Society: The man at the centre of this provocative book was not someone who fits our stereotype of a dull but righteous product of the Dutch middle class. Great-grand- nephew of the famous painter, Theo Van Gogh was a film director and self- publicist. He was heir to the Dutch provocateurs of the 1960s, the so-called "Provos", who goaded the political authority of the time with "happenings" designed to expose the intolerance of bourgeois society.
In 1981, his first film had a character shoot a gun into a woman's vagina and later stuff a couple of pet cats into the washing machine. The man whose violent death in 2004 provoked a national outpouring of grief, fear and anger was a shock-jock of egregious proportion. Even his memorial service was planned by him in advance and choreographed to offend, directing that two stuffed goats should stand on a theatre stage "ready for those who might feel the urge". Anyone tuned to the counterculture of the time would recognise the reference as insulting to Muslims.
Ian Buruma, now an academic at Bard College, New York, was himself born and raised in the same privileged environment as his charming fellow Dutchman.
"Van Gogh made a show of his unwashed, dishevelled, over-weight ugliness," according to Buruma. "The huge pink belly straining under old T-shirts, the nicotine-stained teeth, the nose picking, the scratching, the general disdain for personal hygiene."
Van Gogh lived by the simple creed that his citizenship gave him the right to insult anyone he liked - especially Jews, Muslims, Christians, whoever took his fancy. In November 2004, he met a man who didn't agree. Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Moroccan Dutchman shot him several times, cut his throat with a machete, scribbled an explanatory note on a piece of paper and pinned it to his victim's chest with a knife. The Netherlands, famed for the artistic genius which coursed through the blood of the dying film-maker, and revered for its cultural tolerance, had lost its innocence.
What are the limits of tolerance? Ian Buruma has given us a wonderfully readable and provocative investigation of the problem, weaving through it the stories of a small group of characters who are central to the murder.
There is Pim Fortuyn, the once- bearded sociologist who found his niche in populist politics, camp theatrics, and claiming to redeem civilisation as we know it from the "extremists who spit on our culture . . . don't even speak our language and walk around in funny dresses". In a kind of postmodern disconnect, Fortuyn was murdered by an animal rights activist on a bicycle, enraged by Fortuyn's personal excesses, not by his views on tolerance. Fortuyn was outrageous, ostentatious, abnormal. And that was a crime in a nation where, it is said, if you behave normally, you are already behaving madly enough.
If Fortuyn's death was banal in its purpose and execution, his funeral swept the country with un-Dutch emotion and elevated him to messianic level. He became the greatest Dutchman in history, according to a television poll. How was it possible for this gay fantasiser, "who talked openly of sexual adventures in bath-houses and backrooms, a show-off with the gaudy style of a showbiz impresario", as Buruma describes him - "how was it possible for such a man to become so popular in a country known for its Calvinist restraint, its bourgeois disdain for excesses, its phlegmatic preference for consensus and compromise?"
THE ANSWER MUST be that Fortuyn's death, and that of his great admirer, Theo Van Gogh, released a tension that had been building for years in the majority white, middle-class population and snapped their legendary tolerance for cultural and moral difference. A more direct campaign to save the soul of Holland was waged by the Somali-born immigrant, who lied to the Dutch authorities to gain asylum, became an MP and was later betrayed by a party colleague and forced to emigrate to the United States. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the clever, beautiful, brave woman who risked all to save the legendary tolerance of her adopted country from the enemy of Islamic fundamentalism. Buruma tells her story with evident admiration and sympathy for this uncompromising champion of Enlightenment values.
A Muslim herself, Hirsi Ali found in Holland the conditions of freedom and cultural tolerance which encouraged her rapidly to reassess the strict Islam of her upbringing and finally, as Buruma tells us, to see Islam no longer as the anchor but as the problem. There were shortcuts to the Enlightenment, she told him. "Young Muslim girls in the Netherlands, who still have a spark in their eyes, need not go through what I did."
The real enemy for Hirsi Ali - and here we come to the nub of Buruma's thesis - is not so much Islam but the betrayal of Enlightenment rights and values in the pursuit of cultural and moral tolerance. This is the great debate signalled by the subtitle of this stimulating book and set to rage throughout Europe for many years to come. In conditions of rapid migration and the challenge to traditional conceptions of identity which it entails, what are the limits of tolerance?
An author not known to be shy of expressing his opinions, Buruma's reluctance to answer his own and Hirsi Ali's question is the reader's loss. It's not so much Islam she blames as the wimpy relativism of the host country in defence of their Enlightenment heritage. "If you're critical of Islam," she says, "you're a racist, or an Islamophobe, or an Enlightenment fundamentalist."
Hirsi Ali is right to relate the question of tolerance to the philosophical doctrine of relativism, but not to buy into the populist dogmatism which reduces the problem of tolerance and its limits to a cultural and moral absolutism. If the moral absolutism of Islam is the problem, it is our western moral relativism which will emancipate it. It betrays the Enlightenment to meet their fundamentalism with ours.
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance By Ian Buruma Atlantic Books, 278pp. £12.99
Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin