Murder in Amsterdam (18 page)

Mohammed's quest for the truth might also have been affected by 9/11, but this event appears to have confused him more than anything else. He certainly didn't support the U.S. government, but he didn't condone the killing of innocent
civilians either. Violence, he told friends, was not the solution. On the other hand, he was open to the idea that it was the Jews who had staged the attacks. But this was hardly unusual. Many Muslims were receptive to that particular canard.

Mohammed was still active in neighborhood projects, organizing public debates, cooking lessons, and the like. He had plans to organize a new youth club in his old school. It would be called Mondriaans Doenia, or Mondrian's World. A photograph taken at this time, published in the neighborhood paper, shows a friendly young man stroking his sparse beard while smiling at the camera. His old habits—the beer drinking, the dope smoking, the chasing after Dutch girls—were gradually giving way to an increasingly moralistic outlook, especially after this latest plan, too, came to nothing. There were already enough other youth clubs, he was told. There wasn't enough money to build a new one.

Mohammed's interest in corporate information technology proved to be as fleeting as his interest in bookkeeping, so he changed once again, this time to something called social educational relief work. He received a scholarship for this new field of study, but soon got bored again. Fellow students noticed a peculiar priggishness about him. He threatened people who drank alcohol, for example. One student recalled that “he didn't seem to have any real friends at the
college, especially at the end, when he formed a separate little group with other people who are now in jail.”
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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.
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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.

T
here 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.

I
slam 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.”
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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.