A compelling bit of reportage on a sensational case. If you take the story at its face, it's really quite well done. Ian Buruma tells the story well, mostly leaving his own opinions out-- which I was rather disappointed by, he's an admirable scholar, and I'd be curious about his opinions. But he makes some good points when he is editorializing, namely that a tolerant society is by no means necessarily a non-racist society, that Islamism bears more in common with more classically "Western" schools of thought than it may seem at first glance, and that anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and occidentalism share more commonalities than differences.

Reading this book was a mind-altering experience -- and not in a good way. I expect well written, intelligent books to help clear away confusion, but when it comes liberalism, Islam and tolerance, this one only added to mine.

Murder in Amsterdam was recommended to me by someone I respect (who told me that it was the "best book" he'd read "in a long time") but I didn't even realize it was a work of non-fiction until I ordered it -- much less know what it was about. What it IS about, specifically, is the stabbing death in Amsterdam in 2004 of Theo van Gogh -- film-maker and critic of Muslim immigration into Holland -- by a Moroccan Dutchman named Mohammed Bouyeri.

As a history of the issues, beliefs, laws, events, factions, and social and political undertows that led to the Theo van Gogh's murder, I found Murder in Amsterdam entirely satisfactory. It was also a rich exploration of the history of Dutch tolerance -- particularly since World War II, when, Buruma says (and this was something I hadn't known), many Dutch people felt that their country had not done anywhere near enough to protect its Jews from extermination. How widespread guilt over historical events led to a nearly no-strings-attached approach to immigration from Morocco, Turkey and other Arab countries, which then collided with Holland's almost mindless pride in its freedoms of speech and lifestyle, combined with the country's incapacity at any level to support or even begin to understand the mindsets of its newcomers, is a complex tale which Ian Buruma un/ravels with care, objectivity and intelligence.

The book is not reassuring on any level. It offers no guidance as to how Westerners (atheists, Christians, Jews) can co-exist with devout Muslims, or how we can even communicate with one another to forge any kind of global peace. Broadly speaking, we are two cultures, one of which takes a collective approach to life and death, the other an individualistic approach. The two approaches are simply not compatible.

As the death of Theo van Gogh and the recent events in Boston demonstrate, it is not the tolerant Muslims among us who want to harm, much less destroy, our western systems and institutions, but rather those who are unable to adapt to the alien, usually unwelcoming, totally self-focused milieu that comprises so much of the western world -- and of those, the tiny minority who turn to ultra-extreme and ultra-literal interpretations of ancient texts for solace and direction. Unfortunately, the behaviours of such extremists are so incomprehensible that they incite fear among many of us of all Muslims. That attitude leads in turn to the kind of prejudice that serves as a forge for even more extremism -- particularly among second-generation immigrants who cannot find work, acceptance or self-respect in their new countries.

I don't know the answers. I just know that we need to pay attention to the questions. And we need to make more effort to understand, rather than turning away from what we do not understand. Maybe reading this book will help that understanding, even as it undermines it.

bro was so off topic for so much of the book

Eight out of ten.

This book definitely wouldn't be considered as groundbreaking today as it was in 2005. But it's still a relatively well-rounded narrative of the tensions inherent in the interaction between (post)liberal Western societies and increasingly influential Islamic (as opposed to Muslim) populations.

Buruma's tone is sometimes a little paternalistic. (In one of the first chapters, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a "delicate African beauty" - wait, what?) But his journalistic experience shines through. He includes interviews with people from all corners of Dutch society, and his questions are perceptive. He retains a stolid impartiality, refusing to blame Islam for the death of Theo Van Gogh, or to blame people like Van Gogh for the phenomenon of Mohammed Bouyeri.

No breathtaking solutions to these tensions are proposed. Perhaps that's because there are none readily available.

As I've suggested above, this book feels slightly dated. However, its concerns are still relevant and I recommend it to anyone interested in immigration, Islam in the West, or postliberalism.

Really interesting analysis of the complexities of fundamentalisms, liberalisms, and xenophobias, through the lens of the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, with associated fascinating characters.

As an aside, this book reminded me how much I love the internet and access to information. The short film "Submission," a collaboration of van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is very much at the core of this book. I put the book down, looked it up on YouTube, watched all 11 minutes of it and then went back to reading with that context in my head. But it made me think back to my obscure film obsessions when I was in college - which involved walks to TBA or Kim's video or hanging out in the basement of Bobst library to get my film education. Kids these days have it so easy!

El hilo narrativo de la historia es difícil de seguir. El autor te intenta explicar el escenario que llevo a la muerte de Van Gouh y para ello va metiendo historias anexas sin ninguna relación (existe la relación de la religión; el autor entrevista a gente y él, desde su punto de privilegio de hombre blanco, opina sobre un tema que no le afecta). Es más, según lo que expone el autor, ¿me da pena el fallecimiento del hombre? Apenas. Se le ve como una persona irrespetuosa que está por encima del bien y del mal.

