Murder in Amsterdam (12 page)

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 pleasant 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.

Nora's interest in law began early. In high school, she was always joining in class debates. She had “a big mouth.” It was then that she learned about the Dutch constitution. It gave her “such a wonderful feeling. The idea that everyone is equal, the freedom of religion.” Now, her feeling is less positive. She feels that freedom of speech is being stretched
too far. At a recent student debate on terrorism, a law student claimed to be proud of the constitution, because it allowed Theo van Gogh to speak his mind. That, said Nora, was “hypocritical.” She thought that he only said it because Van Gogh's insults didn't offend
him.
Because he agreed with Van Gogh's views. But why should anyone have the right to insult others on the grounds of race or creed? Nora pointed out that this was against the law.

Nora was still in high school when the Twin Towers came down in New York. Everything changed on that day, for her and in how she was seen in the eyes of others: “Before, I was just Nora. Then, all of a sudden, I was a Muslim.” She recalled how she was a little late for class on the eleventh of September. When she entered the classroom, everyone turned to look at her, expecting her to say something, perhaps even make some statement, since she normally had such a big mouth. But she was “speechless.” She felt that all Muslims were being blamed, especially after the same frightening images were shown over and over on the television news, not only of the smoking towers in Manhattan, but of young Muslims dancing with joy in a small Dutch town called Ede.

September 11 had made Muslims think about things more seriously than before. What things? “Things like: What right does Osama bin Laden have to call himself a Muslim. Or things like the correct understanding of jihad.” Jihad,
she said, did not give her “a bad feeling.” People often don't understand it: “Young Moroccan boys shout about jihad, but that's just macho talk. They have little idea what it means. Jihad is only justified in self-defense, if you're attacked, or if you cannot practice your faith.”

Faith, however, remains a private affair for Nora. She is not in favor of introducing Shariah, or Islamic, law into Dutch legislation, “because it doesn't fit in this country, and besides, I'm for the separation of church and state.” She would never even think of living in a country like Saudi Arabia, where women can't get a driver's license, or Nigeria, where adulterous women are stoned. Nora is not interested in a Muslim political party either, for “the Dutch population is varied and the government must take that into account.” She is, in fact, a member of the Young Socialists, part of the PVDA.

Nora is a devout Muslim, then, who can see the point of jihad in defense of her faith, but also a progressive Dutch citizen full of common sense, whose talents and ambition should be of benefit to society. But she knows things are not that simple. For if 9/11 provoked a shift in the attitudes of Dutch progressives, things changed for the immigrants as well. Nora describes it as a “switch.” Before 9/11, well-educated Moroccans had confidence in their future in Dutch society. This is where they felt they belonged. It was the uneducated who felt isolated, or indifferent. They still are indifferent,
according to Nora. But the educated ones have changed. They have become frightened to be identified as Muslims or Moroccans. Yet it is precisely those people who should be given every chance, those young people who have tried so hard to succeed. For when they are disappointed, when they see the door being slammed in their faces, they become embittered.

“I would hate for that to happen to me,” said Nora, adjusting her scarf in the afternoon breeze coming from the river. She fell into a rare silence. I thought of frustrated intellectuals, not just Muslims or Moroccans, and their vulnerability to great revolutionary causes when they feel marginalized or cornered. I thought of Farhane, the actor, and his bitterness about being ostracized and “put in a box.”

I asked Nora what she would like to do after she got her university degree. She didn't want to work as a barrister, she said. She didn't think the law court was the right place for a woman in a headscarf, for counsel and judges had to look neutral. She would prefer a government job. “But, you know …,” she said, “it is so sad that you cannot work for the city government if you wear a Jewish kippa or a Muslim headscarf. After all, this city belongs to me too. It's as if you are mentally disappeared.” It was a strange and haunting phrase, “mentally disappeared,” something worse than being ignored or treated with indifference. It is as if by a mental effort society pretends that you don't even exist.

