Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Parallel Lives

Frederick Douglass, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the flight to freedom

by Claudia Anderson - Weekly Standard

Seeing Europe for the first time, a young Somali woman was dazzled by its order and cleanliness and its ingenious efficiency. It was “like a movie.” Düsseldorf “looked like geometry class, or physics, where everything was in straight lines and had to be perfect and precise.”

The buses in Holland were “sleek and clean; their doors opened by themselves.” She was spooked by their “eerie punctuality.” Policemen were courteous and helpful, not ominous. Garbage collection was an elaborate minuet performed by citizens–”you had to put the garbage containers out at the proper time, in the proper way. Brown was for organic waste; green was for plastic; and newspapers were something else entirely, some other time”–and government, which, if you did your part, “came the next morning and whisked it all away for recycling.”

Her first weekend in the Netherlands, this newcomer, who had lived in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, stayed with the cousin of a friend. Her hostess walked her around the neighborhood.

All the houses were alike, and all the same color, laid out in rows like neat little cakes warm from the oven. They were all new homes with flouncy white lace curtains, and the grass in front was all green and mown evenly, to the same height, like a neat haircut. In Nairobi, except in the rich estates, colors were garish and houses were completely anarchic–a mansion, a half-built shanty hut, a vacant lot all jumbled together–so this, too, was new to me.

It was 1992, and this young woman, transiting Europe en route to Canada and a forced marriage to a distant cousin, had bolted to Holland almost on the spur of the moment after hearing of its lenient policies toward asylum seekers. Her wide-eyed wonder at her surroundings calls to mind a passage from a much earlier memoir in which a young man recounted his own experience of stepping into a new world.

In September 1838, a newly escaped slave walked the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts. A product of the plantations of Talbot County, Maryland, and the shipyards of Baltimore, this young man marveled at the display of wealth and industry, at the mighty ships and granite warehouses. He noticed, too, that

almost every body seemed to be at work, but noiselessly so, compared with what I had been accustomed to in Baltimore. There were no loud songs heard from those engaged in loading and unloading ships. I heard no deep oaths or horrid curses on the laborer. I saw no whipping of men; but all seemed to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand his work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness, which betokened the deep interest which he felt in what he was doing, as well as a sense of his own dignity as a man. To me this looked exceedingly strange.

Proceeding from the wharves to explore the town, he would remember,

Every thing looked clean, new, and beautiful. I saw few or no dilapidated houses, with poverty-stricken inmates; no half-naked children and bare-footed women, such as I had been accustomed to see in Hillsborough, Easton, St. Michael’s, and Baltimore. The people looked more able, stronger, healthier, and happier, than those of Maryland. I was for once made glad by a view of extreme wealth, without being saddened by seeing extreme poverty. But the most astonishing as well as the most interesting thing to me was the condition of the colored people, a great many of whom, like myself, had escaped thither as a refuge from the hunters of men. I found many, who had not been seven years out of their chains, living in finer houses, and evidently enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders in Maryland.

Born a little over 150 years apart, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (born 1969) both had the experience, on the threshold of adulthood–he was 20, she 22–of fleeing the culture they’d grown up in and entering another. For both, it was a run toward freedom. In each case, a short train ride and a name change to foil pursuers were the fateful turning points in a remarkable life they would recount in bestselling memoirs.

Both, growing up, were subjected to various forms of violence and family disruption, and frequently witnessed the degrading treatment of others. Both found in books intimations of a different way of life. Both claimed their inner freedom in a climactic act of self-assertion. For Douglass, this came several years before his escape, when, in a two-hour struggle, he fought off an attempt by the “Negro breaker” Edward Covey to tie him up and flog him. For Hirsi Ali, it came months after her flight, when she quietly faced down a council of ten Somali tribal elders who had found her in Holland and had come to return her to the fold.

Both were eventually thrust onto a wider stage when they spoke up extemporaneously in a public meeting. Gifted with intelligence and unusually handsome physique, each would become a sought-after speaker–he a leading abolitionist and one of the great orators of the 19th century, she an agitator for the rights of Muslim women in Europe and a sharp critic of Islam. Yet however prominent, both would long remain in physical danger–she in mortal danger–and would more than once cross the Atlantic in search of safety.