Ian Buruma is one of my favorite public intellectuals. In his career he has written on a number of subjects from Japanese history/culture to the fundamental problems of contemporary society. Expert scholarship, an engaging literary style, and a density of ideas distinguish his books. Recently he has written about the growing strain between the East and the West, often identified as a clash of Enlightenment values and the severe dogma of Islam (see Occidentalism). In his latest book, Murder In Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gough and the Limits of Tolerance, he travels back to his native Netherlands to analyze the situation between the historically liberal and open Dutch and the Muslim population that has largely failed to integrate into Dutch society. Much like several other European countries the Netherlands invited guest workers to come there to perform the jobs no one wanted to do, thus the settlers were often uneducated and were expected to return to their native countries. But instead many of them brought their families over and settled in insular communities that were connected to other Middle East countries and their home countries via satellite TV-hence the term “dish cities”. They weren’t expected to assimilate, because they weren’t expected to stay. Thus these communities became insular openly practicing the customs of their respective countries. The children are in an in between nether world since they cannot commit to their traditional culture nor do they feel comfortable in Dutch society. Sometimes this results in schizophrenia. It is this pressure of these two worlds that led the misguided Mohammed Bouyeri to shoot and stab the outspoken contrarian, filmmaker, public intellectual, critic of Islam, and distant relative of Vincent van Gough. There are a lot of issues analyzed in this text, and it would seem as though there are a complex set of issues compounding this problem that has the usual tolerant Dutch citizens up in arms about he Muslim situation. One that is exacerbated by the culture of pride and respect that is often represented in the women of Islam, who must remain pure and modest and obey the will of the family, by staying inside, hidden by scarves, and often married to strange men in another country via forced marriages. Van Gough was targeted for a film called Submissions that he made with Somali Muslim critic and feminist Ali Hirst that was considered blasphemous. One of the more eye-opening suggestions is that the paternalistic welfare state policies of Europe and the Netherlands in particular allow Muslims to live in these insulated societies, whereas in America they are forced to integrate into society since they are given limited aid and most join the work forced and integrate through daily interaction. A perfect example can be found in What Is The What where the Lost Boys all work and go to school in America, which keeps them in apposition of having to negotiate with mainstream American society. It is a fascinating and thought provoking book that uncovers layer after layer of gray. It is a more complex situation than most commenters would have you believe, and there are no easy answers to the question of how society should deal with this growing polarization of Muslim communities from the European governments they live in.

نسبت به کتابهای با ژانر پلیسی و جنایی جدید این کتاب اصلاً حرفی برا گفتن نداشت
یه دلیلش عدم ارتباط برقرار کردن با فضای بدون تلفن همراه و تجهیزات و وسایل جدید بود یه دلیل دیگه اش سرگرد شرمان بود که از یه آدم معمولی هم معمولی تر بود جز آخر داستان که یه چیزی در حدود بیست صفحه یه سری نیروهای خارق العاده از خودش نشون داد... خلاصه یه کتاب بسیار معمولی
خوندنشو توصیه نمیکنم

I believe this book was a very honest look into the complicated nature of a historically open minded and tolerant society in an age of rapidly changing demographics and shaky global politics. The only major issue I had with it was that Buruma seems to suffer from the same intellectual ailment that lots of non-muslim writers seem to develop when they discuss a muslim subject matter. These writers, many of whom have any strong particular ideological or religious ties, have a tendency to measure the muslims they discuss against some vague unarticulated ideal. This leads writers into qualifying the experiences of muslims as either good or bad, sympathetic or not, without expressing a genuine understanding of islamic norms or values except in how they contrast to accepted western ones. Overall still a very good read.

I wasn't expecting this book to be so wide-ranging and enjoyably thoughtful. As the title suggests, it centers around an infamous murder, but expands on this to discuss broader Dutch social and political history since the second world war, and especially the challenges of multiculturalism. As an immigrant to the Netherlands, it was an education into the country I have made my home these past few years.

Not writing a thick book, Ian Buruma still manages to provide a lot of information and reflections on those burning topics of our time, immigration and integration, multiculturalism and problems multiculturalism has ignored, religion and apostasy, paradigm and dissent. How to understand radicalisation. And so on. It's not a "simple questions, simple answers" kind of thing, but an inquiry into a murder case which became a symbol, stretching far beyond the Netherlands' borders. The book gives a specific Dutch context, but it's not that unique either. These questions are international. If you want to know more about the van Gogh murder and Ayan Hirsi Ali, you can read this book. If you want to take said murder as an example on a wider phenomenon, you can read this book. It's well-written, and contemplative rather than polemic.