The sense of being “disappeared” can lead to aggression, as well as self-hatred; dreams of omnipotence blend with the desire for self-destruction. To prove their existence, to themselves and the world, people sometimes join great revolutionary causes, or embark on a mission to spread the word of God. Others, even more desperate, might commit a spectacular crime, like vengeful gods, assassinating a famous person, or shooting at random into a terrified crowd. Some lost souls, in order to feel truly alive, to prove their individuality, have to kill it in the process: suicide as the ultimate act of will. These are the most dangerous “radical losers,” the lone killers who cannot bear to live with themselves any longer and want to drag the world down with them.
*

 

 

 

FIVE
Submission

 

E
t cetera. This is only the beginning of a rap number by a three-man hip-hop band named DHC, living in The Hague (“The Hague is my terrain”). The lyrics, originally written in Dutch, get more graphic (“I cut you up in two”). Imagery of the circumcision Ayaan Hirsi Ali suffered as a child is repeated as a ghastly refrain. The rap was supposedly meant for the group's private pleasure, but quickly got spread around the Internet, was picked up by a television news program, and became a scandal. Hirsi Ali sued. The band was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 150 hours of community work. The three men are of Moroccan origin.

No one who has seen or heard Ayaan Hirsi Ali can be indifferent to her. To some she is a heroine, standing up against the forces of darkness, battling for free speech and enlightened
values. Men are charmed by her extraordinary beauty. Her slender, dark elegance and shy smile give her a chic vulnerability that looks very fine on the cover of magazines. Theo van Gogh's typical response, after his first meeting with her, was that he'd “love to fuck her.”
¹
Which may be why women sometimes distrust her. Others, women and men, actively loathe her. This loathing is harder to place. The haters are sometimes old progressives, who see her as a right-wing troublemaker in the multicultural garden. Some hate her for being a black woman who became too prominent—an alien who needed to be cut down to size. More often the haters are fellow immigrants, usually Muslims. Hirsi Ali's hostile views on Islam would account for this, but there is something else, a deeper resentment, revealed in the rap number, which is both oddly Dutch and also typical of a particular kind of immigrant's rage. Hirsi Ali doesn't act “normal.” She puts on airs after “just two months in Holland.” She “prances around” like an
autochtoon
(nativeborn person).

A Dutch hip-hop label owner said in defense of the rappers that Ayaan Hirsi Ali “has offended many people deeply with her statements. Why should she be able to get away with that, just because she studied and learned to neatly package her statements, whereas DHC cannot, because they are rough street kids who do so in their own language?”

In fact, Hirsi Ali never threatened anyone, but this argument illustrates the kind of resentment she provokes among many immigrants. The resentment goes something like this: She has studied, she can speak eloquently, even though she has only been in Holland for a short time. She thinks she's better than us, who were born here. Her statements are neatly packaged. She pretends to be Dutch, an indigenous clone.

DHC said they had never meant to hurt her physically. Their abuse was just words. If they had wanted to kill her, they said, they surely wouldn't have advertised their intentions. They were indeed words, and there is no proof that the three Moroccan-Dutch rappers in The Hague had anything more in mind than “dissing” their target. That's what rappers do; it's a style, just like the photograph of DHC, a gang of poseurs in jeans and face masks, pretending to be armed guerrillas. Rappers play at being murderers. Perhaps they were Dutch enough to have adopted the national penchant for vicious irony. But Mohammed Bouyeri did mean it when he pinned his death threat to Hirsi Ali onto Theo van Gogh's corpse. The difference between his words and those of DHC come down to one thing, which is not just a matter of style: to the rappers, she had betrayed her immigrant roots; to Mohammed, her betrayal was religious: she was an apostate.

2.