READING

Books, of course, were not supposed to play a part in the life of any slave. But the young Frederick Bailey–the name he carried until his escape from slavery–learned to read. Sent from the plantation to Baltimore when he was eight to live with relatives of his owner and look after their young son, he was welcomed by his new mistress, Sophia Auld, who had never before had a slave. She treated him kindly, read him Bible stories, and taught him hymns. When he asked her to teach him to read, she did. Proudly showing off Frederick’s accomplishment to her husband, she was smartly informed of the error of her ways.

In phrases that became a touchstone for Frederick, Hugh Auld explained to his wife that to teach a slave to read would “unfit him for slavery.” The formal lessons ended, but the child already had the rudiments. Over the ensuing years, unobserved in his loft above the kitchen, he practiced reading and taught himself to write, studying Webster’s speller and copying between the lines of his young charge’s old exercise notebooks from school.

When he was 12, with 50 cents saved from polishing shoes, Frederick bought a copy of one of the most widely used school anthologies of the day, The Columbian Orator, first published in 1797. This book became his entire curriculum. He studied it, he later recalled, every chance he got. It could hardly have been better designed to prepare him for his calling.

An anthology of speeches, poems, sermons, and dramatic excerpts from eminent authors and now-forgotten contemporaries, The Columbian Orator exposed Frederick to Socrates, Cicero, Milton, Sheridan, Franklin, Washington, Napoleon, William Pitt, and more. It was compiled by Caleb Bingham, a Boston abolitionist and pious Congregationalist, who interspersed among the selections numerous dialogues and short articles of his own devising, the whole intended, Bingham wrote, to “inspire the pupil with the ardour of eloquence, and the love of virtue.”

One of the first items to catch Frederick’s eye was Bingham’s “Dialogue Between a Master and Slave,” in which a master confronts a slave who has been caught making his second attempt to run away. With his answers, the slave exposes slavery as an institution resting purely on force: the coercion required to steal from a man the freedom for which his “soul pants” and to reduce him to a beast. If a theme can be said to arise from Bingham’s anthology it is the nobility of upholding above any other loyalty God’s wisdom and justice and the natural rights of men.

The young Frederick was just as deeply influenced by the Bible, which he said fueled his hunger for knowledge. Converted at 13, he found a spiritual mentor in an old black man named Lawson, who told the young man that God had great plans for him and would put his talents to use. They prayed and read scripture together, and Frederick “saw the world in a new light.” He wrote that he “loved all mankind–slaveholders not excepted; though I abhorred slavery more than ever.” He does not say when he owned his first Bible, but a hymnal was among the few possessions he carried with him on his train ride north.

Between them, The Columbian Orator and the Bible armed Frederick with fundamental principles contrary to slavery, as well as with models of reasoned argument, vivid narrative, and powerful use of rhetoric that would nourish his mind for years to come.

For Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it was not one book, but rather a kind of book–Western fiction, both high and low–that stirred her aspirations beyond the horizons of a typical Somali woman. At school, she read 1984, Huckleberry Finn, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Wuthering Heights, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Cry, the Beloved Country. She read Jane Austen and Charlotte Brönte and “Russian novels with their strange patronymics and snowy vistas.” And after hours, there were “the sexy books” that circulated among her school friends, by Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steel. Both the classics and the romances, as she tells in her memoir, exposed her to a world of “freedom, struggle, and adventure.” In these books, individuals wrestled with moral dilemmas, women were independent actors, mutual attraction preceded union, and the man and woman who chose each other often were shown achieving shared satisfaction in love and in partnership for life.

During these teenage years, Ayaan’s peers were dropping out of school one by one, to be married to men chosen by their fathers–sometimes men whom they had never met. The Somali girls, who had undergone the customary clitoral excision, described to her wedding nights that were scenes of fear and pain, as their new husbands forced open their scars. Somali women were taught that submission to their husbands, as to Allah, and unquestioning service to family and clan were their lot in life.

