Murder in Amsterdam (14 page)

I couldn't contradict him. Perhaps he was right. I could not think of anywhere that looked more peaceful and secure than this pleasant provincial suburb in the center of the Netherlands. But even if he was wrong, and there was no real danger, the fact that they felt so intimidated by the threat of Muslim violence was a sad reflection of what one murder of a public figure could do. From the perspective of a modern European couple, connected to the world through television and the Internet, Lower Manhattan and Ede were no longer so very far apart, no farther at any rate than the events in Palestine or Iraq were from the Moroccans in dish city who got their news from Casablanca, Beirut, or Qatar.

Even though she had stopped wearing a headscarf, a bit guiltily, in order to conform, Ayaan was still a pious Muslim when she lived in Ede. Her “Dutch mother” had to be careful about her dietary restrictions, and Ayaan never touched alcohol. This was confided to me in the kitchen. When we were rejoined by Ayaan, she and her “Dutch parents” laughed about shared memories, but once or twice I noticed a certain awkwardness, perhaps about things better left unspoken.
Not everything about her experience in Ede had been positive. There was the painful matter of Ayaan's younger sister, Haweya, the rebel who had worn short skirts in Kenya, the clever one who took a secretarial course and then a job for the United Nations, against her mother's will. She, too, sought to escape from an unwanted marriage, and joined Ayaan in Ede.

Things went well at first. Haweya learned to speak fluent Dutch in less than two years. But it was as if a life of rebelliousness had taken too heavy a toll. After years of taking the lead, of being ahead of Ayaan in striking out for freedom and independence, she began to retreat even as Ayaan started to feel more at home in the West. Just as Ayaan was discarding her headscarf, Haweya began to wear one. Ayaan was making Dutch friends while her sister withdrew into herself, lying in bed, refusing to eat, watching television for hours. She would have fits of crying, and felt ashamed of having upset her mother. Islam was the way back home, to security, salvation, away from this cold, shallow country. Standing in the freezing cold one day, she turned to Ayaan and said: “Do you know why these people don't believe in hell? They're already living in it.”
⁴

It was terrible for Ayaan to see her sister turn out this way. Just as the freedom of the West was in sight, her sister started yearning for life in the cage. A similar disillusion came over
Ayaan when she worked in shelters for battered Muslim wives. Instead of seeing their own culture and religion as the sources of their misery, as Ayaan did, these women often embraced Islam as their only anchor in an otherwise hopeless existence.

When her sister finally returned to Kenya, after suffering a nervous breakdown, she was told to study the Koran, and sorcerers were brought in to exorcise her demons. When she had fits, she was beaten into submission. Paranoia set in, and she stopped eating. In 1998 she died. It was the most difficult moment in Ayaan's life. Her father told her it was the will of God. But this was becoming harder for her to accept. The knowledge that some women, perhaps many women, couldn't break their bonds, even under the most favorable circumstances, filled her with disappointment, but also with disgust—a disgust she was not always able to disguise when she met such women face to face.

7.

A
yaan only hinted at the guilt she felt when she discarded the chains that bound her to her own past: the scarf, the ban on alcohol, chastity, and dietary rules. Her
conversion from the Muslim faith to a flinty atheism did not take place at once. While studying political science at Leiden University, she lived with a Dutch boyfriend called Marco. The most important taboo had been broken. Their relationship ended, however. He was punctual and orderly, while Ayaan was, in her word, “unstructured.” Though increasingly doubtful, she was still a Muslim believer.

Marco was not a believer in any religion. When he gave her a copy of a book called
The Atheist Manifesto,
written by a Dutch philosophy professor named Herman Philipse, she refused to read it. Such a document had to be the devil's work, she thought. Four years later, when she was sharing rooms with a young Christian woman from Ede, she asked Marco to send her the manifesto again. This was one year after 9/11. Doubts in Ayaan's mind had provoked arguments with her roommate, who stuck to her faith. On holiday in Greece, Ayaan finally read the manifesto. It posed all the questions she had been asking herself. “I was ready for it now,” she wrote later. “I saw that God was a fiction and that submission to his will is surrendering to the will of the strongest.”
⁵

No longer an anchor (or chain) of security, Islam, for Ayaan, had become “
the
problem.” She wrote: “We must face the facts and give migrants what they lack in their own culture: individual dignity. Young Muslim girls in the Netherlands,
who still have a spark in their eyes, need not go through what I did.”

Holland is a small country. Herman Philipse and I had played in the same sandpit at a kindergarten in The Hague. I remembered him as a somewhat pompous child who spoke with great conviction even then. Tall and handsome, with a taste for bow ties and French phrases, he cuts a rather quaint figure, a kind of nineteenth-century gentleman, the sort of man who likes to personify the high European civilization of the French Enlightenment, equally at home in drawing rooms of The Hague and the high tables of Oxford, where he also teaches.

It was, in its way, a perfect match: the rebellious daughter of a Somali democrat, with the elegant bearing of an aristocrat, and the smooth Dutch professor of philosophy, who could hold forth most eloquently about all the values that she aspired to: Reason, Order, and Freedom—of conscience, speech, and enterprise. That they had a rather public love affair would not be worthy of mention were it not that intellectual, political, and sexual liberty were intimately linked in Ayaan's mind. Her encounter with Philipse's words and person offered her a membership in that self-appointed elite, the public defenders of the Enlightenment. Like all converts, she did not take her membership lightly. As did her comrade-in-arms, Afshin Ellian, she soon felt as though she were surrounded in her adopted land by men and women who had
fallen so deeply into the pit of moral decadence that they could never be counted on in the war against the forces of darkness.

8.

I
t was of the Enlightenment that she spoke when we first met in Paris, moving from café to café, infuriating her Dutch bodyguards. She began by admonishing me for having written in a magazine article about her harsh experiences, as though they explained anything about her views. Her arguments, she said, not without reason, had to be judged on their own merits. They were based on her reading of Karl Popper, she explained, and Spinoza, and Hayek, and Norbert Elias. She was in her element at the Café de Flore, basking in the early summer sunshine, watching the young men and women go by in their thin summer clothes, holding hands, kissing, and generally carrying on in pursuit of private pleasures. “Coming from a tribal world,” she said, “it was so good to read books about individuals as social beings.”

Islam was
the
problem, but there was hope, she believed, even for the women in Saudi Arabia, where they can't even drive cars. For there were “shortcuts” to the Enlightenment. It didn't have to take hundreds of years. All you needed to
do was “free yourself intellectually.” The great thing about the Enlightenment, she said, with a spark of almost religious fervor in her eyes, was that “it strips away culture, and leaves only the human individual.”

It takes courage for an African immigrant in Europe to say that, even if she is from a privileged class. For a man like Herman Philipse, secure of his rightful place at the high table of European civilization, it is easier to dismiss culture in this way, for there is much that he can take for granted. There is no need for shortcuts if you are educated to believe in universality and individualism; they are products of the civilization to which Philipse was born. Not that this idea of civilization is universally shared in the West. Ayaan's individualism made the social-democratic PVDA an odd party to choose as the platform for her political career. She was attracted to the Social Democrats because of their “social conscience,” but culture, for them, was all-important; the “identity” of immigrants in a multicultural society had to be protected, even encouraged. To Ayaan this was nothing less than a
trahison des clercs.

Her dream of liberation for the Muslims in the West is sabotaged, she believes, “by the Western cultural relativists with their anti-racism offices, who say: ‘If you're critical of Islam, you're a racist, or an Islamophobe, or an Enlightenment fundamentalist.' Or: ‘It's part of their culture, so you musn't take
it away.' This way, the cage will never be broken. Westerners who live off dispensing public welfare, or development aid, or representing minority interests, have made a satanic pact with Muslims who have an interest in preserving the cage.”
⁶

What makes Ayaan Hirsi Ali such a fascinating and controversial figure is her role in a European civil war that has raged, intellectually and sometimes bloodily, for many centuries, the war between collectivism and individualism, the ideal of universal rights and values versus the pull of the tribal soil, the Enlightenment versus the Counter-Enlightenment, spirit of faith versus enlightened self-interest, the hero versus the merchant. Hearing Ayaan talk reminded me sometimes of Margaret Thatcher: the same unyielding intelligence, the same impatience with those from a similar background who lack the wherewithal to “make it,” and the same fascination with America. When refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria fled to Britain in the late 1930s, the more conservative ones, who admired the dense network of English traditions, settled there, while the radicals usually moved on to the more rugged terrain of the U.S. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is clearly a radical.

