Parallel Lives
Anderson, Claudia
Parallel Lives Frederick Douglass, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the flight to freedom BY CLAUDIA ANDERSON Seeing Europe for the fi rst time, a young Somali woman was dazzled by its order and...
...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...
...Who was the well-spoken exotic beauty so passionately out of step with correct opinion...
...When an Islamist fanatic murdered the fi lm’s director, Theo van Gogh, in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street, he stabbed into the corpse a letter warning that the next victim would be Hirsi Ali...
...She discovered empiricism and the beauty of rational argument and fell in love with the Enlightenment...
...I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery—as a means of concentrating public attention on the system, and deepening the horror of traffi cking in the souls and bodies of men...
...Yet the country of Oprah Winfrey, Condoleezza Rice, and Barack Obama has come far...
...The only black man in line, Douglass was barred entry...
...Douglass records that he was ushered straight into the bedroom, and the two old men were overcome with emotion...
...And the more she saw, the more intrigued she became by the contrast between orderly, generous Holland and the other countries she had known...
...Even his secondary interests—temperance, women’s rights—are traceable to that same source...
...Then on November 2, 2004, the danger level sharply rose...
...Slowly, an ambition formed in her mind: to go to university and study political science...
...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...
...I saw no whipping of men...
...The fi lm, which aired on television, showed verses of the Koran, such as one ordaining the physical chastisement of disobedient wives, written on women’s bodies...
...but all seemed to go smoothly on...
...exposure to scenes of sadistic cruelty...
...I am your fellow-man, but not your slave...
...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...
...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, fi rst published in 1797...
...Douglass was slower to recognize the value of American political institutions...
...She has placed herself outside any intra-Muslim discussion of renewal...
...His history vindicates Hirsi Ali’s conviction that individuals can sway events...
...Even today, our reality falls short of the ideal—as Douglass put it, “a solid nation, entirely delivered from all contradictions and social antagonisms, based upon loyalty, liberty, and equality...
...Hirsi Ali has chosen not to shield sensitivities, but to shock consciences—as Douglass did with his gripping memoirs...
...In doing so, he opened himself to greater danger of pursuit...
...After surprising neglect in the fi rst half of the 20th century, his papers are receiving due attention from scholars, and biographers have combed over his life...
...His three memoirs are in print, and some of his speeches are a click away on the Internet...
...If “human relations are better” in America, it is partly because, before our grandparents were born, Douglass and others risked all to remove an institution that was an absolute obstacle to sound human relations—and because in doing so they held onto their humanity...
...Both claimed their inner freedom in a climactic act of self-assertion...
...his mental suffering as a teenager from the knowledge that he was unfree for life—all these fl owed from one cause: slavery...
...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...
...He called the Constitution, when properly interpreted, “a Glorious Liberty Document”—Lincoln would call it the “great charter of liberty”—and demanded that it “be wielded on behalf of emancipation...
...If her outsider’s perspective equips Hirsi Ali to expose the abdication of judgment that is cultural relativism, it also heightens her gratitude for the opportunities opened up to her by life in the West...
...She was admitted to Leiden University and with energy and joy threw herself into the study of European history and political philosophy...
...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...
...Not only are the 77 years of his life complete, but we bring to them the perspective made possible by time...
...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...
...The people looked more able, stronger, healthier, and happier, than those of Maryland...
...How mild the danger to Douglass seems by comparison with the threats that have forced Ayaan Hirsi Ali to live with bodyguards and occasionally in hiding for over fi ve years...
...Forced to do the continual “reading and thinking” of journalism, as he put it, working week after week to respond to events and answer the arguments of his critics, he changed his mind...
...But after he struck out on his own as an editor, he reconsidered...
...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 they supported him, too, in his new ambition: to have a newspaper of his own...
...He “never felt happier than when in an anti-slavery meeting” among his friends, and for his fi rst vacation he decided to attend a large convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on the island of Nantucket...
...Each acknowledged ways he had wronged the other...
...his right hand was broken and never fully recovered...
...Yet he took a second wife without so much as informing the fi rst and, in due course, would force Ayaan to marry against her will...
...After he escaped (and a clansman who helped him was caught and executed), he was often in hiding or away organizing...
...Walking into Nantucket Town from the ferry, Douglass was spotted by a Quaker who had heard him speak in New Bedford...
...Both are notable less as original thinkers than as moralists and reformers...
...Heads turned...