Ayaan, though, had observed some alternatives. An aunt became a nurse and rose to the post of director of the Mogadishu hospital where Ayaan was born. Her own mother left her first marriage, then met Ayaan’s father and married him for love. But the marriage soured. Her father, who had studied at Columbia University, had a modern outlook in some things. He insisted that his daughters go to high school, and it was against his express wish that their grandmother had them circumcised. Yet he took a second wife without so much as informing the first and, in due course, would force Ayaan to marry against her will.

For much of Ayaan’s childhood, her father was in prison for opposing the Somali dictatorship of Siad Barre. After he escaped (and a clansman who helped him was caught and executed), he was often in hiding or away organizing. Ayaan’s mother was embittered by her struggle to manage three children without their father, scraping by on handouts from the clan. The family fled from Somalia to Saudi Arabia when Ayaan was eight, and moved twice more, first to Ethiopia and then to Kenya, both countries where Muslims were a minority. Ayaan’s mother loathed living among non-Muslims. She became tyrannical and increasingly violent towards her children, frequently tying them up and beating them. Finally, Ayaan’s father stopped coming back and married the third of his eventual four wives.

Amid this familial and relational chaos, Ayaan was drawn to an Islamist teacher, Sister Aziza, who projected serenity and confidence. She took to wearing a headscarf and a loose black gown over her clothes. She read Muslim Brotherhood literature and joined an Islamic discussion group, admiring the universality of a faith open to people of every tribe. She knew young men who left for Egypt or Saudi Arabia to study the Koran and advance the cause of Islam against the godless West. But she was torn. She kept asking impertinent questions about the equality of the sexes. She was uneasy witnessing a book burning after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1989. What’s more, she had boyfriends in secret, and she kept devouring those novels that were a window on a world where women were as free as men.

SPEAKING UP

By his late teens, Frederick, after a stint as a fieldhand, was back in Baltimore, working as a caulker in the shipyards, though forced to turn over his wages to his master. A group of free black caulkers befriended him and let him join their debating club, the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society. He met a free black woman working as a domestic, Anna Murray, and courted her. And he plotted his escape.

For the getaway, he dressed as a sailor, in keeping with the identification papers he carried, obtained from a free seaman. He took the train to New York, where Anna joined him and they were married, before pushing on to New Bedford. The black man who took in the young couple there helped Frederick select a new last name, which they chose from the poem he happened to be reading, Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake.” The newly minted Douglasses found work, she as a household servant, he sawing wood, digging cellars, rolling oil casks on the wharves, and working in a candle factory and a brass foundry. They rented a two-room apartment and joined a small black Methodist church, where Douglass was soon teaching Sunday school and preaching. And they found something else: abolitionist agitation.

Within months of his escape, Douglass had become an avid reader of the Liberator, edited by William Lloyd Garrison, the leading abolitionist of the day. “I not only liked–I loved this paper, and its editor,” he wrote. He “never felt happier than when in an anti-slavery meeting” among his friends, and for his first vacation he decided to attend a large convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on the island of Nantucket.

Walking into Nantucket Town from the ferry, Douglass was spotted by a Quaker who had heard him speak in New Bedford. This man greeted him warmly and urged him, if he felt so moved, to speak up and share his experiences at the convention that night. Douglass did. Mastering his acute embarrassment at addressing a large, and mostly white, crowd for the first time, he electrified the audience. Garrison, clearly inspired, followed with a speech Douglass would remember as a “very tornado.” The young runaway was a sensation, and before the night was out an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society had persuaded him to sign up as a speaker with the society. The initial agreement was for three months, but Douglass would never again earn his living with his hands. His career as an orator “pleading the cause of [his] brethren” had begun.

It was August 1841, not three years after Douglass’s escape. By contrast, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s apprenticeship in Holland would last nine long years.

