The shape of things to come?

The Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh had quite a send-off. As per the plans he drew up himself before his death, the memorial party organised by the Friends of Theo was adorned with a rock band, comedians, miniskirted cigarette girls, and female guests in twin-sets and pearls — something Van Gogh had found an erotic turn-on. A wooden coffin rotated on a platform surrounded by champagne bottles, and the room was scattered with ‘phallic cacti’.

On stage were two stuffed goats, supposedly there for anyone who felt the urge to have sex with one. This alluded, defiantly, to what had caused all the trouble in the first place. ‘Goat-f****r’ was Van Gogh’s preferred term for a Muslim. And not long previously, Van Gogh had been calmly shot off his bicycle in the street, and then all but decapitated, by a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan called Mohammed Bouyeri.

Bouyeri used a knife to attach an open letter to Van Gogh’s chest, addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the radical Somali-born politician with whom Van Gogh had made a film called Submission, featuring verses from the Koran projected onto the naked bodies of young women. Bouyeri’s letter denounced ‘Zionists’, ‘Crusaders’, the Jewish cabal that runs the Netherlands, and announced that Islam would prevail ‘through the blood of martyrs’. As he remarked to a passer-by while committing the murder, ‘Now you know what you people can expect in the future.’

Buruma returned to Holland on a magazine assignment after Van Gogh’s death. ‘There was something unhinged about the Netherlands in the winter of 2004, and I wanted to understand it better,’ he writes. Why, he wonders, is a place whose benign traditions of liberal negotiation, a place whose historical character has been, as he puts it, satisfait, seen an irruption of violence and irrationality. The cover image — a downed bicycle — is a wry little metonym.

This interesting short book is neither quite a work of history nor quite a polemical essay; rather, it’s a meandering, journalistic attempt to put these events in the context of Holland’s history, distinct intellectual traditions and political set-up.