that it is an utterly sick society. It is only a matter of time before the whole social order collapses into chaos.”
In the muddled mind of Mohammed Bouyeri, then, ran a deep current of European anti-liberalism combined with self-righteous moralism and Islamist revolutionary fervor. This explosive mixture gave him a reason to murder the enemies who stood in the way of his vision of world salvation. The targets of his rage could be quite random, from a security guard at a local welfare office, whom Mohammed threatened with murder (“I’ll rip your heart out!”), to the entire Dutch people: “The dark clouds of death gather over your country. Prepare for something you can never be prepared for. You will pay with your blood for the torture and martyrdom of our brothers and sisters.”7
Random, but also quite specific, and there was a sexual element. Two of the three most immediate targets of Mohammed’s murderous intentions were immigrants: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a frequent subject of violent fantasies at gatherings in Mohammed’s apartment, represented the civilization Mohammed wished to destroy. Ahmed Aboutaleb, the Amsterdam city councillor, was a Muslim who had allegedly turned on his brothers by working for the enemy. The third target was the populist right-wing politician, Geert Wilders, who had been trying to step into Pim Fortuyn’s shiny shoes, with diminishing returns. Wilders was denounced mainly because of his alleged homosexuality. There was no basis to this allegation. Perhaps he was mixed up with Fortuyn. Or possibly his enemies were confused by the politician’s trademark dyed-blond bouffant hairdo. In any case, Hirsi Ali and Aboutaleb, a thoughtful and tough-minded Social Democrat born in Morocco, were the main enemies, one an apostate, a Whore of Babylon, and the other a degraded Muslim, a zindiq, who was nothing but an infidel in the eyes of the followers of Takfir, and thus unworthy to live on this earth.
8.
The common view of Mohammed Bouyeri’s rhetoric and deeds is to see them as deeply alien to Dutch tradition, as aspects of an exotic invasion from the mysterious and increasingly terrifying Orient. But at least one newspaper columnist recognized a similarity between the killer of Van Gogh and the fanatical vegan who murdered Pim Fortuyn. Both were “idealistic narcissists” who felt hindered in their quest for a better world, or the Truth, by loud-mouthed media celebrities.8
It would indeed be surprising if the general coarsening of public rhetoric, encouraged by a constant battle to be heard in the cacophony of the mass media, and by the modern Dutch notion that “everything must be said,” no matter how offensive, had not infected the habits and words of a young Dutchman of foreign extraction. Mohammed, in this sense too, was perhaps more a child of south Amsterdam than of Douar Ikhammalen.
Ali Eddaoudi, the prison imam, has no patience for the “young generation of Moroccan criminals.” They are “animals,” in his view, uncouth, left much too free, obsessed with money and status. Turks still send their most unruly boys back to Turkey for a while, to learn manners. Moroccan parents use
d to do this too, until Dutch social workers put a stop to it, thinking it was a form of “oppression.” Eddaoudi would love to take some of those “animals” back to Morocco, where he would soon teach them manners by “totally humiliating them.” Over there, he said, you get beaten for bad behavior. You get ostracized. You have no friends. But in Holland, it’s the reverse: “If you steal, and drive around in a big car, you get status.” The culture of “the old country, where few of these boys were born, isn’t the problem,” he concluded. “The problem is right here, in Holland.”
Naturally, Mohammed Bouyeri would not regard himself as a common thug. On the contrary, he touted his brand of Islam as the solution to the bad behavior that both he and Ali Eddaoudi condemn. Nor has he been treated as a common criminal. Judges and lawyers in criminal trials do not normally spend so much time pondering the “ideological and religious development” of the defendants. But this, too, may have something to do with an older story, much older than the current crisis among Muslims in large European cities: violent crime and revolutionary violence are not always far apart.
In November 2005, the Amsterdam police arrested a Moroccan-Dutch kid called Maik. He had twice posted violent threats against Geert Wilders on the Internet. When the police searched his house, they found homemade explosives in the basement. Maik was a street kid, like many others, with a passion for kickboxing and fireworks. He was attracted to excitement, craved action. September 11 immediately captured his imagination. His Moroccan friends at school thought Islam was cool and tough. He began to rummage around the Internet for more information. After the murder of Van Gogh, he established some kind of contact with the Hofstad Group and met Nouredine. He adopted the name Talib el-Ilm, Student of Knowledge. His hero, whose picture he used on his user profile on MSN, was his “Great leader and teacher” Mohammed Bouyeri. Maik, the kickboxer, was all of seventeen years old.
