Ayaan Hirsi Ali has called the prophet Muhammad a ”lecherous tyrant”, Islam a ”backward religion”, and the Qur’an ”in part a licence for oppression”. Theo van Gogh dubbed Muslims ”goat-fuckers”, a radical Islamic leader ”Allah’s pimp”, and Islam a ”retrograde and aggressive” faith.
Van Gogh (47), a filmmaker, columnist and TV interviewer, died in Amsterdam last week, slain by a suspect whom police described as an Islamic fundamentalist with terrorist ties.
”I feel terribly guilty,” Hirsi Ali told the media last week, adding that she was ”very much afraid” that Submission, an 11-minute film about Islamic violence against women that she wrote and the filmmaker produced, was the direct cause of his death.
Hirsi Ali (34) is an MP for the free-market VVD Party. The Somalian refugee who 12 years ago fled an arranged marriage and now calls herself an ”ex-Muslim”, has every reason to be distressed: the manner of Van Gogh’s death was brutal — and depressingly familiar.
The filmmaker was shot and stabbed several times as he rode on his bicycle to his office. His attacker was a 26-year-old man with joint Dutch and Moroccan nationality. Police found a letter on the body, but have yet to reveal its contents.
The Dutch Justice Minister, Piet Hein Donner, said last week that the suspect, captured after a shootout with police, ”acted out of radical Islamic fundamentalist convictions” and had contacts with a fundamentalist group that was under surveillance by the Dutch Secret Service.
The assassination has sparked fears of a rise in racial tension in a country whose population of 16-million includes about one million Muslims.
Recent opinion polls show the Dutch to be increasingly hostile towards immigrants and fearful of Muslim extremism. Islam, immigration and integration have shot to the top of the political agenda since the rise of Pim Fortuyn, the populist anti-immigrant politician who was shot dead in May 2002.
The centre-right Dutch government has only succeeded in fanning the flames by calling for greater integration of immigrants through language tests and citizenship classes, and recently fuelled even more controversy with plans to repatriate up to 26 000 failed asylum seekers.
In the midst of this tinderbox, insisting on their right to speak freely and with the support of many Dutch people, Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh scattered their sparks — a blistering critique of Islam — with disregard for the feelings they might be offending.
Hirsi Ali has had several fatwas issued against her and spends her life in the company of a brace of bodyguards; Van Gogh also received death threats but refused protection.
Their film was broadcast in August. It depicts, among other scenes, a young Muslim girl addressing Allah in a mosque. She wears a veil that covers her face, but her naked body is visible through a transparent gown.
”All praise to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds,” says the text that scrolls across the actress’s throat and down her breasts: the fatiha, or opening of the Qur’an. In another scene a woman’s bruised and beaten shoulders are covered with lines from verse 34, chapter 4 of the Qur’an. ”Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made them excel …” it reads. ”The good women are therefore obedient. Those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places, and beat them.”
The film was a potent, if provocative, interpretation of Hirsi Ali’s thesis. Brought up as a Muslim in Somalia, she suffered female circumcision at the age of five and, sent to Germany to meet her intended Somali partner in an arranged marriage, fled to The Netherlands in 1992. Penniless, she worked as a cleaner, in a factory and as a translator before studying political science at Leiden University.
In 2001 she wrote a report on ”honour killings” of Muslim women that also served as a savage indictment of Holland’s 30-year experiment with multiculturalism, describing it as a ”disastrous error” born of ”misplaced guilt”. The report embarrassed the Dutch Labour Party, which comissioned it, but the VVD — which has a ”boat is full” stance on immigration — welcomed her. She has sat in The Hague as an MP since January last year.
On talk shows and in newspaper columns, Hirsi Ali has denounced the ”cruelty and abuse” meted out to Muslim women living in Western societies.
Damning Islam as a ”backward, 12th-century religion”, a ”medieval, misogynist cult incapable of self-criticism and blind to modern science”, Ali says orthodox Muslim men routinely indulge in domestic violence against women, as well as incest and child abuse. To make matters worse, she says, their behaviour is hushed up.
The solution, Hirsi Ali argues, is for fundamentalist Islamic books to be banned, mullahs to be banished and for Western societies ”not to bend over backwards to accommodate a culture that advocates the degradation of women … but to ensure that the Muslim men who perpetrate such barbarity are brought to justice”.
The ”lapsed Muslim” last year found a partner in Van Gogh. Fired over the years by almost every Dutch newspaper and magazine for offending its readers, he wrote most recently for the daily freesheet Metro and ran his own highly popular website, De Gezonde Roker (The Healthy Smoker).
But in The Netherlands, he paid the price. Dutch commentators had no hesitation last week in saying that Holland had become a ”front-line state” in a collision between two cultures.
Sociologist Herman Vuisje, described Van Gogh’s murder as ”not a turning point, but the after-effect of a historical failure”. Academic Norbert Both said: ”The great dilemma, in confronting intolerance, is that you cannot reply with tolerance … If you do … you lose your own identity. Can we, despite the emotion, remain ourselves? That’s the question.” — Â