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“The biggest problem I faced, right from the beginning, was that so few of the children spoke Dutch—there was nobody helping them learn the language, and no reason for them to want to learn it.” The next thing that struck him, as it does most people who visit, was the dense foliage of satellite dishes sprouting from the apartment balconies. This is what the Dutch call a “dish city,” an isolated urban island linked by television to the cultures of the Maghreb and the larger Arab world, with little connection to the Netherlands. Mohamed was shocked by the terrible quality of the state school and its teaching: Only the very worst teachers were willing to work out here, and this had led to a decline of education standards and the flight of the neighborhood’s non-migrant residents to outside schools. A third of young Moroccan-born men were high-school dropouts, unemployed and unemployable, prone to substance abuse and criminality. They clustered in the barren public squares and glades between buildings, making the neighborhood a source of fear. The crime rate was appalling. People felt trapped and alone: It was a long and frightening walk between buildings, never mind between Slotervaart and the larger city, and Mohamed was disturbed to find that the very shape of his neighborhood kept it out of contact with Dutch society. He was even more alarmed by the religious subcultures that this system had seemed to produce. Radical, ascetic, Saudi-style Islam, which had not been part of Moroccan village culture, had become widespread. When Dutch visitors came here, they looked at Slotervaart’s Arabs, with their diets of calves’ brains, their chador-wearing women, and strict piety, and assumed that this was a stubborn holdout of village life, a fixed and primitive alien culture superimposed on the city.

Mohamed knew otherwise. The cultural conservatism of Slotervaart was not rural Moroccan culture or urban Dutch culture; it was a new hybrid, a culture of arrival created by trapped people. “These are the problems when you have a system that forces people to live outside of it, to see the system only from the outside and never participate,” he told me as he tended to crowds of Arabic children at his school. “The people here live the contradictions between the two cultures, without being a member of either one. They are not welcome to the culture of their parents, and the school fails to do anything to make them part of the society around them. My students and their parents really wanted to be Dutch, but there was no way to be Dutch here; there was no contact with the Netherlands, so they invented this new culture. It was not good for them or anyone.” In the twenty-first century, this bitter isolation would rise to threaten the core of Dutch society and state.

The threat emerged from one of those young second-generation men whose aimlessness and isolation had so worried Mohamed Mallaouch. Born in Slotervaart in 1978 to rural-migrant parents, Mohammed Bouyeri left high school to find himself disconnected from the economy, alienated from parents whose marriage fell apart, lost in the echo chamber of Slotervaart’s internal obsessions. In 2003, still living in Slotervaart, he had turned to radical Islam, organizing a deeply fundamentalist group of self-proclaimed martyrs. On November 2, 2004, he took action, ambushing the filmmaker and provocateur Theo van Gogh, shooting him eight times, slashing his throat, and using a dagger to pin to his corpse a five-page manifesto calling for the death of several senior government figures. This eruption from Slotervaart transformed Dutch society and politics in a dark and lasting way, launching anti-immigrant and far-right political parties to high office and becoming the dominant issue in Dutch politics for many years. Mohamed Mallaouch watched in disapproval as his neighborhood became the most feared place in western Europe. His students were still falling into the traps that had captured