...He studied it, he later recalled, every chance he got...
...They gave her much more...
...Proudly showing off Frederick’s accomplishment to her husband, she was smartly informed of the error of her ways...
...There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine, and there is nothing in my house which you might need for your comfort, which I would not readily grant...
...Notoriety, however, also handed her a megaphone...
...Twentynine years after writing this, Douglass was invited to return to Talbot County, Maryland, for the fi rst time since he had been a slave there...
...For Hirsi Ali, it came months after her fl ight, 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...
...There is a postscript that cannot be omitted...
...The buses in Holland were “sleek and clean...
...He belongs to history, and we are free to make of him what we will...
...Her own mother left her fi rst marriage, then met Ayaan’s father and married him for love...
...To me this looked exceedingly strange...
...hunger and cold and fi lth...
...The very morning of his fatal heart attack, he attended a women’s rights rally and was escorted to the podium by his old friend Susan B. Anthony...
...And if so, what did I think about Islam...
...The friends and supporters he discovered there raised ?150 to buy his freedom, laying to rest the fear of capture...
...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...
...In phrases that became a touchstone for Frederick, Hugh Auld explained to his wife that to teach a slave to read would “unfi t him for slavery...
...He chose as the epigraph to his second memoir, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), a quotation from Coleridge: By a principle essential to Christianity, a PERSON is eternally differenced from a thing...
...Indeed, I should esteem it a privilege to set you an example as to how mankind ought to treat each other...
...He insisted that his daughters go to high school, and it was against his express wish that their grandmother had them circumcised...
...In 1848, Douglass attended the seminal women’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls, 50 miles from his home in Rochester, and the North Star published its proceedings...
...you shall hear from me again unless you let me hear from you...
...Brown was for organic waste...
...In 1851, he broke with the American Anti-Slavery Society and embraced the Constitution as capable of being made consistent with “the noble purposes avowed in its preamble...
...When he asked her to teach him to read, she did...
...Her father, who had studied at Columbia University, had a modern outlook in some things...
...As a young runaway under the wing of the Garrisonians, he went along with their view that the Constitution was hopelessly compromised by slavery...
...He personally signed up 100 men in the fi rst six weeks—starting with his own sons Lewis and Charles—and his speech “Men of Color, to Arms...
...His life story, like hers, was in itself a creative accomplishment compelling to others...
...The young Frederick was just as deeply infl uenced by the Bible, which he said fueled his hunger for knowledge...
...In a gesture that Hirsi Ali will appreciate—she considers the date of her escape to freedom her “real birthday”— Frederick Douglass marked the tenth anniversary of his escape in a special way...
...Douglass’s rhetorical vigor was matched by an instinct for action...
...Both found in books intimations of a different way of life...
...Douglass moved his family to Washington after the Rochester fi re and held a succession of sinecures with the federal government...
...But she also felt personally challenged...
...People in the West swallow this sort of thing because they have learned not to examine the religions or cultures of minorities too critically, for fear of being called racist,” she wrote...
...Letters poured in, and so did invitations to speak and write and participate in conferences...
...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...
...Douglass was nearly killed in the melee...
...After her fl ight 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...
...Most important,” she writes, this couple took her in and showed her “openness and love...
...For the getaway, he dressed as a sailor, in keeping with the identifi cation papers he carried, obtained from a free seaman...
...Policemen were courteous and helpful, not ominous...
...Douglass did...
...To be sure, Douglass’s career was not all heroic...
...Fourteen years later, in one of the strangerthanfi ction episodes in his eventful life, Douglass sailed again for Liverpool to avoid arrest...
...She still thought of herself as a Muslim...
...no half-naked children and bare-footed women, such as I had been accustomed to see in Hillsborough, Easton, St...
...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...
...their doors opened by themselves...
...It is a country less tidy and orderly than Holland, with cruder manners, perhaps, though no less warm, and equally dedicated to the open society...
...Hirsi Ali has used it deliberately...
...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...
...A culture that encourages dating between young men and young women is not equal to a culture that fl ogs or stones a girl for falling in love...
...The Prophet Mohammed was held up as the preeminent moral example...
...They are no doubt partly the basis for Hirsi Ali’s most striking conclusion: that “life is better in the West because human relations are better...
...A group of free black caulkers befriended him and let him join their debating club, the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society...
...She did, and won...
...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...
...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...
...Yet in the decade of his death, there were over 1,000 lynchings...
