Murder in Amsterdam

Buruma argues that conservatives have "commandeered" the liberal values of the European Enlightenment to portray Islam and Western culture as "competing, hostile versions of absolute truth."[1]

Buruma argues that murderers like the young Muslim who killed Theo van Gogh are driven to action by the failure of Dutch society to recognize them as full members of Dutch society, their new homeland.[1]

He concluded with a vague hope that reason and civility will prevail.[2]

Christopher Caldwell wrote that Buruma is "less interested in the details of the killing than in what followed: the ideologies vindicated or discredited, the prejudices revealed and the doubts cast on the workability" of what Buruma regarded as Amsterdam's new, almost 50% immigrant society.[1][3] Buruma cited data showing that Amsterdam 1999, was 45 per cent foreign in 1999, and would be 52% foreign by 2015.[4]

The book is regarded as an early exploration of the process of Islamist radicalization and commitment to Jihad.[5] Buruma explores the steps by which in only a few months time, van Gogh's murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri, a young man born in the Netherlands and living a secular life, gave up Western clothing, donned a djellaba and prayer cap, stopped using alcohol and marijuana, grew a beard, stopped dating, cut all ties with old friends, and murdered a man, explaining in court that his Muslim faith required him “to chop off the head of anyone who insults Allah and the prophet.”[5]