Hans Rustad Halvparten av innbyggerne i Nederlands fire største byer – Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Haag og Utrecht – består allerede av utlendinger, de fleste muslimer. Det er ikke noe å strides om. Det er et faktum. Hva slags fremtid blir det?
Spør forfatterinnen Margriet de Moor. Hun er optimist. Hun tror at den nederlandske toleransen vil befordre en islamsk reformasjon. Hun sammenligner med dikene som har holdt havet ute. Et perfekt stykke ingeniørkunst. Menneskene bruker sin oppfinnsomhet. Men nettopp dikene og havet er et bilde på hva som kan skje hvis det går galt. Det vil ramme alle.
Many people are extremely pessimistic about whether Islam is even capable of reforming itself. Christianity is founded on the New Testament with its precepts of love thy neighbour and of forgiveness – meant both literally and in a broader sense, in other words, not just to be applied to one’s own clan – and what is really an astounding assumption of the separation of church and state. Matthew 22, 15,22: «Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.» But just how broad-minded or absolute are the foundations of Islam, as it currently manifests itself all over the world, with its undeniable dogma of violence? And furthermore: how well known are the basic teachings of Islam to the dear faithful? In his time Luther thought it was absolutely essential that all believers should be able to read or hear the New Testament themselves. That was why he translated the Holy Book into German.
I do not need to spend much time here listing what the European, the non-Muslim and, perhaps in his or her heart of hearts, the Muslim European finds absolutely unacceptable about Islam. The average Dutch person tends to regard things like the Jihad, the introduction of Sharia law and the repression of women by men decreed by Allah as a farce, or after some reflection as an annoying consequence of the Arab colonisation of the Middle East with a militant form of Islam many centuries ago. There are two reasons why I think that a reform of Islam will take place in the West. The first is the flourishing of Islamic studies. Research into the sources, into the story of Muhammad as a historic figure and the doctrine of Islam is currently taking place independently of Islamic orthodoxy.
But a scholar living in our part of the world is less likely to be subjected to the fate undergone by the Sudanese politician, theologian and writer Mahmud Taha. Taha, who for sound, scholarly reasons proposed recognising only the Koran texts from Mohammed’s time in Mecca – and these are peaceful texts without the obligatory Jihad –, was executed in Khartoum prison in 1985 after being accused of having lost his faith.
The second reason for a possible Islamic reform here in the West is the social conditions that Fareed Zakaria has already talked about. Here I focus, once again, on the Netherlands, a country that is currently so interesting internationally. Every religion adapts itself to the everyday practices and conditions of the country in which it exists. That is inevitable. When I travelled through Uzbekistan with my daughter in late 1992, we stayed with a family in Samarkand where the father was a Muslim and the mother and eight-year-old daughter Orthodox Catholics. And when my Albanian publisher and his family took me on an expedition into the mountains I saw a similar, even more complex arrangement: again, the man was a Muslim and the woman an Orthodox Catholic, but the daughter was a Roman Catholic. Afterwards, of course, I thought a lot about these families’ easy- going attitude to religion. I suspect it was because of the Stalinist dictatorship in these countries that the individual religions, which were all illegal, were concerned with things other than the exact tenets of their religious doctrine.
Conditions in the Netherlands are the opposite of a dictatorship. This country is probably the freest, most liberal in the world, and one of the most prosperous to boot. I belong to the unrestrained generation, the generation that in 1960s protested passionately against almost all holders of power of that time. Since then this rebellious impetus has been thoroughly placated. During the 1970s and 1980s, which culminated in a mood of oblivious contentment at the turn of the century, the only movement to maintain a constant presence was feminism.
I know what fascinates and shocks our Muslim new arrivals. If I look at it through their eyes, I am shocked, too, by the banal, trivial attitude to sex in our contemporary society, which appears to be a kind of obsession, forced on people in a compulsive way, often in the service of aggressive commercial interests. Nevertheless, I can still imagine that some Muslima soon start to find this less shocking than their decorously covered heads might lead one to believe. They know, often better than we do, that in countries where females walk around completely covered up, like in Afghanistan or Pakistan, this express taboo seems to provoke men in an uncontrollable fashion.
How sex-obsessed is a culture that teaches a woman that she is basically a walking, sitting or reclining set of genitals? How over-aroused is a society in which men are expected to have no qualms about throwing themselves on any woman who happens to walk by, unless a powerful signal, in the form of a divinely ordained dress code, forbids them to do so? Our obsession may look different to theirs, but in fact they are just two sides of the same coin. The prediction that Islamic women will be the first to feel strangely at ease amid our European prosperity, with all the principles that go with it, does not seem illogical to me.
When I’m feeling optimistic I sometimes see the Netherlands, a small laconic country not inclined towards the large-scale or the theatrical, as a kind of laboratory on the edge of Europe. Now and then the mixture of dangerous, easily inflammable substances results in a little explosion, but basically the process of ordinary chemical reactions just continues. It is not only the world that is changing, the earth is changing as well. Of all the European countries, the Netherlands will be the most threatened when at some point in the near future, in weather conditions that are statistically probable, the stormy sea once again rises aggressively. My novel «Drowned» is set against the background of a natural disaster involving many dead which occurred in the south of the Netherlands half a century ago. A recurring sentence in the book is: «It could have been worse ….»
I am thinking of the novel 2084 still to be written. Historical developments often come about very abruptly. The question of whether the teaching of Mohammed can coexist peacefully with that of Jesus, the hero of the Gospels, will probably have been answered by then. But in the case of the Netherlands this question might well lose its importance in the face of a sudden dictatorship, and this time I don’t mean a political one. The storm tide barrier in the Oosterschelde, the defences along the coast and the dyke separating Northern Holland and Friesland are masterpieces of hydraulic engineering that have so far proven pretty reliable. They ensure that the inhabitants of the Netherlands can live below sea level.
All of them together.
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