“Infidel”

About two years ago I read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir “Infidel” and was immensely moved by her story, especially the atrocities she went through in her childhood in Africa and the way she struggled to flee from an oppressive life. At that time, I could not imagine that anyone (except fanatic Muslims), let alone victims of the same oppression that she was, would not share her feelings and views. However, the reading of Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam sheds light on bigger and obscure components of this story, which clearly influenced some people to disapprove her behavior – even Islamic women. Like in Hirsi Ali’s story, Ian Buruma also identifies nuances in the main episode of the book – an episode that at face value could be described as a murder of a fierce critic of Islam, Theo van Gogh (Hirsi Ali’s friend), by a Muslim extremist, Mohammed Bouyeri. According to Buruma, although the common theme is immigration – involving two guests, Hirsi Ali and Bouyeri, and one host, Van Gogh – there is no single explanation for what happened. Instead, each of these three characters, he explains, was influenced by a blend of personal experiences and external forces. It was thus the clash between their diverse cultural values and personal identities that ended up leading to the tragic morning of November 2nd, 2004, the day of Van Gogh’s murder.

Theo van Gogh, for instance, was highly influenced by the political and cultural context he lived in. He was born and raised in the Netherlands, a country that jumped from a peaceful, racially homogenous society to an excessively open, multicultural home for immigrants, including Muslims. To understand this historical transformation, though, it is necessary to look sixty years back, when 71 percent of a...

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...learly that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Van Gogh and Bouyeri had indeed highly divergent understandings of several issues including the relation between Church and government and gender equality. Bouyeri, for instance, a Muslim immigrant unable to assimilate to a western, secular nation seemed to fail to identify either with his original or with his host culture. His fanaticism, therefore, was apparently more a remedy to his feeling of isolation than real identification. Ironically, the country that is supposed to host the most tolerant civilization of the entire world was home of a prime example of intolerance – Van Gogh’s murder. Clearly, the three characters’ clashing perceptions, added to the effects of globalization pointed out by Huntington (economic modernization and social change) made them – even if Bouyeri more visibly – fall into the “trap” of civilizations’ clash.