Murder in Amsterdam (15 page)

The
Veiled Monologues
had been inspired by
The Vagina Monologues.
Aside from the professional cast, well-known Dutch women were invited to read monologues on stage. Ayaan was one of those well-known women.

“A giga-success!” said Funda, which she found delightful but also disturbing. “When it comes to Islam,” she explained, “all you need to do is fart to get attention.” The other thing that disturbed her was the nature of the audience. Partly because of the high price of a ticket, few Muslim women turned up. The monologues on Muslim lives were performed largely for middle-class non-Muslims. The original idea, to use the stage to start a discussion among Muslims, proved to be an illusion.

Funda admires Ayaan Hirsi Ali, salutes her courage, and yet cannot hide her disapproval, not so much of what she says, but of the way she says it, of her attitude, her style. She tried to explain: “I've lived in Holland much longer than Ayaan. I'm more a part of this society than she is. I've worked with refugees for fourteen years. And I've always resisted the kind of people who cut themselves off from their own kind and
then behave arrogantly because they're ashamed of their own background.” Listening to these accusations, I thought of the rap group in The Hague and their loathing of the “filthy indigenous clone.”

There was an element of one-upmanship here, a kind of competition which Ayaan could not possibly win on the basis of reason. Rivalry among immigrants is not just a matter of age, or birth. One day, on the tram in Amsterdam, I saw a black Surinamese scold an elderly Turkish man who was standing in his way. He berated him for not speaking “proper Dutch like everybody else.” In a kebab joint, near the Central Station, I got into a conversation about the European Union with the owner, an Arab from Nazareth. The Dutch, following the French, had just voted against the proposed EU constitution. How had he voted? “ ‘No,' of course,” he replied in fluent, accented Dutch. This was the way he saw it: “Soon, those Turks and other foreigners will want to join Europe, but they're still fifty years behind. We can't afford to wait for
them
.”

Funda was aware that Turks in the Netherlands got better press than the Moroccans. This made her feel a bit guilty. But she pointed out that Turks were different from Moroccans. Even among the illiterate Turks, such things as democracy, women's rights, and education for girls were taken for granted. “Turks,” she said, “feel a strong sense of superiority.
We were always independent, while Morocco was under foreign control.”

Although she speaks Turkish and visits Turkey regularly, Funda feels entirely at home in the Netherlands. And yet she has always been aware that “something ugly lurks under the surface.” It comes out in the hate mail she receives, especially after she began writing columns for a popular conservative newspaper. Every time she writes something critical about her own country, Holland, she is told to “fuck off back to where you came from!”

Funda didn't hide her indignation; indeed, she acted it out in a flourish of angry gestures. Her hate mail was not always the same, however; the tone had changed with time. “In 2000 I was called a ‘filthy Turk.' After 2001, and the rise of Pim Fortuyn, it was ‘filthy foreigner [
allochtoon
].' After Hirsi Ali, it was ‘filthy Muslim.' ” She doesn't blame Ayaan for this. “It's not about her. It's about the Dutch. What's being spat out now, was always there.”

Not that Theo van Gogh was like that. Funda worked with him once, in a television soap opera, not unlike
Najib and Julia,
about a Turkish mother (played by Funda) who tries to stop her daughter from seeing a Dutch boyfriend. She adored working with Theo: “He was an absolute sweetie, even though he could say the most terrible things.” Theo, she said, could be persuaded to make the Turkish roles more
realistic, less like stereotypes. But he had a silly streak: “One day he told me he had smuggled a line into the script that was broadcast without anyone noticing. The line was: ‘I fucked Allah.' He was so pleased, just like a child.”

9.

A
yaan Hirsi Ali's film
Submission,
directed by Theo van Gogh, is based on the same formula as
Veiled Monologues
. But it goes a step further. When
Veiled Monologues
was first performed in Amsterdam, a poster showing a woman in a see-through black burqa was quickly replaced after Muslim activists threatened to smash the windows of the theater. A new poster showed the same woman, fully covered. The first shot in
Submission
shows a woman about to kneel on a prayer mat. The camera slowly pans from her head down to her toes, revealing her naked body under the diaphanous material of her burqa. Later in the elevenminute film we see texts from the Koran projected onto the skin of several naked women, texts that point to the submission of women, submission to their fathers, brothers, husbands, and to Allah. For many Muslims, this was a deliberate provocation.

Ayaan would not disagree. She meant it to be provocative. She expected “a section of the Muslim world to come down on me.” But “if you want to get a discussion going, and needle people into thinking, you must confront them with dilemmas.” Ayaan believes that “anything short of physical and verbal violence should be permissible.”
⁷
It was fine, then, to show a naked woman writhing on the floor, with livid wounds on her back and thighs, talking about being flogged for making love with her boyfriend. Over her wounds we read the words from the Koran: “The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication—flog each of them with a hundred stripes….”

It was all right to show the naked back of another woman, who tells the story of being raped by her unwanted husband:

Or a third woman, her face swollen and disfigured by bruises from being beaten by her tyrannical husband:

Or the fourth, raped by her uncle in her own home, and then abandoned when she is pregnant, knowing she will be killed by her father for bringing shame to the family:

Her closest friends advised her against making this film. They thought nothing good could possibly come of it. But Ayaan had an answer to all doubters and critics, which deserves respect, if nothing else. She wrote: “In the long history of Jews and Christians searching for enlightenment, there are bound to have been people who called the strategy of analyzing sacred texts—to show how ridiculous, cruel, or unjust they were—counterproductive. I copied my strategy
from the Judeo-Christian criticism of faith-based absolutism. That is how
Submission Part I
*
must be seen. How effective my chosen strategy is should be clear to anyone who knows the history of Western criticism of religion.”

It is hard to disagree in principle. Whether she was wise is another matter. But wisdom is not always the quickest way to necessary change. Those who dare to challenge the dogmas that justify oppression are not always wise. Resistance is not always wise. But it can be necessary. The problem in the case of Ayaan's film is the intended target. She wrote it in English, so it must have been meant for an international audience. Theo van Gogh spoke of trying to sell it to the Arabic television station Al Jazeera, a bold but astonishingly naive idea. If the film was intended for the ayatollahs of Iran, or the imams of Saudi Arabia, or the patriarchs in Rif mountain villages, the chances they would ever see it were virtually nil. The film was shown only on a highbrow cultural program on Dutch TV. In this limited context, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was no Voltaire. For Voltaire had flung his insults at the Catholic Church, one of the two most powerful institutions of eighteenth-century France, while Ayaan risked offending only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe.

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.”