42 pages • 1 hour read
Ian BurumaMurder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Holy War in Amsterdam”
In the first chapter to Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma, a native son of the Netherlands who has been living outside of the country since 1975, tries to set the backstory to the murder of Theo van Gogh so that the reader can begin to understand the current political and social climate in the Netherlands as well as the reason for it. In a style that jumps around from recounting aspects of present-day life in the Netherlands to offering bits of important history about the people of Holland, Buruma trains his reader to understand that much of what they are going to encounter in this book is fragmented.
Known as place filled with “public figures preaching multicultural tolerance” (5), the Dutch have always taken pride in the fact that they are viewed as living “in the finest, freest, most progressive, most decent, most perfect evolved playground of multicultural utopianism” (11). Buruma goes on to describe how, for centuries, the Netherlands has been a place of refuge for those persecuted in other parts of Europe for either their religious or philosophical beliefs. This is particularly demonstrated in Amsterdam, which “has a long history of taking in foreigners” (18)—from the Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Spain, to Protestant Huguenots fleeing Catholic France, to the Moluccans fleeing persecution in the former Dutch colony of Indonesia.
Interspersed between references to Dutch tolerance, Buruma also reminds the reader of the Dutch experience during the German Occupation of the Second World War, when “71 percent of Jews in the Netherlands ended up in death camps” (19). This blight on the nation’s character continues to inform political discussions about immigration and the treatment of minorities, especially the Moroccan and Turkish guest workers who arrived in the Netherlands during the 1950s and 1060s. These refugees stayed on, ultimately bringing their families and creating “dish cities” (21)—immigrant enclaves throughout the Netherlands that have very little cultural affinities towards the greater Enlightenment principles upon which the modern state of the Netherlands has been found on.
Through all of Buruma’s quick Dutch history lesson looms the ghost of Theo van Gogh—the political Dutch filmmaker whose murder at the hands of Mohammed Bouyeri on November 2, 2004, serves as the impetus for Murder in Amsterdam. By the end of the first chapter, Buruma has laid out a series of threads that must be further examined if the reader is ever going to make sense of the series of contradictions that seemingly make up the psychology of modern Dutch society.
Chapter 1 Analysis
A nonfiction book that is more of a report and an exploration than a defense of a thesis, Ian Buruma begins Murder in Amsterdam by offering his reader as much background into Dutch political history and culture as possible so that they might better understand all that is to come. By using the figure of Theo van Gogh as the fulcrum around which the narrative pivots, Buruma grounds the book firmly in the ideas of the European Enlightenment, of which van Gogh was an ardent supporter. However, what could be seen as an oversimplification of a complex issue into two camps is complicated by the manner in which Buruma handles his subject. Van Gogh is not romanticized; he is presented, warts and all, as a provocative, opinionated, and irascible human being who most definitely was not loved by all, even those in his own circle. In showcasing the many facets of van Gogh, Buruma succeeds not only in humanizing someone who might otherwise be considered a martyr, he also humanizes the problem facing the modern-day Netherlands by bringing its debate out of the realm of theory and into the real world.
At the center of Murder in Amsterdam are two fundamental problems that need to be addressed, and which, in the wake of van Gogh’s murder, are more prevalent than ever. The first asks: “Is multiculturalism possible if two groups of people have completely antithetical foundational beliefs?” The second asks: “How can a society that values tolerance and acceptance also force a minority to confirm to its rules and regulations without being hypocritical?” These two problems form the heart of the discourse within Murder in Amsterdam, which considers not only the contemporary situation in the Netherlands, but also traces the historical events that have led to Amsterdam and the Netherlands as a whole as being seen as a liberal, progressive, and secular bastion in Western Europe.