...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...
...Douglass sailed in November, and on December 2, John Brown was hanged...
...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...
...In September 1838, a newly escaped slave walked the streets of New Bedford, Massachusetts...
...Douglass traced his commitment to temperance to his revulsion at the use of alcohol to keep slaves stupefi ed in their rare leisure, especially at Christmas, and so diverted from improving themselves or organizing against their masters...
...Michael’s, and Baltimore...
...Ayaan’s mother loathed living among non-Muslims...
...Douglass lived to see his chief goal realized: slavery abolished...
...Only the last speaker, a refugee from Iran who taught law at Amsterdam University, spoke up for the “critical renewal” of Islam...
...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...
...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...
...the black schools of the District of Columbia were shut in his honor...
...Both the classics and the romances, as she tells in her memoir, exposed her to a world of “freedom, struggle, and adventure...
...Her hostess walked her around the neighborhood...
...Hyde, and Cry, the Beloved Country...
...And he plotted his escape...
...I was for once made glad by a view of extreme wealth, without being saddened by seeing extreme poverty...
...She had just become a researcher on immigration issues for the Labor party’s think tank when 9/11 occurred...
...In his last job, as U.S...
...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...
...I found many, who had not been seven years out of their chains, living in fi ner houses, and evidently enjoying more of the comforts of life, than the average of slaveholders in Maryland...
...She was incommunicado for 75 days...
...During the question and answer period, comment was heavily supportive of the fi rst view...
...When she leapt continents and cultures, she leapt centuries as well...
...She kept asking impertinent questions about the equality of the sexes...
...Hirsi Ali calls herself a single-issue politician, and her issue is the rights of Muslim women...
...But Douglass’s story may reinforce Hirsi Ali in her willingness to take the long view...
...He wrote that he “loved all mankind—slaveholders not excepted...
...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...
...Human beings are equal, cultures are not,” she told a New York audience last year: A culture that celebrates femininity is not equal to a culture that trims the genitals of her girls...
...Her fi rst weekend in the Netherlands, this newcomer, who had lived in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, stayed with the cousin of a friend...
...She became tyrannical and increasingly violent towards her children, frequently tying them up and beating them...
...By October 2002, the threats were suffi ciently oppressive that she fl ew from the Netherlands to California for a few months to remove herself from the public eye...
...Ever since she began pointedly criticizing Islam in public, extremists have been promising to kill her...
...Ayaan, though, had observed some alternatives...
...Why, she asked, was it forbidden to rationally examine his life...
...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...
...But increasingly, he found his bona fi des challenged...
...Proceeding from the wharves to explore the town, he would remember, Every thing looked clean, new, and beautiful...
...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...
...What was wrong with us...
...Equal pay would be granted retroactively in 1864...
...They were all new homes with fl ouncy white lace curtains, and the grass in front was all green and mown evenly, to the same height, like a neat haircut...
...She treated him kindly, read him Bible stories, and taught him hymns...
...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...
...Even before she knew Dutch, her knowledge of English enabled her to assist speakers of Somali, Arabic, Swahili, and Amharic...
...Among the most memorable passages of Infi del are those where she expresses this gratitude to the many people who helped her, above all her “Dutch family...
...A culture where monogamy is an aspiration is not equal to a culture where a man can lawfully have four wives all at once...
...Just the year before, Brown had drafted a constitution for his imagined state while staying at Douglass’s house...
...He published in the North Star an open letter to his former owner, Thomas Auld, one of the slaveholders whose religious profession he deemed a travesty...
...Now, Hirsi Ali has come to America...
...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...
...And it was more...
...His method was to insist that black and white, created equal, already stood on common ground...
...Garrison, clearly inspired, followed with a speech Douglass would remember as a “very tornado...
...In 1850, in New York City, he was dragged off and beaten by a white gang for escorting two white women...
...Seeking to use the visual media to advance her cause, Hirsi Ali wrote the screenplay for a short art fi lm called Submission: Part I. She aimed to dramatize the bind in which pious Muslim women found themselves when they were abused, yet were called to submission by their faith...
...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...
...Ayaan’s mother was embittered by her struggle to manage three children without their father, scraping by on handouts from the clan...
...The same principles that caused him to abhor slavery also disposed him toward forbearance and charity...
...Within three weeks she was granted permanent residence...
...There were no loud songs heard from those engaged in loading and unloading ships...
