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Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance |  |
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Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance | |
It was the emblematic crime of our moment: On a cold November day in Amsterdam, an angry young Muslim man, Mohammed Bouyeri, the son of Moroccan immigrants, shot and killed the celebrated and controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, great-grandnephew of Vincent and iconic European provocateur, for making a movie with the vocally anti-Islam Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali that "blasphemed" Islam. After Bouyeri shot van Gogh, he calmly stood over the body and cut his throat with a curved machete, as if performing a ritual sacrifice, which in a very real sense he was.
The murder horrified quiet, complacent, prosperous Holland, a country that prides itself on being a bastion of tolerance, and sent shock waves across Europe and around the world. Shortly thereafter, Ian Buruma returned to his native country to try to make sense of it all and to see what larger meaning should and shouldn't be drawn from this story. The result is Buruma's masterpiece: a book with the intimacy and narrative control of a true-crime page-turner and the intellectual resonance we've come to expect from one of the most well-regarded journalists and thinkers of our time. Ian Buruma's entire life has led him to this narrative: In his hands, it is the exemplary tale of our age, the story of what happens when political Islam collides with the secular West and tolerance finds its limits.
作者简介 Ian Buruma is currently Luce Professor at Bard College. His previous books include God's Dust, Behind the Mask, The Missionary & The Libertine, Playing the Game, The Wages of Guilt, Anglomania, and Bad Elements. He writes frequently for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and the Financial Times.
媒体推荐 A troubling description and analysis of what can happen when cultures collide. -- Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2006
Bumping Into Boundaries in a Land of Tolerance
By WILLIAM GRIMES
There are two murders in "Murder in Amsterdam." The first took place on May 6, 2002, when an animal-rights advocate, for obscure reasons, gunned down Pim Fortuyn, a charismatic politician with a populist program combining law-and-order conservatism, opposition to immigration and gay liberation. About a year and a half later a young Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, incensed by a film critical of Islam, shot the filmmaker-provocateur Theo van Gogh dead in broad daylight. As a parting gesture, he pinned a manifesto to the twitching body with a knife. It was all, as the prime minister of the Netherlands put it, "un-Dutch."
Well, perhaps more Dutch than it seemed, Ian Buruma proposes in his shrewd, subtly argued inquiry into the tensions and resentments underlying two of the most shocking events in the recent history of the Netherlands. For one thing, both killers traveled to the crime scene by bicycle. More seriously, both murders represented the sort of highly pitched moral confrontation that could be regarded as a Dutch specialty. The killings were, in a sense, "principled murders."
Mr. Buruma writes ,"It is a characteristic of Calvinism to hold moral principles too rigidly, and this might be considered a vice as well as a virtue of the Dutch."
Mr. Buruma has made a career of examining foreign cultures, usually Asian, in books like "God's Dust: A Modern Asian Journey" and "Inventing Japan." The murders of Mr. van Gogh and Mr. Fortuyn took him to an unexpected place, his own country.
Mr. Buruma grew up in The Hague, but the country to which he returns in this book is virtually unrecognizable to him, transformed by large numbers of Muslim immigrants from Turkey and Morocco. The multicultural experiment, despite the government's liberal immigration policies and lavish social services, has not gone well, and Mr. Buruma wants to find out why.
There is no single answer, he discovers, as he sits down with social workers, historians, politicians and writers, some Dutch, others immigrants or the children of immigrants. There are, however, promising avenues to explore, and this he does, economically and suggestively. He traces the evolution of the Netherlands from a sleepy, racially homogenous country to a multicultural haven for immigrants, many Muslim. He also delves into the personal histories of the victims and their assassins, trying to expose the social fault lines that led to murder. The connecting theme is immigration and its discontents, felt by guests and hosts alike.
The improbable Mr. Fortuyn tapped into deep public anxiety over immigration, globalism and national character. Personally outrageous, he hurled abuse at the smooth face of Dutch liberalism, ridiculing its tolerance for Islamic cultural practices that conflicted with social freedom.
Mr. van Gogh, a social gadfly who once described himself as the national village idiot, made a point of offending Islam, just as he made a point of offending the political establishment and anything else within reach: he once called Jesus "that rotten fish from Nazareth." He miscalculated when, with the Somali immigrant Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he made "Submission," a film in which lines from the Koran on the role of women were projected onto naked female bodies.
The Dutch, Mr. Buruma writes, savor irony, and perhaps because their political establishment is so dull, enjoy the politics of outrage. This taste is not shared by the country's Muslim immigrants. "This was the crowning irony of his life," Mr. Buruma writes. "Van Gogh, more than anyone, had warned about the dangers of violent religious passions, and yet he behaved as though they held no consequences for him."
Dutch by upbringing, Mr. Buruma manages to pick up on nuances and historical threads that other writers might easily overlook. He maintains that the argument over immigration cannot be understood without seeing the long shadow of World War II and Anne Frank. Questions of national identity, race and tolerance bear heavy freight. "Never again, said the well-meaning defenders of the multicultural ideal, must Holland betray a religious minority," Mr. Buruma writes.
