AMSTERDAM — Nothing marks the spot on an unremarkable street in east Amsterdam where on Nov. 2, 2004, Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Moroccan Dutchman — saying he was acting to defend the name of Allah — shot dead, then slashed the throat of the Dutch filmmaker, television host and provocateur Theo van Gogh. Few events have been planned to mark the 10th anniversary, and many here are weary of the national soul searching the killing prompted. But the day is still seared in people’s minds.
In this tidy country of 17 million, which prides itself on tolerance, the murder opened a raw and polarizing debate. Was this a salvo in a larger war between radical Islam and the West? Or the act of one angry young man from a generation of young Dutch Muslims who feel shut out of the mainstream? What is the line between free speech and hate speech? Has self-censorship taken hold?
Ten years later, the debate is still raging. But in the cultural realm, which thrives on ambiguities, the picture is more complex. Books and at least one film have been inspired by the murder. A haunting 2005 portrait of Mr. Bouyeri by the Amsterdam artist Marlene Dumas has been prominently displayed in the Stedelijk Museum, without generating much controversy. And a new generation of Dutch Muslim actors, filmmakers, musicians, and politicians — including a coach on the local version of “The Voice,” the hip-hop artist Ali B — has been slowly claiming its place in the national conversation, far from the violence embraced by a deadly few.
In many ways, Mr. van Gogh’s murder is still a third rail here. As the 10th anniversary drew near, some actors, writers and prominent cultural figures shied away from discussing it. One said he worried that his remarks would contribute to the divisions he is trying to transcend. Another declined to comment for fear that he would be exploited by right-wing populists who came to prominence after the murder but are no longer in government. Some were concerned that even the slightest criticism of Mr. van Gogh, who was famous for insulting everyone, would be seen as an apology for his killer and invite attacks from “friends of Theo,” as his staunchest defenders are known.
“The polarization has become bigger and bigger and bigger,” Abdelkader Benali, a Moroccan-Dutch novelist, said on a drizzly recent morning, as he drove to the site of the killing, in front of what is now a hotel in a gentrifying neighborhood filled with halal butcher shops and hipster cafes. An unobtrusive, semiabstract memorial to Mr. van Gogh stands in a nearby park; it shows his face in multiple profiles, meant to convey a voice shouting, a reference to his insistence on free speech.
The murder “changed our way of thinking of who we are,” said Leontine Coelewij, the curator of a retrospective of Ms. Dumas’s work on view at the Stedelijk until January. “We always thought that things like this would never happen in the Netherlands,” she added. “It really was a turning point.”
Theodor Holman, a journalist and one of Mr. van Gogh’s best friends, takes a harsher view, arguing that fear of causing offense had stifled free speech here. “Tolerance,” he said, “has been transformed into cowardice.”
For years, in his writing and television appearances, Mr. van Gogh (a distant relative of the artist) loved to push buttons. He crudely insulted everyone respected in postwar multicultural Dutch society, including Jews and Muslims. But he also helped bring Muslim actors onto Dutch television, as in “Najib and Julia,” a Romeo and Juliet story that was broadcast in 2002.
Two years later, Dutch television broadcast “Submission, Part I,” a short film that Mr. van Gogh had made with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee turned Dutch politician, in which verses of the Quran were written on the bodies of naked women, to protest what they saw as their subservient status in Islam.
After “Submission” ran in prime time in August 2004, Mr. van Gogh refused the police protection that Ms. Hirsi Ali had been given following outcry over the film. “No one kills the village idiot,” he said then. His death, a direct result of the film, opened a tense season in Europe, one that became more fraught in 2005, when riots broke out around the world to protest a Danish newspaper’s publishing satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
After Mr. Bouyeri’s horrific act, all Muslim men here became suspect, said Mr. Benali, a self-described secular Muslim who moved to Rotterdam from Morocco as a child in the 1970s. “You are confronted on a daily basis with an amount of hatred,” he said. “If I say something that may sound apologetic for Muslims or Islamic practice, they hang me.” Mr. Benali’s latest novel, “Bad Boy,” is about a Moroccan Dutch kick boxer. “When I give readings, people ask me when I’m going back to my country,” he said.