...They had long wanted him to make contact with the vibrant antislavery movement in Britain, so in 1845, just as his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was appearing, he embarked for Liverpool...
...Both, growing up, were subjected to various forms of violence and family disruption, and frequently witnessed the Claudia Anderson is the managing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...One of the fi rst 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...
...And after hours, there were “the sexy books” that circulated among her school friends, by Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steele...
...Yet she had long since abandoned the head scarf, put on jeans, and moved in with a boyfriend...
...Most damning of all, Douglass had traveled to a clandestine meeting with Brown at a quarry on the edge of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, shortly before the Harper’s Ferry raid...
...She was confi dent “that a vast mass of Muslims would see the attacks as justifi ed retaliation against the infi del enemies of Islam...
...Each such opportunity forced Hirsi Ali to further defi ne her position...
...A strong believer in the power of individuals to infl uence the course of history, she has sought to use such power as has been given her to combat coercion and violence in the lives of Muslim women, and more generally to press for a critical reevaluation of Islam...
...Some have observed that in the decades after the Civil War— when the freedmen faced overwhelming diffi culties, and segregationist governments were coming to power in state after state, welcoming Jim Crow and tolerating new forms of violence against blacks—Douglass, distant from working men, concentrated not on combating these evils but on securing political equality...
...But the young Frederick Bailey—the name he carried until his escape from slavery—learned to read...
...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...
...Intended to touch off a slave rebellion and the founding of a free black state in the Appalachian mountains, the raid had ended in Brown’s capture and the capture or death of all 22 of his confederates...
...Both grappled with the meaning of human equality in difference, whether difference of race or difference of sex...
...Yet Douglass never really left the trenches...
...Douglass campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and from then on never wavered in his active support for the Republican party...
...It could hardly have been better designed to prepare him for his calling...
...Here is what she said as she recalled it in her 2007 memoir, Infi del: Look at how many Voltaires the West has...
...She read Muslim Brotherhood literature and joined an Islamic discussion group, admiring the universality of a faith open to people of every tribe...
...It fascinates them that I am not afraid to do so...
...She proceeded one step at a time...
...LIVING WITH DANGER All his long life as a free man, Frederick Douglass was subject to an endless succession of slights, humiliations, and exclusions...
...so that the idea of a HUMAN BEING, necessarily excludes the idea of PROPERTY IN THAT BEING...
...There was a public funeral in Washington...
...A year before he died, he delivered a great oration on the subject of lynching, then at its height, at the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, fi ve blocks from the White House...
...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...
...Half-consciously, she postponed the reckoning she knew would be needed to reconcile her new views with the old...
...Instead, closure took another form...
...At school, she read 1984, Huckleberry Finn, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Wuthering Heights, Dr...
...In particular, she pointed to the consummation of his marriage to Aisha, his favorite among his many wives and concubines, when he was 54 and she was 9. In Holland, she pleaded for public policies to protect females against forms of abuse, including genital mutilation, regarded as private family matters in the communities that practice them...
...I saw few or no dilapidated houses, with poverty-stricken inmates...
...As a child, Hirsi Ali was taught by her grandmother to recite her ancestry back 800 years and to defend at all costs the clan that controlled her destiny...
...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...
...A note from Douglass was found among his possessions...
...From his earliest writings, he excoriated the fraudulent religion of the outwardly pious, privately heartless masters he had known...
...Her rejection of Islam sealed her separation from her origins, even as death threats encumbered her with notoriety and bodyguards, and robbed her of the normal enjoyment of everyday life...
...So when he put his story into writing to reach a wider audience, he sought to enhance its credibility by revealing many particulars for the fi rst time...
...If those are imponderables, the cultural ground on which her family’s disintegration played out was patently a minefi eld—of tribalism dislocated by modernity, folk Islam, postcolonial misrule, civil war, and Islamist agitation...
...In 1865, after attending Lincoln’s second inauguration, he walked down to the Executive Mansion—as the White House was know in those days—and waited with the crowd for admission...
...Look at how we are all fl eeing and asking for refuge here, and how people are now fl ying planes into buildings in their madness...
...The offense, though, went deeper than cruelty...
...In surely the fi nest illustration of this, he early urged the necessity of black men’s participation in the struggle for their freedom...
...Now, another memorial service was held, before the family buried Douglass beside Annie and Anna...
...In the essays collected in The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (2006), she described the Islam she was taught...
...He was wanted in connection with John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859...
