Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch member of parliament who was born in Somalia, wrote the script for "Submission." A fatwa has been issued against her, and she must have bodyguards with her 24 hours a day. Undeterred, she vows to make more movies about the plight of Muslim women. She knows of what she writes, having suffered genital mutilation as a child at the hands of a grandmother following the dictates of her religion. "The intolerable cannot be tolerated," she says.
The murderer of Theo van Gogh targeted Ayaan Hirsi Ali with a death threat in the manifesto spiked to the filmmaker's body, but she doesn't consider the fatwa as directed only at her, "but against Holland, against the entire Western world. We are all targets. In the eyes of radical Muslims, any country in which Muslims can be criticized openly is an enemy of Islam."
She tells how the Moroccan neighborhoods of Amsterdam, where Van Gogh's murderer lived, is a closed community. Immigrant parents can't speak, read or write Dutch and know nothing of the larger community around them. They listen only to Arabic television spewing hatred against the West. In their schools, their children are taught that holy war against unbelievers is a noble way of life.
When I was recently in Berlin, Zafer Senocak, a popular poet and essayist who was born in Ankara in 1961 and has lived in Germany since 1970, spoke of the schizophrenia of Muslims like himself who live in secular societies where they daily confront the "irreconcilable contradictions between the Sex Pistols and the Koran." Muslims have been brought up in a religion that inhibits creative thinking, where tradition is handed down in the form of memorization and emulation: "This has created an ideology starved of creative energy, which is predestined to break out in violence and to set latent aggression in motion."
For devout Muslims, diversity is exhausting, and the male rituals that religious fanatics find in murder and mayhem present a dangerous and appealing alternative to forging identity with their new countries. "What is needed is not so much a dialogue between religions as between Muslims," Senocak wrote in an essay in Die Welt. "But where will this happen? And who will lead it?"
These are the urgent questions we're all asking, questions easier to ask than to answer, but questions demanding answers soon.