“Ah, yes,” she said at the Café de Flore, when I asked her about America, “I feel at home in New York, where you see people of all colors. Some are so black they're almost blue. And there are a lot of people of color who do very well,
which simply confirms that there is nothing genetic about success.”

It was only to be expected, then, that Ayaan would leave the Social Democrats to join the free enterprise party, the VVD. Delighted to have a beautiful black critic of the welfare state and Muslim radicalism in a party that was, overall, very male and very white, she was welcomed as a walking Statue of Liberty. But this move alienated her even further from the progressives on the Left, who saw her now not just as an enemy of multiculturalism, but as a renegade as well. It gave rise to the common slur that Ayaan was the darling of middle-aged conservative white men—professors of Enlightenment philosophy, guardians of European values, advocates for the rights of Dutch “natives” who live in fear of the alien threat.

In fact, she was too radical for the VVD too. The leaders of this typical party of
regenten
hate nothing more than rocking the boat, and that is precisely what Ayaan was aiming to do. She was always more an activist than a politician, and the compromises and deals that are the bread and butter of politicians were not for her. Like Pim Fortuyn, or Van Gogh, she wanted to stir things up. Her real ambition was to be the Voltaire of Islam, to attack the faith,
écraser l'infame.
“What Muslim culture needs,” she wrote, are “books, soaps, poems, and songs that show what's what and mock the religious
rules….” What was needed, in her view, was a film like
Life of Brian,
the British spoof on Jesus Christ. What was needed was a movie about the prophet Mohammed, directed by an Arab Theo van Gogh.

8.

I
met Funda Müjde, the Turkish-Dutch actress, cabaret artiste, and newspaper columnist, at a café in Amsterdam-Noord, an old working-class district across the bay from the Central Station. Her father had worked there once, living in makeshift barracks for Turkish guest workers, named the Atatürk Camp. He arrived in the 1960s, in search of a better, more independent life, and education for his children. Before he received his work permit in Ankara, a doctor probed his mouth and anus, as though he were a workhorse. Dutch labor recruiters favored illiterate men, who would give less trouble to their new bosses.

Amsterdam-Noord is a district of modest family houses built in the 1920s for workers in the dockyards, now long since defunct. A plaque on one of the houses evokes the renewed hopes of those days, after the mass slaughter of World War I: “The sun of peace had been obscured. The
Czar was murdered, the Kaiser deposed. But here we build and work without pause….”

There is a large new mosque in the midst of the neat little row houses. Bearded men in djellabas stand around the entrance, or sit on benches, conversing in Berber. A few minutes' walk from the mosque is the shelter for abused women, run by Paul Scheerder, a Dutchman who converted to Islam after marrying his Moroccan wife. When I last saw him, he told me how difficult things had been after 9/11, and then again after the murder of Van Gogh, when Muslims were afraid of being spat at or insulted. Officials had become tougher and sometimes abusive, especially, he said, the bureaucrats who were from immigrant families themselves. It was they, the sons of Moroccan or Turkish workers, who deliberately refused to take their shoes off inside people's homes, who trampled over prayer mats, who made an old Egyptian take off his shirt to show his fresh operation scar to make sure he wasn't lying about going off on sick leave. They knew, better than any native Dutch person, all the subtle and not so subtle ways to humiliate a fearful
allochtoon.

Funda Müjde is a handsome woman with short black hair. Her speech and gestures are those of an Amsterdam actress, quick, slangy, a little theatrical, her words tumbling over one another, not always in the right order. In 2003, she took part in a traveling theater show entitled
Veiled Monologues.
Intimate experiences of Muslim women were retold onstage
by a cast of Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch actresses, experiences such as losing one's virginity or masturbation, not subjects that Muslim women are used to discussing in public. Ayaan once told me this was one of the most surprising things to her, when she first arrived in the West—the way women talked openly about their sex lives.