It is to respond to that question — and to remarks by the populist politician Geert Wilders that the Netherlands wanted “fewer Moroccans,” remarks for which he is now on trial for inciting hate speech — that Abdelkarim el-Fassi, a television director, and the actors Nasrdin Dchar and Achmed Akkabi started a social media campaign calling on Dutch-born children of immigrants to take photographs of themselves holding their Dutch passports and post them online with the hashtag #bornhere.
Mr. Dchar, 35, made national news in 2011 when he won a Golden Calf, the Dutch equivalent of an Oscar, for his performance in “Rabat,” a road movie about three Moroccan Dutchmen who drive a taxi from the Netherlands to Morocco. In an acceptance speech that went viral, Mr. Dchar said, “I’m a Dutchman, I’m very proud of my Moroccan blood, I’m a Muslim and I have a Golden Calf in my hand,” adding an expletive for emphasis.
He is now on tour with “Oumi,” a monologue he wrote about his mother, in a double bill with a documentary by Mr. Fassi called “My Father, the Ex-Pat.” It features Mr. Fassi and one of his sisters accompanying their father on a visit back to Morocco. The title draws a distinction with “guest worker,” the more common description for men like his father who came to the Netherlands from Morocco in the 1960s to work as menial laborers.
“I think my project is an implicit response to the debate of the last 10 years, I cannot deny that,” said Mr. Fassi, who was 16 on Sept. 11 and has come of age in an era of anxiety about young Muslim men.
With the documentary, which he financed himself, he said he was trying to look beyond labels and urge young Dutch Muslims “to stand up for themselves,” to find dignity in their hyphenated identities, without rejecting Islam.
Ms. Hirsi Ali, who sought asylum in the Netherlands after fleeing an arranged marriage and who has lived in the United States for the past decade, remains controversial, enough that Brandeis University this year withdrew an invitation to give her an honorary degree, citing her criticism of Islam.
In a telephone interview, she contended that the fundamental issues raised by “Submission” — including the oppression of women in Islam — haven’t gone away. She said she wouldn’t rule out making a sequel.
“A ‘Submission, Part 2’ could use culture to provoke a debate that would make many Muslims very angry but it would put on the table some of those extremely painful questions about Islam that are now coming on the table because of, say, ISIS,” she said.
The van Gogh murder has been back in the news since last month, when the Dutch government said it would reopen its investigation, including what the Dutch secret service may have known about Mr. Bouyeri in advance. That is the subject of “2/11,” a new film by Mr. Holman, Mr. van Gogh’s friend, which posits a far-fetched theory that the C.I.A. was in a way responsible for the murder by pressuring the Dutch secret service not to arrest Mr. Bouyeri — whom Dutch authorities had been monitoring — to use him to get to a bigger fish with ties to Al Qaeda. The film was shown at the Amsterdam Film Museum last month and is being shown Sunday on national television.
Mr. Holman, who has also written a novel inspired by the murder, said he remains wary of airing his views in a column he writes in a leading Dutch newspaper. “I’m afraid, because a friend was killed,” he said. “He was slaughtered because of what he was saying.”
He was sitting in a cafe across from the Stedelijk Museum, where Ms. Dumas’s portrait of Mr. Bouyeri is on view. “I painted it as one would make a historical painting of a battle, in earlier times, to remind one of a tragic turning point in one’s history, not to glorify him,” the artist wrote in a statement provided by Ms. Coelewij, the curator.
Ms. Coelewij said that in 2006, Ms. Dumas and her gallery donated the portrait, which is called “The Neighbor” and does not include Mr. Bouyeri’s name, to the museum, which had showed it often without much fuss. It’s part of a larger series, which includes “The Pilgrim” a portrait of Osama bin Laden.
The impulse to get inside the minds of such men prompted the Dutch writer Leon de Winter to include Mr. Bouyeri — and Mr. van Gogh — as characters in “Acts of Kindness,” his best-selling 2012 novel, which imagines Mr. van Gogh as a guardian angel protecting children whose school has been the target of a terrorist attack.
Even though Mr. de Winter’s books about his Jewish roots made him the target of some of Mr. van Gogh’s most off-color and vicious attacks, he said he remains adamant that he wants to live in the kind of open society that lets people voice even the most offensive views. “I cannot deny to a certain degree I miss this guy,” Mr. de Winter said. “Whatever way you look at it, it’s a loss.”