Guus Bosman

I ordered this book from Amazon.com based on a review in The Economist. I'm really interested in the he relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and Western liberal values, and to get more insight in the background of the brutal murder on Theo van Gogh in November 2004.

The author, Ian Buruma, was born in the Netherlands but moved to the United States in the 1970s. He returned to the Netherlands for a few months right after this murder, and wrote a great book. It provides a reconstruction of the events leading to the murder and its aftermath. More importantly, Mr Buruma tries to answer the question what caused Mohammed Bouyeri to commit this act. Many famous Dutch people were interviewed for the book, including Ahmed Aboutaleb, Theodor Holman, Max Pam, Paul Scheffer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bart Jan Spruyt to mention a few of the names I recognized.

The book provides a very good exploration of the Dutch cultural and polical climate. Ultimately, Ian Buruma agrees with the analysis and approach advocated by Job Cohen and Geert Mak. Instead of provoking a pointless "clash of civilizations", there is immense benefit in allowing Islamic people to keep their own culture and let time and exposure to Western ideas do its work without the use of cultural force.

"Religion provides rules of behavior. It answers questions of moral right and wrong. It can offer people a sense of pride. The rules may be questionable and the answers open to challenge. But people should be free to work these issues out for themselves. An illiterate villager in the Rif mountains [Morocco] might not have been able to use this freedom. All he or she knew was village custom and the word of God. Educated Europeans [...] are better placed to make their own choices. In modern society, religious orthodoxy, though by definition closed to reasonable argument, is often a choice. And as such it should be accepted, as long as the choice is not foisted on others."

When the book was translated into Dutch, some of the people in the book disagreed with how they were described in the book, among them Mr. Bolkesteijn. When I was in the Netherlands in October 2006 I read an article about that in HP/De Tijd, but I must say I found the 'problems' that were reported about the book were very minor, and I they don't impact my over-all impression of the book: very, very well written, providing a clear and concise overview of the murder on Van Gogh and of the issues around integrating Islamic immigrants into a Western society.

I had never read anything by Mr. Buruma before, but I will look out for some of his other work, particularly his book Occidentalism, on how people other cultures view Western culture and values.