Enter van Gogh's accused killer. Bouyeri was a member of what's called the "one point five" generation: born in the Netherlands, but of Moroccan-born parents. A man like Bouyeri would never feel at home in Holland, supposes Mohamed Bibi of the Rotterdam immigrant-support organization PBR. Abandoning his studies, unable to find a job, craving identity, he would "seek calm in Islam," says Bibi. For all but an almost infinitesimal number of adherents, the religion would be a comfort and a guide, not a springboard to murder and terror. But Bibi believes Bouyeri's alienation from mainstream society may have been so profound as to render him choice fodder for recruiters who encouraged his radicalization.
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Accommodating Muslims who take their faith seriously will thus increasingly become the issue for Europe. Religion, especially religious fundamentalism of any stripe, does not fit easily into highly secularized, modern European society. Witness the French government's ban on Muslim headscarves (and any other "conspicuous" religious symbols) in state schools. Witness, too, Bavaria, which last week became the latest of four German states to ban Muslim schoolteachers from wearing headscarves. (Bavaria does not ban Christian or Jewish symbols.) Van Gogh's case, says Fuad Nahdi, the founding editor of Britain's QNews, "brings us back to Salman Rushdie and the question of what is the status of religion in a modern secular state."
