Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam on Tuesday. His attacker was a Dutch Moroccan who wore traditional Islamic clothing. After shooting van Gogh, he stabbed him repeatedly, slit his throat with a butcher knife, and left a note containing verses from the Qur'an on the body. Said Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende: "Nothing is known about the motive" of the killer.
Really? Eight weeks ago, van Gogh's film Submission aired on Dutch TV. The brainchild of an ex-Muslim member of the Dutch Parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Submission decried the mistreatment of Muslim women by featuring images of battered women wearing see-through robes that exposed their breasts, with verses from the Qur'an written on their bodies.
Van Gogh was a well-known gadfly; he had attacked Jewish and Christians with enough vehemence to elicit formal complaints. But after Submission came death threats. Van Gogh, in the eyes of many Dutch Muslims, had blasphemed Islam - an offense that brought the death penalty.
If the murder of van Gogh does indeed turn out to have been committed by a Muslim enraged at his "blasphemy," it has precedents. In 1947, Iranian lawyer Ahmad Kasravi was murdered by Islamic radicals after he had been accused of attacking Islam. Four years later, Iranian Prime Minister Haji-Ali Razmara was killed after Muslim clerics issued a fatwa calling for his death. In 1992, Egyptian writer Faraj Foda was murdered by Muslims enraged at his "apostasy" from Islam - another offense for which traditional Islamic law prescribes the death penalty. Foda's countryman, Nobel Prizewinning novelist Naguib Mahfouz, was stabbed in 1994 after accusations of blasphemy. Under Pakistan's blasphemy laws, many non-Muslims have been arrested, tortured, and sentenced to die on the slimmest of evidence. And of course, there is the Ayatollah Khomeini's notorious death fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
But for such things to happen in Iran and Egypt, two countries where Islamic radicalism is widespread, is one thing; to have a "blasphemer" gunned down on the streets of Amsterdam in broad daylight is another. Europe has for thirty years encouraged massive immigration from Muslim nations; Muslims now comprise five percent of Holland's population, and that number is growing rapidly. Yet it is still largely taboo in Europe - as in America - to raise any questions about how ready that population is to accept the parameters of secularism. When Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn tried to raise some of those questions in 2002, he was vilified as a racist - in line with the continuing tendency of the Western media to frame questions regarding Islam in racial terms, despite the fact that the totalitarian intransigence of the ideology of radical Islam is found among all races. And Fortuyn himself, of course, was himself ultimately murdered by a Dutch assailant who, according to The Guardian, "did it for Dutch Muslims."
The deaths of Fortuyn and van Gogh indicate that the costs of maintaining this taboo are growing. One prerequisite of the peaceful coexistence of ideologies in secular society is freedom of speech - particularly the freedom to question, to dissent, even to ridicule. Multiculturalism and secularism are on a collision course: if one group is able to demand that its tenets remain above criticism, it no longer coexists with the others as an equal, but has embarked on the path to hegemony.
It is long past due for such considerations to become part of the public debate in Western countries. To what extent are Muslim immigrants in Western countries willing to set aside Islamic strictures on questioning, criticizing, and leaving Islam?
After van Gogh was killed, thousands of people took to the streets of Amsterdam to pay him homage. Among them was a Muslim woman who stated: "I didn't really agree with van Gogh but he was a person who used his freedom of expression??¢â???¬ ¦. I decided that as a Muslim and a Moroccan I should take up my responsibility to show that we do not support this act."
But the traditional Muslim view that the penalty for blasphemy is death is alive and well. No one really knows how many Muslims in Europe and America hold the views of the Moroccan woman at the rally, and how many would side with van Gogh's killer.
If Western countries continue, out of ignorance, fear, or narrow self-interest, to refuse to find out, they will find themselves playing host to many more incidents like the bloody scene in Amsterdam. And the more likely it becomes that the killing of van Gogh will be the first of many.