That minority seethes. In particular, the offspring of poor, often illiterate Berbers from Morocco have fared poorly in the Netherlands, and Mr. Buruma, with great finesse, explores the sense of displacement and cultural alienation of Muhammad Bouyeri, Mr. van Gogh's killer, and other young Muslim men drawn to Islamic fundamentalism. For the products of rigid tribal societies, Dutch freedom has often proved to be oppressive, and here Mr. Buruma suggests that Islam might not be the main point.
"More important," he writes, "was the question of authority, of face, in a household where the father could give little guidance, and in a society from which a young Moroccan male might find it easier to receive subsidies than respect."
Mr. Fortuyn had a simple solution. Foreigners who did not subscribe to Dutch values should leave. Enlightenment absolutists like Ms. Hirsi Ali and Mr. van Gogh turned apoplectic at any efforts to appease or accommodate Muslims on, say, gay rights or women's rights, and they were not alone in their fears.
"I find it terrible that we should be offering social welfare or subsidies to people who refuse to shake hands with a woman," a left-wing feminist tells Mr. Buruma.
Two murders have left the citizens of two cultures, living in the same country, staring at each other across a gulf and wondering how to move forward. Mr. Buruma is not sure, and at the end he disappears in a puff of rhetorical smoke. With the battle lines drawn, he expresses the fond hope that reason and moderation will prevail on both sides. The sentiment falls sweetly on ears tuned to that particular frequency. The question is how to transmit it to a fanatic on a bicycle. -- New York Times, September 13, 2006
It was already a dreary, late-autumn morning in Amsterdam when Mohammed Bouyeri made it that much drearier by blasting filmmaker and provocateur Theo van Gogh off his bicycle. He then slashed van Gogh's throat, planted the knife in van Gogh's chest, and used another to pin a note to him, a rambling tract calling for a holy war against unbelievers. Then Bouyeri kicked the corpse. He was arrested after a gunfight with police.
"Murder in Amsterdam" is Ian Buruma's exploration of the event, its context and fallout. It is a work of philosophical and narrative tension, strikingly sharp and brooding, frank and openly curious. Which is apt, for here is the Netherlands -- home to the Enlightenment, bastion of tolerance -- experiencing an act of mortal intolerance. The Netherlands, where multiculturalism is worn on its sleeve, meets its evil twin.
Just how elastic is tolerance, asks Buruma? If the Netherlands wears multiculturalism on its sleeve, it doesn't necessarily follow that untold numbers of sober, conformist Netherlanders find the garment a comfortable fit. Tolerance has its limits, he writes. "It is easy to tolerate those who are much like ourselves, whom we feel we can trust instinctively, whose jokes we understand, who share our sense of irony. ... It is much harder to extend the same principle to strangers in our midst, who find our ways as disturbing as we do theirs."
The rows in the multicultural garden proved more and more difficult to hoe, for the Dutch and for, in particular, the significant immigrant population of Muslims. With their radically different worldview, many Muslims were not about to be absorbed willy-nilly into Dutch democratic liberalism. They would stick to their own institutions, especially after the resentment of having one too many doors shut in their face, or when Dutch freedoms -- sexual, religious, artistic, political, you name it -- were perceived as a threat. These Muslims would seek comfort in the reinvention of tradition on new turf.
What is multiculturalism in this instance if not the ideal of a complacent elite, a tolerance of intolerance? asked some high-profile Dutch. Buruma, a Dutch native living in the United States, draws sharp portraits of three: Pim Fortuyn, the gay, populist outsider who almost became prime minister; the anti-Islam, Somali-born politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali; and van Gogh, "with his unfailing instinct for the low blow."
Fortuyn voiced sentiments of cultural homogeneity and a loathing of religious strictures, writes Buruma, concocting a dreamy family-state, with a shared language, culture and history. Foreigners rocked the family-state boat. " 'How dare you!' he fulminated. ... 'This is our country, and if you can't conform, you should get the hell out.' " Campy, mocking, aggrieved, Fortuyn's popularity attested to touching a raw Dutch nerve. He was assassinated by an animal-rights activist who objected to his vanity, opportunism and fur collars.
Ali has pulled no punches in her excoriation of Islam. She suffered firsthand the torments that can be visited upon females living in a fundamentalist Islamic state. Such Islam is a force of darkness, she says, inimical to the health of an enlightened country like the Netherlands. Widely respected, Ali has also made enemies across the spectrum in her role as Islam's Voltaire: a heretic, a "filthy indigenous clone," a snake in the multicultural Eden. Van Gogh was her friend, with whom she made the short film "Submission," a contentious broadside at Islam as a cage imprisoning women.
This was van Gogh's cup of tea. A self-ordained "village idiot," the court jester with license to spill Truth, he loved a good row. He epitomized a rude, free-spirited anarchism of poking fun at convention. Catholic, Jew, Muslim -- all felt his barb. Living in the Netherlands, he believed that he could give unlimited offense without fear of physical retribution. He was mistaken.
