Perhaps in part because of its reputation as the most liberal country in Europe (thanks to its legalisation of soft drugs and liberal attitudes towards sexual minorities) by the 1990s Holland was beginning to experience tensions with its fastest-growing minority group. During this period a number of politicians privately agreed that the increasing number of Muslims in the Netherlands presented problems too large for any one political party to address, that mass immigration and integration in Holland were not working, and that simply attacking those who raised concerns would no longer address the problem. Free expression was an early clash-point. On 5 October 1990 a Muslim religious leader said in a radio programme on a Dutch-subsidised radio station in Amsterdam, ‘Those who resist Islam, the order of Islam or oppose Allah and his prophet, you have permission to kill, hang, slaughter or banish, as it says in the Sharia.’

In 1991 the head of the Dutch Liberal Party (VVD), Frits Bolkestein, gave a speech and wrote a follow-up article in which he voiced what some other leaders from across the political spectrum were also beginning to worry about. Bolkestein noted that Islam is ‘not only a religion, it is a way of life. In this its vision runs counter to the liberal separation of church and state.’ He also highlighted the differences between Islamic attitudes towards women and that of Dutch law and custom. While recognising that the new populations in Holland were clearly not going to go anywhere, Bolkestein concluded that real, full integration into Dutch life was the only answer to the questions he was raising. But there was a final problem: ‘The problem is that we cannot afford to be wrong.’1 Both speech and article were greeted with huge amounts of criticism. Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers called the article ‘dangerous’ while another minister accused its author of being ‘insulting to the Muslim community’. One prominent opinion journalist claimed that it would ‘fan racist sentiments’.2

In a culture where ideas still matter, the sociologist Paul Schnabel’s 1998 book The Multicultural Illusion: A Plea for Adaptation and Assimilation brought many of these issues further into the acceptable mainstream; as in 2000 did the essay ‘The Multicultural Drama’ by the academic and Dutch Labour Party member Paul Scheffer.3 But the public and the politicians were still at a wild divergence. A survey carried out in 1998 discovered that already about half of Dutch people thought that ‘Western European and Muslim ways of life are irreconcilable.’4 The leadership of Bolkestein and others gave their country the advantage of going relatively early through the issues that every other Western country would stumble through in the decade ahead. Nevertheless among the political class there remained a serious reluctance to tackle the problem. In the end it took a popular pundit and professor from the political left to make this discussion normal.