Andrew Hussey on Holland's struggles with multiculturalism

It is now more than a year since Ian Buruma published Murder in Amsterdam, his investigation into the killing of the film-maker Theo van Gogh. However, Buruma's devastating assault on the smugness and complacency of the Dutch political establishment is still creating shock waves in the literary world of Amsterdam. Essentially, Buruma's book is an account of what provoked Mohammed B, a Moroccan who was born and educated in Holland, to stab to death in broad daylight one of Holland's most notorious rabble-rousers. Buruma isolates the blinkered nature of "Enlightenment fundamentalists" - those on the left and right whose faith in the absolute integrity of Holland's secular, rational society ignores the sensitivities of immigrants who are unprepared for the brutal realities of the host culture.

This makes it all the more intriguing that one of the must-read books in Holland in recent months has argued just the opposite - much to the delight of "Enlightenment fundamentalists" everywhere. The book, Het Marokkanendrama (The Moroccan Drama), is a polemical essay by the young sociologist Fleur Jurgens (she's 35 years old). Most dramatically, Jurgens places the responsibility for criminality, and by extension Islamist violence, on the shoulders of the immigrant families themselves. Jurgens is being hailed as a kind of Dutch Oriana Fallaci - if not a Christopher Hitchens - for daring to say what everyone thinks, against the wishes of a self-flagellating consensus on the left that sees flaws in the western model of society but gives carte blanche to immigrants on the patronising grounds that they don't know any better.

Although Jurgens's argument is contentious, and possibly racist - for example, she isolates the fact that most Moroccan immigrants who come to the Netherlands are illiterate peasants from the Rif mountains - she does have a serious point to make about why Moroccan family structures often break down under the pressure of Dutch (and western) society.

Curiously enough, with this theme, Jurgens has found an echo in the literature of a recent generation of Moroccan novelists and film-makers who, working in Dutch, are often obsessed with these same issues. Most prominent among these is Abdelkader Benali, one of the children of the Rif who is also the award-winning author of works such as De langverwachte (The Long-Awaited) and Laat het morgen mooi weer zijn (May the Sun Shine Tomorrow). Benali is bored with being tagged as a "Muslim author" and insists that his work points out the obvious - that without work or structures, immigrants will turn to crime or the mosque, or both, to replace the familiar world that they have lost. This is also a central theme for other Dutch Moroccan writers of Benali's generation - such as Hafid Bouazza or Fouad Laroui. Most interestingly, these writers are being translated into French or Arabic in Casablanca and starting to form opinion back in Morocco about the grim realities of European exile.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website