"Buruma, who was born in the Netherlands in 1951 and has lived mostly abroad since 1975, is less interested in the details of the killing than in what followed: the ideologies vindicated or discredited, the prejudices revealed and the doubts cast on the workability of what only 10 years ago was considered Europe’s most easygoing society."

The murder in Amsterdam at the centre of Ian Buruma's book is that of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004 by the Dutch son of Moroccan immigrants, acting "out of faith" because he felt obliged to "cut off the heads of al those who insult Allah and his prophet" (in other words, the act of someone entirely deluded and misguided). Buruma offers an interesting account of what led up to the crime and the parties involved in what is one of the most striking examples to date of the clash of cultures being played out especially in western Europe, where what likes to consider itself a tolerant and open society has to deal with the children of the (often Islamic) immigrants that have settled there en masse in recent decades.

The provocative and often deliberately insulting filmmaker van Gogh is presented very much as a child of his times -- and his confrontational (if, in a sense, good-humoured) approach as something that was (more or less) understood and accepted in tolerant Holland. Meanwhile, his murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri, was a youth who for a time seemed to have some potential to become a productive member of society but instead became radicalized, embracing Islam, and coming to take it very, very seriously -- arguably because he could not find his place in Dutch society (although he seems always to have had what can be called anger management issues -- i.e. he was quick to react with violence).

Buruma offers a good portrait of Holland and the changing conditions there: long priding itself as a centre of the Enlightenment and a tolerant society, the close-knit Dutch world has nevertheless had trouble adapting to some of the recent rapid changes, specifically in integrating the large influx of foreigners. (In 1999 45 per cent of Amsterdam's population was "of foreign origin", and Buruma says projections suggest it will be 52 per cent in 2015 -- though he doesn't look at the demographics more closely, not making clear how 'foreign' that population really is (i.e. are these EU citizens, or those from beyond EU-borders, etc.).) Some ghettoization has occurred, and Buruma makes a good case that it is especially the displaced second-generation -- the children of the original, often poorly educated immigrants who were made to feel at home in neither their parents' culture, nor in Holland itself -- that have the most difficulty in finding a place for themselves (and hence in some cases act out in unacceptable ways). (Some of the evidence, however, requires more explanation, as when he repeats a psychiatrist's claim that: "A young Moroccan male of the second generation was ten times more likely to be schizophrenic than a native Dutchman from a similar economic background", a claim that at the very least requires a clear definition of what is meant by 'schizophrenic'.)

The appeal of the ultimate irrationality, religion, -- and especially Islam, which has so readily been abused for the most intolerant and outrageous actions in recent times -- to those who can not find a hold elsewhere comes as no surprise, but proves very dangerous in an open society. In each country the situation is a different one, both from the approach to those who choose to live there to the outside influences they bring with them: alone the Islamic immigrants in a variety of European countries -- say Britain (with the large South-East Asian contingent), France (Algerian), Germany (Turkish), and Holland -- each make for a very different immigrant community, and in each case the state's treatment of the foreigners (including how readily to allow them to become citizens) also varies widely. Buruma's book describes the special Dutch conditions and circumstances, and while it is illuminating -- even just in the questions it raises (offering, as it does, few answers) -- hardly allows for larger lessons that are applicable throughout Europe (much less America, where the immigrant-experience (and the immigrant-related issues) tend to be completely different ones).

Buruma offers an interesting account, and a lot of insight into the Dutch world, but ultimately the van Gogh case isn't all that revealing. The case is too clear-cut: no matter what van Gogh's provocation, the murder was beyond the pale, and though Buruma is able to trace the evolution of Mohammed Bouyeri to the point where he committed this act there's no excuse or even any real explanation for what he did. Bouyeri is a weak, pathetic thug who couldn't channel his personal failure any other way than to harm another human being. The Allah-excuse is a feeble one; Bouyeri's belief that his act was in some way the 'right' thing to do nothing more than a delusion. His acting out fortunately remains an extreme example and certainly there's an interest in keeping those from similar (or, indeed, any) circumstances from following down the same path, but given his unique circumstances it's not clear what the solutions might be.

Buruma suggests many of the reasons there is friction, problems, and the potential for disasters (such as the murder of Theo van Gogh), as well as the difficulties of remaining 'tolerant'. There are useful reminders of how intolerant parts of the Dutch model were until relatively recently: the separation by religion, or the fact that: "Until 1954, women in government jobs were automatically fired when they got married". Islamic fundamentalism poses a particular problem -- or at least is one which has garnered a lot of attention at the moment --, especially since it seems (at least in many of its currently popular manifestations) to be irreconcilable with European norms of tolerance. Still, given rapidly changing circumstances (economic, social, educational, and others) it's unclear what lessons can be leant -- or might be applicable -- from this even in just the near future.

An interesting social-historical account, but not entirely satisfying as a discussion of the issues.