Buruma does his most vigilant probing of Mohammed Bouyeri, a textbook on the retreat into fundamentalism. The pot-smoking youth gave way under a series of setbacks and rejections. His Islamic upbringing was tugged from the shadows. He became uncomfortable with all the choices in Dutch society, and disgusted by its value system. Increasingly priggish and moralistic, he fashioned a world out of fantasy, paranoia, tribal honor and religious rectitude. Islamic purism provided sustenance and authenticity amid the earthly evils.
"Submission" stuck in Bouyeri's craw. He would become a knight of Allah, a destroyer of the civilization that tormented him, a dispenser of divine law -- the ordinates of a murderous narcissism -- with violent death his cleansing agent. "The impulse to seek oblivion, to be intoxicated and overwhelmed by a great force, is not rare," writes Buruma. Life in jail is a great place to find oblivion.
Readers can draw their own conclusions about the limits of tolerance. Burma is wary to provide a pat answers, though perhaps operating within a nation's rules of law is a sensible starting point. Still, as Ali might warn, try being a girl in Somalia. National rules of law may well be the death of you. -- San Francisco Chronicle
Like many Dutch people, my wife found the news that the filmmaker Theo van Gogh had been murdered by a Muslim extremist shocking, in two senses of the word: shocking-tragic, and shocking-weird. She had worked with van Gogh, as producer of one of his television series in 1998, "Het Is Hier Verschrikkelijk Gezellig" ("It's Terribly Nice Here"). The show revolved around van Gogh insulting and humiliating people engaged in recreational activities he considered contemptible: executives playing paintball, couples flying off for "exotic weddings," swingers' clubs. (Today, we would call it "reality TV," but that term didn't exist yet; it was coined in 1999, also in the Netherlands, when a Dutch studio called Endemol came out with the original version of "Big Brother.") Van Gogh's public persona was that of a fat, abusive, witty, politically incorrect buffoon, equal parts Johnny Knoxville and Michael Moore, the self-proclaimed "dorpsgek" ("village idiot") of the Netherlands. That such a character should become a victim of international jihad seemed an absurd joke or category error, as though the 9/11 terrorists had tried to blow up the town of South Park.
"It's Terribly Nice Here" found van Gogh at a low ebb in his career. His shtick had begun to seem less repellently funny than just plain repellent. My wife's strongest visual memory of the director was of him passed out on the couch in the editing room, a beached whale in mismatched socks. But in subsequent years, van Gogh reestablished himself by taking on more serious projects, and turning his ridicule toward a new target: Islam. Starting in about 2000, anti-Muslim sentiments, once taboo in self-consciously tolerant Holland, were voiced with increasing openness and conviction. Van Gogh jumped on the bandwagon, saying a number of things that would probably have ended an American entertainer's career, notably his use of the epithet "goatfuckers." -- Matt Steinglass, Salon
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly
Van Gogh, a provocative media personality in the Netherlands, was shot and stabbed on an Amsterdam street in November 2004 by a young radical, the son of Moroccan immigrants, who accused him of blasphemy against Islam. When Buruma (Bad Elements) returned to his homeland in an effort to make sense of the brutal murder, he quickly realized there was more to the story than a terrorist lashing out against Western culture. Exploiting the tensions between native-born Dutch and Muslim immigrants, van Gogh drew attention to himself with deliberately inflammatory political theater that escalated beyond control. Buruma refuses to blame the victim, though, giving equal weight to critics who insist Islam must adapt to European culture rather than the other way around, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch politician who scripted van Gogh's final film, an avant-garde indictment of the religion's treatment of women. There is a strong sense of journalistic immediacy to Buruma's cultural inquiry, and if the result is a slim volume, that's because his dense, thoughtful prose doesn't waste a single word. (Sept. 11)
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From Booklist
The Netherlands may be the Western country most affected by radical Muslim violence, with two major assassinations since 9/11, those of politician Pym Fortuyn, who had called for restrictions on Muslim immigration (Fortuyn's assassin wasn't Muslim, however), and media celebrity Theo Van Gogh, director of a film lambasting the Qur'an on women. Buruma returned to his homeland after Van Gogh's murder to gain understanding from figures in Dutch and Dutch Muslim politics and society who might provide it, including the Somali-born politician who wrote Van Gogh's fatal film, a Muslim prison chaplain, a teacher, a historian, and another Dutch Muslim politician. Their testimony disclosed that the vaunted Dutch multiculturalism is failing second--generation Dutch Muslims, the cohort to which Van Gogh's assassin and ordinary Muslim hooligans belong. There is enough credible blame for the situation to blanket all institutions and social strata in the Netherlands. Buruma sees the problem as primarily denying second-generation Muslims a home in the country in which they were born. An ideal, absorbing companion to Bruce Bawer's excoriating While Europe Slept (2006). Ray Olson
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