...I heard no deep oaths or horrid curses on the laborer...
...though I abhorred slavery more than ever...
...While they provided for their two children “a very structured life,” she says, they disciplined them without hitting and listened to their opinions...
...Blacks were mostly frozen out of politics, and their educational and economic advance was glacial, hindered on all sides...
...The formal lessons ended, but the child already had the rudiments...
...He met a free black woman working as a domestic, Anna Murray, and courted her...
...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...
...An expatriate three times over growing up, she put down roots in the friendly soil of Holland, where she lived and grew and assimilated for 14 years—only to exile herself again, with her open-ended move to the United States in the fall of 2006...
...More than two decades later, the house in Rochester, New York, where the Douglasses had raised their fi ve children and had lived for nearly 25 years, was burned to the ground...
...Yet she can be a provocateur at the margins...
...Again, Douglass was warmly received in Britain, though this second stay was briefer, cut short by word of the death of his 11-year-old daughter, Annie...
...He took the train to New York, where Anna joined him and they were married, before pushing on to New Bedford...
...It was “like a movie...
...They were the fi rst husband and wife she ever saw consulting each other and helping each other with chores...
...She was spooked by their “eerie punctuality...
...Finally, Ayaan’s father stopped coming back and married the third of his eventual four wives...
...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...
...They prayed and read scripture together, and Frederick “saw the world in a new light...
...By the time he reached home in April 1860, the threat of charges against him had dissipated...
...Later Douglass went to Washington to press Lincoln to push through equal pay for black recruits and equal chance for promotion...
...minister to Haiti, his biographer William S. McFeely suggests, Douglass may have allowed his partiality for a nation born of a successful slave revolt to blind him to atrocities committed by a black tyrant...
...That November, she attended a public debate on the subject “The West or Islam: Who Needs a Voltaire...
...The multiculturalism that guided Dutch policy in the 1990s sprang from a desire to respect difference, but in practice it meant tolerance for what, if undertaken by native Dutchmen, would be crimes...
...A generation and more would pass before the tempo of progress picked up, after World War II, with the Civil Rights revolution...
...But she was torn...
...And twice, danger caused Douglass to seek safety abroad...
...At once, security agents of the Dutch government sequestered her at a succession of undisclosed locations— the most surreal, a forlorn motel on the outskirts of Portland, Maine...
...They “conversed freely about the past” and parted reconciled...
...She took to wearing a headscarf and a loose black gown over her clothes...
...The only one of the convention’s resolutions that was controversial—women’s suffrage, still a radical idea—passed by a narrow margin thanks to the leadership of Frederick Douglass...
...There was the conviction, for instance, that non-Muslims were “antisocial, impure, barbaric, not circumcised, immoral, unscrupulous, and above all, obscene...
...The new parliament was seated on January 30, 2003...
...In the end, 180,000 black soldiers served—immeasurably strengthening the case for full black citizenship after the war...
...She read Jane Austen and Charlotte Br?nte and “Russian novels with their strange patronymics and snowy vistas...
...There is no comparable single source of trouble in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s early life...
...Both were eventually thrust onto a wider stage when they spoke up extemporaneously in a public meeting...
...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...
...He scandalized many when, after the death of Anna, his wife of 44 years, he married a woman who was white...
...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...
...Then his widow and children took his body, by train, to Rochester...
...All the houses were alike, and all the same color, laid out in rows like neat little cakes warm from the oven...
...This book became his entire curriculum...
...His career as an orator “pleading the cause of [his] brethren” had begun...
...Thomas Auld, over 80 and dying, heard of his presence in the neighborhood and sent for him...
...No one knows what lies ahead 50 or 100 years hence for the Muslim communities of Europe—whether Islamist convulsions, increasing assimilation and secularization, a comfortable pluralism with rights mutually respected, or, as some fear and others intend, Eurabia...
...Parallel Lives Frederick Douglass, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the flight to freedom BY CLAUDIA ANDERSON Seeing Europe for the fi rst time, a young Somali woman was dazzled by its order and cleanliness and its ingenious effi ciency...
...READING Books, of course, were not supposed to play a part in the life of any slave...
...That Douglass had tried strenuously to dissuade Brown from a suicidal venture did not deter the governor of Virginia from pursuing him for “inciting servile insurrection...
...Douglass’s religious views evolved in a liberal direction in the course of his life, but he never lost the basic orientation he adopted at 13...
...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...
