Today's Amsterdam is perhaps one of the most astonishing cities our much-experienced planet has ever seen. I have lived here for only two months, and during these two months there has not been a single day when I did not marvel at something.
My house is not far from the center, just about 15 minutes by a leisurely tram. Yet, stepping out of my entrance in the morning, I might encounter a real heron standing right on the sidewalk, tilting its long-beaked head and lazily examining me without a shadow of fear. Another time, a fat gray hare will dart past, a hedgehog will rustle through the grass, or two green parrots will circle around, one of which likes to land on my shoulder.
And yet, wandering along these streets imbued with some primeval calm, I do not doubt for a minute that the local police chief was telling the truth the other day when he stated that Amsterdam in recent years has become the crime capital of Europe, where the kings of the shadow economy from all over the continent flock for secret gatherings. I believe him, because in my district, the very one where herons stroll and hares dash about, the famous director Theo van Gogh was killed in broad daylight. He was killed brutally – shot at point-blank range, then his throat was cut. And after a shootout, the killer was caught in the park where I often walk with my child.
For a city and a country where almost all the prohibitions observed by most human societies have been lifted, where same-sex marriages are allowed, where prostitution is listed in the state register of professions, where drugs are freely sold, and so on, this event came as a shock. The Netherlands suddenly noticed that the main Amsterdam paradox is not in all of that at all. It is that among the believers here, Muslims have long and confidently predominated.
Mosques – as many as days in the year
Until a certain point, these mutually exclusive worlds – Christianity and Islam – simply did not intersect. Muslims traded greens and vegetables, went only to the store or the mosque, lived in their own "kishlaks", raised numerous children, and could not even greet anyone in Dutch. One could feel that there were many of them, but dealing with exact numbers was somehow not customary. I remember being struck by a figure in one of the local newspapers – it turned out that at the beginning of the last century, the local authorities in Amsterdam had officially registered one Muslim. At the beginning of this century, the picture is radically different – this is visible even to the naked eye.
There are large Muslim communities in The Hague, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. In Amsterdam itself, with its population of 600,000, 88,000, according to sociological surveys, profess Islam. Already now, one in four infants born in the Netherlands is born into a Muslim family. This means that in twenty years, among the generation of 18-year-olds, exactly half will be Muslim. A hijab is slowly but surely being put on the Netherlands...
Messiahs or devils?
It cannot be said that no one noticed this before Van Gogh's murder. But little was said about it. Acquaintances recalled only one elderly Dutch woman whose last words before death were: "We have as many mosques in this country as there are days in the year! Pinch me, I feel like I'm delirious!"
For the most part, Amsterdam was decadent, hookah in mouth, reveling in its tolerance and refusing to count hijabs on the streets. This was done by Theo van Gogh and his like-minded companion, former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who renounced her faith and, in unison with Van Gogh, shouted that "incest, violence, and abortion are the norm of life in many Muslim families" and that 60% of abortions in the Netherlands are performed by Muslim women.
The reason why this tiny, fragile woman decided to betray Allah lies in her past. As a child, a Koran teacher split her head open during a lesson, trying to drum something into her in that way. When Ayaan was a student studying in Berlin, her father planned to marry her off to a distant relative from Canada, a man her daughter had never seen in her life. Hirsi Ali responded by buying a ticket to Amsterdam and breaking forever with both her family and her faith. She adopted Dutch citizenship and even won a seat in the Dutch parliament for the Liberal Party.
As for Van Gogh, this genius of outrageousness, who had previously performed stunts like jogging in his underwear in front of the Royal Palace while cursing loudly at the queen, took on Islam in earnest. True, the role of this pair is not entirely clear. And it is hard to understand whether they brought more harm or benefit to the Netherlands. As a priest of one of the denominations very far from Islam told me in a private conversation: "Personally, I am not surprised by what happened. Theo van Gogh did everything to get himself killed. Rather, I am struck by the forbearance of the Muslims. They warned him so many times..."
By the way, the same priest noted another rather interesting and important thing, in my opinion. That Dutch society was blown up, perhaps not by Van Gogh's killers, but... by Van Gogh himself, because his offensive antics forced many young people born into Turkish or Moroccan families, but already on Dutch soil and often not even speaking the language of their ancestors, to start reading the Koran. Simply out of a sense of protest.
"But how did it happen that Islam became the dominant religion in the Netherlands?" I asked the holy father. "Very simply," he replied. "Because the church, both Catholic and Protestant, plays a very weak role in the lives of the Dutch. Other religions do not fight for their parishioners as fiercely as the Muslim one. I know many cases where the Dutch, who are generally mostly atheists in life, converted to Islam."
All this happens gradually... First they are given the Quran to read, and this reading captivates them. Perhaps if they were given the Bible, they would read the Bible. A person needs a core in life. It is no accident that 70% of residents of Western countries, seemingly so well-fed and prosperous, suffer from acute clinical depression. In the modern world, people have no ground under their feet, which faith gave their ancestors.”
How to tame an imam
Van Gogh is killed... His body covered with a sheet is still sometimes shown on video screens in trams. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who even before had never left home without bodyguards, has not appeared in a public place once since what happened to her friend, the filmmaker. Political discussions do not subside on television and in the press, the leitmotif of which is: “After this bloody massacre, the Netherlands will never be the same.” Mosques keep bursting into flames, pigs' heads are thrown at the homes of Muslims. So is this small European country, which for so many years amazed the world with its eccentricities and freethinking, on the threshold of a serious political cataclysm?
Many are saying this now. But one can say anything. The main question is what to do now? It is unlikely that the Netherlands, which even after Nord-Ost and Beslan condemned Russia for the war in Chechnya, will decide to open its own wounds with a surgical scalpel and at least deport illegal immigrants, whose number cannot be counted. And for a “velvet” revolution, there is, generally speaking, only one path. To tighten immigration measures and achieve the assimilation of Muslims who have already settled here.
The authorities, however, had tried to do something even before the murder of Theo van Gogh. For example, in March of last year, the Minister for Immigration and Naturalization, Hilbrand Nawijn, understanding what a huge role their priests, who interpret the Quran and explain how to live, play in the lives of the mostly illiterate Islamists, drew up an interesting bill. It stipulated that imams wishing to practice in the Netherlands would have to sit at school desks and take a course of lectures on tolerance for other religions, women and homosexuals, marijuana and euthanasia. At the end of this peculiar course, which was called a course on Dutch language and culture, imams were to take an exam. And only on such conditions would they be granted an entry visa.
Obviously, there is a sound kernel in this idea – it is no accident that the Netherlands' EU neighbors are thinking about something similar. Although, honestly speaking, I, for example, cannot imagine how one can “tame” the furious imam of the Amsterdam mosque al-Tawhid. The imam who, instead of sermons, inspires his parishioners by reading excerpts from the banned book “The Path of Muslims”, according to which, in particular, homosexuals (of whom there are far more here than there are days in the year, and therefore more than mosques) should be dealt with unambiguously. Namely – thrown from the roofs of houses and, if they survive, finished off with stones...