CHAPTER ELEVEN

RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT: A DUTCH PERSPECTIVE1

1. The Dutch Enlightenment Debate: Fortuyn, Van Gogh, and Hirsi Ali

In many Western countries the Enlightenment has again become the subject of heated debate. Unfortunately, in the Netherlands the political rediscovery of the Enlightenment has remained largely restricted to right- wing liberals critical of Islam. Although there can be little doubt that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have accelerated the worldwide dispute regard- ing Western attitudes toward religiously inspired activism, the anxieties caused by the immigration of several million Muslims into Britain, France, Germany, the Low Countries and Scandinavia had restored the Enlight- enment to a prominent position in European public debate well before 2001. During the 1990s the broad consensus on the inevitability and desir- ability of a multi-cultural society had already come under attack in the Netherlands from the right as well as from some left-wing opinion mak- ers, particularly after the sociologist and one-time Marxist started claiming that politicians had completely ignored the cultural, that is, religious background of Muslim immigrants as a possible obstacle to their full integration.2 His main objection to Islam was perfectly straight- forward in that Fortuyn insisted it had never gone through an ‘Enlighten- ment’ such as ‘ours’.

1 See also my De Nederlandse Republiek. 2 Pim Fortuyn wrote a large number of books. The first in which he criticized Islam, in 1997, was entitled Tegen de Islamisering van onze cultuur, essentially a collection of col- umns. The most serious attempt so far to assess his legacy: Pels, De geest van Pim. Probably owing to the dark memory of the Second World War and the fate of the Dutch Jewish com- munity of some 110,000 people, which was largely destroyed, until the 1990s it had been a taboo to discuss the position of the immigrant work force and its cultural background. The growing realization that the stories told of the heroism displayed by the Dutch resis- tance were indeed more often than not just stories only added to the unwillingness to even discuss the rapidly growing presence of the Muslim minority in Dutch society. Just prior to Fortuyn only two public intellectuals had put the issue of multiculturalism on the agenda: the right-wing politician and future European commissioner Frits Bolkestein, and the left-wing publicist Paul Scheffer. For some of the backgrounds, see Buruma, in . 190 chapter eleven

Amidst alarming reports of a series of anti-semitic incidents and gay- bashing, both involving young Moroccans, Fortuyn’s star began to rise, though the large majority of Dutch intellectuals were hardly impressed by his populist Muslim-bashing or his complaints against what he liked to call the ‘left-wing Church’ with its reputation for political correctness. Shortly after gaining a resounding victory in the Rotterdam municipal elections on 6 May 2002, several days before the general election, Fortuyn was killed by one Volkert van der Graaf, no Muslim at all but an activist from the environmentalist movement. Even Fortuyn’s most ardent crit- ics were left in shock and his made headline news across the world as did the gruesome murder, on 2 November 2004, of Theo van Gogh by Mohammed Bouyeri, an Amsterdam Muslim whose parents were, indeed, from Morocco. Fortuyn and Van Gogh could hardly have been more different person- alities. Fortuyn, a former associate professor of sociology at the University of and extraordinary professor at the Erasmus University, was an overtly gay dandy who flaunted his wardrobe, butler, Italian ‘palazzo’ and his young Moroccan lovers. To his own amazement he suddenly found himself heading a populist, right-wing movement that soon after his death, however, collapsed disgracefully. Theo van Gogh, on the other hand, great-grandson to Vincent’s brother, a gifted film director, seemed to relish posing as a fat and sweaty chain-smoking drunk. The many quarrels he was involved in forced him to finance his movies with private means, which in turn necessitated him to embark on a profitable but undistin- guished career as a television presenter and newspaper columnist.3 Over the years, his columns grew increasingly critical of Islam, turning him into one of the most reviled public personalities in the eyes of the large Mus- lim community of the Netherlands. From the early 2000s, however, the Dutch personality most hated by the Muslim community has been Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee with an MA in political science who became a Liberal member of the Dutch parliament, and who has made it her mission to fight what according to her amounts to a systematic and worldwide suppression of women by

3 His first movie, entitled Luger (1981), with which he graduated from Art School, already caused a minor row on account of its ‘a-moral’ and ‘decadent’ obsession with violence. He seems to have modeled his public persona largely on the late German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Remarkably, soon after Van Gogh started writings columns, he was accused for many years both by the novelist Leon de Winter and by his fellow columnist Hugo Brandt Corstius of anti-semitism.