...D?sseldorf “looked like geometry class, or physics, where everything was in straight lines and had to be perfect and precise...
...The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were added to the Constitution, but the equal citizenship they promised did not ensue...
...His 21-month speaking tour of the British Isles was a blessed reprieve from danger and discrimination...
...His relationship with his hearers was straightforward: He was an American addressing (mostly) Americans, in his native language, appealing to his audience on the basis of religious and political principles the majority already claimed to share...
...green was for plastic...
...Refugee Aid gave her a secondhand bicycle and one Dutch lesson a week...
...THE OUTSIDER All the physical and spiritual ills that scarred Douglass’s formative years—ignorance of his (white) father and almost total deprivation of his mother...
...Don’t deny us the right to have our Voltaire, too...
...From childhood, Douglass saw that slavery was wrong and that it was incompatible with true Christianity...
...Hirsi Ali was awarded a master’s degree in political science in September 2000...
...The initial agreement was for three months, but Douglass would never again earn his living with his hands...
...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 fl og him...
...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...
...degrading treatment of others...
...Johanna became “like a mother” to Hirsi Ali, teaching her to be Dutch—how to economize and look people in the eye and deal with problems squarely...
...His interest in women’s rights grew naturally out of his alliance with women abolitionists...
...She worked as a cleaner at an orange juice factory and packed cookies at a biscuit factory...
...In tolerant New Bedford in 1838 with its integrated schools, the white caulkers in the shipyard where he sought employment refused to work with a black man, and so Douglass took unskilled jobs at half the pay...
...And it may encourage her in another way...
...Look at our women, and look at our countries...
...A MAN IN FULL Frederick Douglass has been dead for over a century...
...For both, it was a run toward freedom...
...The motto he chose for his newspaper, the North Star, was: “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is Father to us all, and we are all Brethren...
...Who can trace all the reasons a family falls apart, or explain why it is cursed with a woe like the mental breakdown and early death of Hirsi Ali’s sister...
...He does not say when he owned his fi rst Bible, but a hymnal was among the few possessions he carried with him on his train ride north...
...For much of Ayaan’s childhood, her father was in prison for opposing the Somali dictatorship of Siad Barre...
...At the time of his death, he was planning to retire to a house on the Chesapeake Bay, with a view across the water to the Eastern Shore where he was born...
...Responding to a notice on a church bulletin board, a young couple named Johanna and Maarten volunteered to give Hirsi Ali an hour of conversation a week when she’d been in Holland just a year...
...When in 1863 the government fi nally permitted blacks to enlist in the Union army, Douglass called it a “golden opportunity” and instantly threw himself into recruiting for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry...
...He and his wife expected to go to a meeting at a black church in Anacostia that night...
...A culture that holds the door open to her women is not equal to one that confi nes them behind walls and veils...
...Jekyll and Mr...
...By addressing Western audiences—giving her European and American readers and hearers an insider’s view of Islam, coupled with her unsparing indictment of it—she can not only inform the ignorant but also prod Islam’s apologists to respond...
...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 fl eeing the culture they’d grown up in and entering another...
...As an apostate, she cannot command a Muslim audience...
...a volunteer lent her the money for three more lessons...
...And all the while, fi rst informally, then as a certifi ed employee of the state, she worked as an interpreter...
...Why should infi dels have peace, and Muslims be killing each other, when we were the ones who worshipped the true God...
...There was no turning back...
...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...
...Mastering his acute embarrassment at addressing a large, and mostly white, crowd for the fi rst time, he electrifi ed the audience...
...Amid this familial and relational chaos, Ayaan was drawn to an Islamist teacher, Sister Aziza, who projected serenity and confi dence...
...Not least, Hirsi Ali has used her platform to challenge Westerners about their own inconsistencies...
...An aunt became a nurse and rose to the post of director of the Mogadishu hospital where Ayaan was born...
...She can take inspiration from her curious points of kinship with Frederick Douglass, a quintessential American...
...Mobilized by his experience of slavery, he devoted his chief energies to overturning that institution and fi ghting its hateful legacy...
...Why there was so much peace, security, and wealth in Europe...
...deprivation of education...
...She may fi nd us more conscious than our secular European cousins of the preEnlightenment roots of our liberty, in the rights of Englishmen and the Puritans’ intoxication with the Bible...
...I wanted to understand why life in Holland was so different from life in Africa,” she would write...
...People said he was too articulate for an escaped slave...