After her flight by train from Bonn to Amsterdam, Ayaan Hirsi Magan applied to stay in the Netherlands using her grandfather’s last name, Ali, and lying to the immigration service to establish the requisite fear of persecution (which would come back to haunt her). Within three weeks she was granted permanent residence. Refugee Aid gave her a secondhand bicycle and one Dutch lesson a week; a volunteer lent her the money for three more lessons. She worked as a cleaner at an orange juice factory and packed cookies at a biscuit factory.

And all the while, first informally, then as a certified employee of the state, she worked as an interpreter. Even before she knew Dutch, her knowledge of English enabled her to assist speakers of Somali, Arabic, Swahili, and Amharic. Over the next six years, she translated at refugee intake centers, women’s shelters, prisons, abortion clinics, police stations, and courts of law. Even as she was riding her bicycle between jobs and lessons, making new friends and soaking in Dutch ways, she was continually being exposed to the struggles and pathologies plaguing Holland’s rapidly growing population of Muslim immigrants. And the more she saw, the more intrigued she became by the contrast between orderly, generous Holland and the other countries she had known.

Slowly, an ambition formed in her mind: to go to university and study political science. “I wanted to understand why life in Holland was so different from life in Africa,” she would write. “Why there was so much peace, security, and wealth in Europe.”

What was wrong with us? Why should infidels have peace, and Muslims be killing each other, when we were the ones who worshipped the true God? If I studied political science, I thought, I would understand that.

She proceeded one step at a time. Once her Dutch was adequate, she took a two-year course in social work in order to obtain the propadeuse degree required for university admission. This introduced her to subjects like psychology, “a story with no religious roots,” and child development, with its novel idea that children needed explanations, not just blows. She was admitted to Leiden University and with energy and joy threw herself into the study of European history and political philosophy. She discovered empiricism and the beauty of rational argument and fell in love with the Enlightenment. She still thought of herself as a Muslim. Yet she had long since abandoned the head scarf, put on jeans, and moved in with a boyfriend. Half-consciously, she postponed the reckoning she knew would be needed to reconcile her new views with the old.

Hirsi Ali was awarded a master’s degree in political science in September 2000. She had just become a researcher on immigration issues for the Labor party’s think tank when 9/11 occurred. She was riveted by the commentary on the attacks and dismayed by the general unwillingness of the Dutch, especially in Labor party circles, to admit the role of religious belief in the motivations of Osama bin Laden and his ilk–”a little like analyzing Lenin and Stalin without looking at the works of Karl Marx.” She was confident “that a vast mass of Muslims would see the attacks as justified retaliation against the infidel enemies of Islam.” But she also felt personally challenged. Listening to bin Laden quoting the Koran in reruns of old interviews, she dreaded to ask herself: “Did the 9/11 attacks stem from true belief in true Islam? And if so, what did I think about Islam?”

That November, she attended a public debate on the subject “The West or Islam: Who Needs a Voltaire?” The first three speakers called for a new Voltaire in the West, a rational reformer to counter Western arrogance and neocolonialism and consumerist decadence. Only the last speaker, a refugee from Iran who taught law at Amsterdam University, spoke up for the “critical renewal” of Islam.

During the question and answer period, comment was heavily supportive of the first view. Finally Hirsi Ali raised her hand. Here is what she said as she recalled it in her 2007 memoir, Infidel:

Look at how many Voltaires the West has. Don’t deny us the right to have our Voltaire, too. Look at our women, and look at our countries. Look at how we are all fleeing and asking for refuge here, and how people are now flying planes into buildings in their madness. Allow us a Voltaire, because we are truly living in the Dark Ages.

Heads turned. Who was the well-spoken exotic beauty so passionately out of step with correct opinion? After the discussion, an editor of the newspaper that had sponsored the panel invited Hirsi Ali to write for his pages. The process of obtaining clearance from her think tank superiors for a piece critical of Islam was an education in itself, but the article ran. Letters poured in, and so did invitations to speak and write and participate in conferences. Each such opportunity forced Hirsi Ali to further define her position. There was no turning back. She was launched on the journey that would lead to her embrace of atheism in the spring of 2002, to death threats from Islamic extremists, and within 14 months to her election to the Dutch parliament.

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(h/t to my friend BK)