A
yaan Hirsi Ali's first act of serious rebellion took place in a cinema, in Kenya, where she lived with her family in exile for ten years. It was in the late 1980s, when the Iran-Iraq War was still raging and the fatwa was out against Salman Rushdie. Ayaan was a good Muslim—more than a good Muslim, in fact. Inspired by Sister Aziza, her favorite teacher at the Nairobi Muslim Girls' Secondary School, she covered herself from head to toe, demonstrated against Rushdie, and even considered fighting for the Iranian Islamic forces against Saddam Hussein's secular Iraq. She shocked her classmates by showing them pictures from jihadist magazines of murdered Muslims, and declared that she was ready to die for Allah. Contrary to Somali custom, she refused even to shake hands with a man.

But she also had a secret boyfriend, a Kenyan, who, though a devout Muslim, was ready to cut himself some slack. This was scandalous, not only because she was expected to produce sons with a member of her own clan; she was not allowed to have intimate relations with any boy. So they would meet in secret, in the dark, in the cinema. She can still remember the film they saw while they sat side by side, their hands touching. Just the feel of his hand made her break out in a sweat of guilty anxiety. Yet she couldn't contain
herself. The film was
A Secret Admirer,
a Hollywood comedy of errors about the mixed-up love affairs of American high school kids. The fact that such a thing was possible, that young people kissed without fear, was a revelation.

On the screen was a vision of liberty, however zanily expressed, a vision associated with the West, with America, where her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, a political activist in opposition to the Somalian dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, had studied. A linguist by training, he believed in democracy, and in education for women, including his own daughters. The U.S. was his great example. If a young country like the U.S. could succeed, he told himself, then so could Somalia. He was in prison as a political dissident when Ayaan was born. They met for the first time when she was six. His name and his activities had reached Ayaan only through whispered conversations. Although estranged, she clearly still adores him.

Ayaan's rebellion was not against him—that would come later. He was mostly absent from Kenya anyway. Her immediate problem was sexual, but this had many implications: how to reconcile the teachings of Islam—the deepest beliefs of her mother and illiterate grandmother, of her favorite teacher, Sister Aziza, of her Kenyan boyfriend, herself, and even her progressive father—with her physical and emotional desires? Why could she and “Yussuf” (his secret name) only meet furtively, like thieves in the dark? Why did she have to
lie all the time about something that felt so natural? What was it that separated her from the world of those American high school kids glimpsed on the cinema screen?

One of the most frequent criticisms made against Ayaan Hirsi Ali is her allegedly monolithic view of Islam. Like all major religions, the Muslim faith comes in many forms and degrees of orthodoxy. Some practices, such as female circumcision, are not religious, but cultural. In the case of Ayaan, it was the custom of her Somali clan, the Darod. While her father, an opponent of the custom, was abroad, her grandmother had Ayaan and her younger sister circumcised.

However, it is Ayaan's conviction that the social, economic, and political problems that plague the Islamic world—terrorism, poverty, dictatorship, lack of scientific progress—can be explained, at least in part, by something suffered by all Muslims, regardless of their culture, and that is a warped view of sexuality. It comes down to what Chafina, the young filmmaker in Amsterdam, said about her father and his imam: “Daughter, daughter, daughter”—the obsession with the family's honor resting on the purity of the women.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes about Muslim sexual morality that it “is derived from premodern tribal societies, but sanctified by the Koran and further developed in the stories about the life of the Prophet. For many Muslims this morality is expressed
in the obsession with virginity. Such value is attributed to virginity that people are blinded to the human and social catastrophes that result from this obsession.”
²

Ayaan's grandmother kept a billy goat. In the evening, when the female goats belonging to the neighbor passed his patch, the goat would rush over and jump one of them. Shocked by this show of animal force, Ayaan asked her grandmother why the goat behaved so brutally. It's the fault of the neighbors, replied her grandmother. If they didn't want the females to be jumped, they should have taken a different path. To Ayaan, this anecdote serves as an illustration of what is wrong with Muslim morality. “As far as sex is concerned,” she writes, “men are seen in Muslim culture as irresponsible, frightening beasts, who lose all self-control the moment they see a woman.” This is not seen as the fault of men, but of the women who tempt them, simply by their physical presence. Hence the need for veils, for being kept out of sight.