...Over the next six years, she translated at refugee intake centers, women’s shelters, prisons, abortion clinics, police stations, and courts of law...
...There is about his life’s work an impressive coherence, a unity...
...Still, she should fi t right in...
...As an adult, now 38, she is a free agent, unmarried and self-supporting...
...It lay in state at City Hall—where 30 years before citizens had gathered spontaneously after news arrived of Lincoln’s assassination, and Douglass, stunned and bereft, had been prevailed upon to speak...
...Honesty is to her the hard-won prize: It is what liberty is for...
...Like many in abolitionist circles, Douglass knew John Brown...
...In his early days as an antislavery speaker, Douglass withheld his real name and that of his owner...
...After the discussion, an editor of the newspaper that had sponsored the panel invited Hirsi Ali to write for his pages...
...Finally Hirsi Ali raised her hand...
...She was uneasy witnessing a book burning after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1989...
...It was while she was there that a prominent fi gure in the Dutch Liberal party persuaded her not only to switch allegiances— trading Labor for a party more in tune with her emphasis on personal freedom and individual rights—but to run for parliament on the Liberal slate...
...I not only liked—I loved this paper, and its editor,” he wrote...
...When he returned to the United States, British friends helped him buy a press...
...For Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it was not one book, but rather a kind of book—Western fi ction, both high and low—that stirred her aspirations beyond the horizons of a typical Somali woman...
...After her return—even after her resignation from parliament amid a controversy over her (long-since disclosed) false statements to immigration authorities, then her decision to accept a position with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.—the need persisted for constant precautions to ensure her safety...
...Somali women were taught that submission to their husbands, as to Allah, and unquestioning service to family and clan were their lot in life...
...Having come late to the political culture of individual rights and the rule of law, she was astonished by the willingness of many in the West to cast a blind eye to gross violations of rights so long as they occurred among foreigners...
...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...
...practiced at such confrontations, however, he managed to make his way in to congratulate the president...
...Not just slavery, moreover, but any form of racial differentiation in the church or in political and social life he understood to be at odds with human beings’ equality in God’s sight...
...He was born a stepchild of Western civilization, she an outsider to it, yet both made that civilization their own...
...If I studied political science, I thought, I would understand that...
...There was her family’s prayer fi ve times a day for the extermination of the Jews...
...His associates in the abolition movement deemed this a good time for Douglass to leave the country...
...Decades later, as an old man addressing the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, he was so provoked by jeers and insults from racebaiters in the audience that he threw down his prepared text and spoke extemporaneously out of his fury for over an hour—by the end, to thunderous applause...
...indeed, sending money to her mother...
...I shall make use of you as a means of exposing the character of the American church and clergy—and as a means of bringing this guilty nation, with yourself, to repentance...
...By contrast, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s apprenticeship in Holland would last nine long years...
...The authorities attributed the fi re to arson, though no perpetrator was ever identifi ed...
...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...
...And they found something else: abolitionist agitation...
...In doing this, I entertain no malice toward you personally...
...But the more outspoken she became about this—urging, for instance, that “honor killings” of wayward females by their families or clans be registered as such by the police so that the extent of the problem could be determined—the more virulent became the threats against her...
...In him as in her, Africa, Europe, and America met...
...But the marriage soured...
...was widely reprinted...
...The family fl ed from Somalia to Saudi Arabia when Ayaan was eight, and moved twice more, fi rst to Ethiopia and then to Kenya, both countries where Muslims were a minority...
...She is no less forthright about her own atheism and libertarianism...
...Neither showed malice...
...the experience at the age of nine of being examined and assessed as chattel, along with horses and cattle and swine, as part of an estate being divided among three heirs...
...Allow us a Voltaire, because we are truly living in the Dark Ages...
...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...
...Sometimes hostility rose to the level of violence...
...SPEAKING UP By his late teens, Frederick, after a stint as a fi eldhand, was back in Baltimore, working as a caulker in the shipyards, though forced to turn over his wages to his master...
...In 1845 and again in 1859, he found a haven in Britain...
...It was August 1841, not three years after Douglass’s escape...
...It is a most unusual and highly charged communication, and this is how it ends: I will now bring this letter to a close...
...A mob attacked an outdoor abolition meeting in Pendleton, Indiana, in 1843...
...The fi rst three speakers called for a new Voltaire in the West, a rational reformer to counter Western arrogance and neocolonialism and consumerist decadence...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 39
