In August 2004, a short film was broadcast on Dutch television that dealt with the theme of violence against women in Islamic societies. The key scene showed four topless women in transparent clothing; their bodies had been covered with calligraphically inscribed verses from the Koran that legitimate the subjection of women. Working from a script written by Member of Parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh had created the tenminute movie Submission, a direct translation of the word Islam. Van Gogh had a long-established reputation for being a provocateur that included insulting the Jewish community and more recent references to Muslims as “the secret column of goat-fuckers.� He was fat, purposefully unkempt, antiauthoritarian, satirical, and immoderate in his language — in short, a personification of the Dutch cultural ethos since the 1970s. He had frequently been sued for libel and slander but managed to successfully defend himself under the rubric of freedom of speech. After the movie was released, both van Gogh and Hirsi Ali received death threats. Van Gogh was murdered in the early morning of November 2, 2004, in Amsterdam by Muhammad Bouyari, a young man of dual Dutch and Moroccan nationality who had grown up in the Netherlands. The murder of van Gogh triggered a nationwide panic. The minister of finance referred to a clash of civilizations, declared that there was a war going on between Islam and the West, and boasted that if extremist Muslims wanted war, they could get it. This seemed to give licence to those who wanted to put arson in the country’s mosques as immediately happened. There was fear of widespread reprisals against Muslims and their property, but the situation was brought under control by the more responsible elements among Dutch state authorities. The murder of van Gogh, though generally taken to be a sign of growing Islamic terrorism, also seemed to mark the end of an era of cultural transformation in the Netherlands.

These events did not fit the Netherlands’s global image and tourist brand as a wealthy, tolerant, and perhaps excessively liberal society. Discussions in Holland after van Gogh’s murder focused on the intolerance of Islam, the threat of Muslim extremism, and, perhaps most significantly, Muslims’ lack of humor. As many Dutch commentators remarked, Muslims simply could not take a joke; they took life and especially their religion too seriously. Much emphasis was placed on freedom of speech and artistic expression. The terms of the debate resembled those generated by Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, in which Muslim illiteracy in satire was identified as a sign of deep cultural backwardness. Nevertheless, Submission was not an especially funny film, and scriptwriter Hirsi Ali saw it as a quite serious political challenge to Islam’s sexual violence against women. Before the film was broadcast, the leading Dutch liberal newspaper had already described it as a “new provocation by Hirsi Ali.� Rather than the supposed lack of humor among Muslims, what needs to be explained is the aggression of the Dutch against a Muslim minority that forms some 7 percent of the Dutch population and is by and large a socially and culturally marginal group. Most discussions in the Netherlands, however, have been not about Dutch society and culture but about the nature of Islam and global terrorism. Van Gogh was indeed killed by a Muslim fanatic who made his religious motivations and desire for martyrdom explicit in a letter pinned to the breast of the murdered filmmaker. Islam is a global signifier of trouble and terrorism, and the Dutch follow the general tendency of explaining incidents like the murder of van Gogh within the framework of the rise of militant Islam. However, it is important to understand how these global images of Islam are appropriated and used in different arenas to interpret very different situations.