Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance

The fifth chapter of Murder in Amsterdam formally introduces Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Theo van Gogh’s partner on the controversial 2004 film Submission, to the reader. Considered an attractive and divisive woman, Ali was born in Somali and raised in West Africa, where she was subject to certain interpretations of Islamic law and cultural traditions, one specifically being the act of female circumcision. For much of her youth, Hirsi Ali lived without her father, who was a political opponent of the Somali warlord Mohammed Said Barre. In order to escape an arranged marriage, she applied for refugee status in Holland, changing “her name and her date of birth” (155). She also maintained that she “had arrived from Mogadishu” because the reason of not wanting to take part in an arrange marriage was “not an acceptable ground for asylum” (155). She became “a very bogus asylum seeker” (155), which would eventually lead to her status in the Netherlands being revoked following the murder of Theo van Gogh.

Hirsi Ali is a champion of women and a strong opponent of political Islam; however, even in her own community, she is a polarizing figure. She is hostile towards and carries a not-so-subtle disdain for immigrants, especially women who “just as the freedom of the West was in sight […] yearn[ed] for life in the cage [of Islam]. […] Instead of seeing their own culture and religion as the sources of their misery” (163-164). She believes that Islam is the problem, and she opposes the idea of multiculturalism espoused by many liberals because she believes they make it impossible to be critical of Islam without immediately being labeled a “racist” or an “Islamophobe” (168). What she loves most, having come “from a tribal world” (167), is how the idea of the Enlightenment “strips away culture, and leaves only the human individual” (168). Her film Submission speaks to this idea: “If you want to get a discussion going, and needle people into thinking, you must confront them with dilemmas. […] anything short of physical and verbal violence should be permissible” (177).

However, Buruma does not let Hirsi Ali speak without counterpoint. He also offers the reader the opinion of Afshin Ellian, an Iranian political dissident who fled the 1979 Iranian Revolution. After a brief time in Kabul, Afghanistan, Ellian settled in the Netherlands, where he works as a professor at the University of Leiden. He is a vocal opponent of Hirsi Ali, who feels that her politics is one of self-aggrandizement.

Buruma’s final interview of Chapter 5 is a Turkish-Dutch actress named Funda Müjde. Müjde helped take part in a performance of the Veiled Monologues, which had been designed to spark open discussion by Muslim women about sex and sexual mores, but which had, instead, played primarily to “middle-class non-Muslims” (173). She, like many women, both admires and disapproves of Hirsi Ali: “I’ve always resisted people who cut themselves off from their own kind and then behave arrogantly because they’re ashamed of their own background” (174). Her words highlight how the issues of integration, community, and culture are much more layered than many want to admit.