Things seemed very different in the West. Ayaan could tell from the movie, and perhaps even from the English language itself. Somali was for storytelling, for myths and tribal lore; Arabic was the language of the Prophet. But English, to her, was the language of science, of reason. She needed English, the genteel, even somewhat prissy English of her Indian schoolteachers in Kenya, to “order my thoughts.”

“The only real hope for Muslims,” she wrote more than a decade after her experience in the Nairobi cinema, “is to practice self-criticism, to test those moral values, taken from the Koran. Only then can they hope to break out of the cage in which they imprison their women, and thereby themselves. The fifteen million Muslims who live in the West are in the most favourable circumstances to make this hope a reality.”

In the West, she explained, Muslims can speak their minds without fear of punishment or death. Under such favorable circumstances, they would have to be almost perverse not to do so.

3.

A
yaan Hirsi Ali told me about her childhood one day as we drove through The Hague in a bulletproof car. She spoke softly, almost self-effacingly, but this was deceptive. For behind the polite smile and soft voice was a steeliness that deflected all challenges to her convictions. The head of her security detail was sitting in front. Another car drove ahead of us, scanning our route for potential trouble, and another followed behind. Ever since she began to speak out in Holland against the dangers of Muslim extremism, Ayaan has
been followed by death threats. After her film
Submission
and the murder of Van Gogh, she has had to live virtually underground, first in military barracks and safe houses, then under permanent guard.

We passed through an area called Transvaal, near the soccer stadium, once a Dutch working-class neighborhood, now almost 100 percent
allochtoon,
an ugly, and relatively new, bureaucratic term for people of alien, but more specifically non-European, origin. Only a few days before, I had read a newspaper article about this area, which I used to cycle through as a child on the way to the stadium on Sunday afternoons. One of the few “native” inhabitants to have opted to stay was an old woman known as the Queen of Transvaal. She told her interviewer that the first foreigners to arrive were blacks from Suriname, in the 1960s. But they were okay.

“The trouble really began,” she said, “when masses of Moroccan and Turkish families were dumped in our neighborhood. They had no idea how to behave in our society. Garbage bags would be tossed into the street from the second floor. Goats would be slaughtered on the balcony. That sort of thing. The worst, really, is that we don't speak the same language. You know, when your ceiling leaks and you can't tell the neighbors upstairs to turn off their tap. People get irritated.”
³

I thought of the Queen of Transvaal as we passed the neighborhood's dreary row houses, some with boarded-up windows and graffiti on the walls. Rubbish spilled on the sidewalks out of torn plastic bags. There was the usual profusion of satellite dishes. Most butchers in the main shopping street were halal. The coffeeshops and kebab joints certainly looked livelier than anything in the city of my childhood. But one cannot dismiss all the
autochtoon
people who moved out as racists. The Queen of Transvaal spoke a truth that those whose lives are insulated from the cultural frictions and general squalor of the “dish cities” prefer not to hear.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali hears it only too clearly. She has swept floors in factories, and interpreted for illiterate women who were paralyzed with fear and bewilderment in a society they could not even begin to understand. Some had been abused by husbands or fathers; others had contracted AIDS; yet others had lost their virginity and were married off to strangers. This was hardly the promised West that Hirsi Ali had dreamed of. As a politician, she has stood up for the Dutch “natives” who feel forced to abandon their homes to get away from the sacrificial goats, the imams who preach hatred of the West, the idle young men asking for trouble, and the neighbors who don't understand their language.

When we first met, in Paris, Ayaan said something few Dutch politicians would dare to utter. She was talking about
policemen. The top officers, she said, were overpaid, ignorant, and lazy. The real hard work in a city like Amsterdam was done by underpaid cops in the streets, who did their best to deal with violence against women, drug traders, and religious tensions. But, she said, “these are the kind of people who are leaving the cities in droves. One day people will wake up and say: ‘Oh my God, the whole city is black.' And what's happening in Amsterdam will happen in the whole country.”