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[Ya-ta Boy]

�Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance� by Ian Buruma

�Fascinating�Ian Buruma�half-Dutch, half-British, and wholly cosmopolitan�has had the excellent idea of returning to his native Holland to explore the causes and implications of the murder on November 2, 2004, of Theo Van Gogh, a filmmaker and provocative critic of Muslim culture, by a twenty-six-year-old Moroccan Dutchman named Mohammed Bouyeri�Characteristically vivid and astute.� Timothy Garton Ash, The New York Times Book Review

Los Angeles Times Book Prizes winner

One section especially struck me and thought other people might be interested.

(p 120-123)
Bellari is another Moroccan success story. His parents are illiterate villagers from the Rif. Yet he has two university degrees, is active in politics, and practices psychiatry�

I was less interested in his politics than in his work as a psychiatrist. He had some specific data about immigrants that were, to say the least, arresting. The main problem among his patients, he said, were depression and schizophrenia: depression was especially common among women, and schizophrenia among men. But schizophrenia did not seem to affect first-generation immigrants. The guest workers tended to become depressed, not schizophrenic. It was the second generation of Moroccans, born and educated in the Netherlands, that suffered from schizophrenia. A young Moroccan male off the second generation was ten times more likely to be schizophrenic than a native Dutchman from a similar economic background.

There are several possible explanations for these startling figures. A sense of humiliation could be a factor, or the fact that immigrants tend to visit a psychiatrist only when things have come to a crisis. But Bellari has a theory about schizophrenia. He believes the problem lies in the adaptation of a strictly regulated society to a freer, more open one. This can lead to disintegration of the personality. The pressure to assimilate is one of the risk factors for schizophrenia. Men suffer more than women because they have more freedom to interact with mainstream Western society. When the process of integration goes too fast, when the son of Moroccan villagers throws himself too quickly into the bewildering maelstrom of Western temptations, his �cognitive wiring� can go badly awry. The desire for strict religious rules is a form of nostalgia, as it were, a way to regain the world of one�s parents, or what people think was the world of their parents. To remain sane, they long for the security of a paradise lost.

Girls, or young women, have the opposite problem. They have to live with many traditional constraints; the old order still exists for many of them, and so they long for more freedom. Bellari is a sophisticated man, and he worries about the consequences of religious extremism. Be he, like most Muslims I talked to, had little sympathy for Ayaan Hirsi Ali [the Somali woman who wrote the movie that got Van Gogh killed]. He thinks she has gone too far. �Look at her,� he says. �She�s a typical example of what I�m talking about. Having fought for her freedom, she goes berserk whenever she sees anything that smacks of the old ways that she grew up with.�

Too much freedom, then, would seem to be a bad thing. Muslims of the second or even third generation need religion �as a stabilizing factor. It will help people integrate better, make them more altruistic, keep them on the right path.� It is a strangely conservative view for a man who thinks of himself as a leftist. He is convinced that only properly organized religion will stop men from downloading extremism from the Internet.

The yearning for the safe strictures of tradition also explains, in his opinion, why Muslim men prefer to marry girls from Morocco. Muslim girls born in the Netherlands are too threatening. And that is why, according to Bellari, more and more Muslim girls will end up marrying non-Muslims.

He may be right, even though this doesn�t match the general impression that people have of Muslim women in the Netherlands. Perhaps because women in headscarves and veils, let alone burqas, are more conspicuous, it is women, more than men, who are the walking symbols of the kind of alien fundamentalism that many people fear. Yet the impression one gets of young Muslim women just from strolling around a Dutch city center is mixed and inconclusive: girls in headscarves and long dresses walk arm in arm with others in tank tops and jeans. It is as though religious attire is often worn as a fashion statement, or an assertion of difference, as much as a sign of devotion.


Another interesting bit (p 171): Dutch labor recruiters favored illiterate men, who would give less trouble to their new bosses.

[The_Eyeball_Kid]

Interesting stuff. Cheers.