SON OF AN IMAM ON THE LADDER

Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Moroccan-born son of an Imam, is the first Muslim immigrant to become a mayor of Rotterdam, a major Dutch city. His is the classic immigrant success story, the saga of a youth who landed in the Netherlands as a teenager, worked hard and climbed the social ladder, first as a journalist, then as a politician in free-wheeling Amsterdam. With ethnic minorities accounting for almost half its population, the city serves in many ways as a laboratory of demographic change for the rest of the Netherlands, and potentially other parts of Europe. As mayor, Aboutaleb must manoeuvre a cultural war pitting those who believe Dutch liberal, secular society to be under threat from a growing religious minority against others who say that Muslims and other immigrants have been unfairly made scapegoats.