Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

by Denise A. Spellberg

  The lives of two American Muslim slaves of West African origin, Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman and Omar ibn Said, also intersect this narrative. Both were literate in Arabic, the latter writing his autobiography in that language. They remind us of the presence of tens of thousands of Muslim slaves who had no rights, no voice, and no hope of American citizenship in the midst of these early discussions about religious and political equality for future, free practitioners of Islam.

  Imagined Muslims, along with real Jews and Catholics, were the consummate outsiders in much of America’s political discourse at the founding.27 Jews and Catholics would struggle into the twentieth century to gain in practice the equal rights assured them in theory, although even this process would not entirely eradicate prejudice against either group.28 Nevertheless, from among the original triad of religious outsiders in the United States, only Muslims remain the objects of a substantial civic discourse of derision and marginalization, still being perceived in many quarters as not fully American.29 This book writes Muslims back into our founding narrative in the hope of clarifying the importance of critical historical precedents at a time when the idea of the Muslim as citizen is, once more, hotly contested.30

  1

  The European Christian Origins of Negative but Sometimes Accurate American Ideas About Islam and Muslims, 1529–1797

  Now, in comparing the Turk with the pope, if a question be asked, whether of them is the truer or greater Antichrist, it were easy to see and judge, that the Turk is the more open and manifest enemy against Christ and his church.

  —John Foxe, English compiler of

  Protestant martyr accounts, 1570

  The sword and the Alcoran in my bloody hands,

  Will impose silence on the rest of humanity.

  —from Voltaire’s play

  Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet, 1742

  I would not bring the sacred volume of our faith in any comparative view with the Alcoran of Mahomet; but I cannot help noticing it as extraordinary, that the Mahometan should abominate the Christian on account of his faith, and the Christian detest the Mussulman for his creed; when the Koran of the former acknowledges the divinity of the Christian Messias [sic], and the Bible of the latter commands us to love our enemies. If either would follow the obvious dictates of his own scripture, he would cease to hate, abominate, and destroy the other.

  —Royall Tyler, American novelist and member

  of the Vermont Supreme Court,

  from his novel The Algerine Captive, 1797

  BY THE TIME John Leland reached the age of twelve in 1766, this future ally of Thomas Jefferson reckoned that he’d heard about “Mahomedan imposture” every Sunday from his Congregational minister in Massachusetts.1 Indeed, by 1776 most American Protestants believed Islam to be the invention of Muhammad, a false prophet and an impostor. No matter their denomination, they had generally been primed not only from the pulpit but by books and theater to think the worst about Islam and Muslims. Such a view, however, was not an American innovation, but a legacy of European precedents.2 In the absence of much contrary evidence, American Protestants had little reason to think differently about Islam than their coreligionists across the Atlantic.3 This bias would find its way into the evolution of political polemic in both Britain and the United States. In the developing discourse about individual freedom and the role of government, Muslim rule would come to be identified with tyranny, the antithesis of Anglo-American political ideals.4

  American Protestant prejudice toward Islam, though directly inherited from European precedents, already existed among Catholics on the Continent. These negative views first emerged among Eastern Christians when Islam spread from Arabia throughout the Middle East in the seventh century. Eastern Christians suddenly found themselves subordinate to a new religious minority. Their immediate response to this subjugation was to repudiate Islam as both a religion and a political system.5 In later polemic, no matter what their denomination, Christians continued to assert the superiority of their own faith as the true faith over all others. Unlike Muslims, who accepted that Jews and Christians as People of the Book had received revelation from the same God, Christian theologians rejected any overlap with Islamic tradition. Christians also rejected the Islamic doctrine that the Qur’an was God’s final, perfect revelation to all humankind, which superseded human distortions that arose in Judaism and Christianity. Instead, Christian theologians denounced Muslim belief as a corruption of their own faith invented by Muhammad or borrowed from, according to various accounts, a heretical monk, the Jews, or the devil.6

  This chapter examines how a millennium after the advent of Islam, Christian prejudice against Muslims crossed the Atlantic with profound impact on American religious and political beliefs at their foundation. It also traces how Christians of all denominations repeatedly employed anti-Islamic rhetoric against one another for doctrinal, political, and personal reasons. Protestant debates about Islam shaped American views of government in ways seldom acknowledged today.

  ISLAM AND THE ANTICHRIST: PROTESTANT THEOLOGY AND THE ROOTS OF ANTI-ISLAMIC THOUGHT IN EUROPE

  American Protestants inherited their hostility to Islam directly from sixteenth-century Protestant reformers in Europe, who defined the Antichrist in terms of Islam. They supported this based on scriptures, including the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation, both of which had, of course, been revealed to address entirely different religious and political concerns long before the rise of Islam. With creative interpretation, however, the Antichrist could be defined variously as the Prophet, or the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, then the most powerful Muslim military force in Asia and Europe.7 In other references, the Ottoman army as a whole was invoked as the manifestation of the Antichrist.

  The German Protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) envisioned the Antichrist incarnated as a dual enemy, both Catholic and Islamic, writing, “The person of the Antichrist is at the same time the pope and the Turk.” Later he would refine his earlier statement, claiming that the spirit of the Antichrist is the pope, but his “flesh” is that of “the Turk.”8 By “Turk,” Luther referred to the Ottoman sultan, whom he incorrectly deemed the supreme spiritual and political leader of Islam, analogous to the pope for Catholicism. German Protestant woodcuts from the sixteenth century depict Luther’s vision of the Antichrist as a beast with two heads—one a mitered pope and the other a turbaned Ottoman sultan.9 Luther, however, was not the first Christian to envision the Antichrist in terms of Islam. As early as the twelfth century, Catholic theologians had asserted that Muhammad was the precursor of the Antichrist.10 Although Luther denounced Catholicism as inimical to his true version of Christianity, he nevertheless found aspects of Rome’s anti-Islamic polemic useful enough to appropriate for his own needs.

  By Luther’s time, Ottoman expansion threatened Western Europe, having already begun to engulf Christians in Eastern Europe in the fourteenth century. In 1453, Constantinople, the last bastion of the Christian Byzantine Empire, fell to the Ottoman Turks. In the sixteenth century, the Ottomans continued to advance on Europe, defeating the Hungarian army in 1526 and besieging Vienna for the first time in 1529. Although that first siege failed, European fears of Muslim military might would persist throughout the seventeenth century, until 1683, when the Ottomans would attempt to seize the Austrian capital a second and final time. Though this attack would also fail, and by 1700 the Ottoman menace would recede, the memory of the Turkish military conquests remained a potent symbol in Christian thought into the eighteenth century.11

  Luther believed that God allowed the Ottomans to triumph over the Catholics as punishment for their sinful beliefs, also asserting that “true” Christian prayers might defeat the Turks. For his part, the Ottoman sultan reputedly saw Luther and other Protestants as potential allies against the Catholic Hapsburg enemies of the Turks, a charge Luther quickly denied even though he and other Protestants knew that conquering Ottomans in Eastern Europe treated their denomination better than per
secuting Catholics did.12 Still, Luther’s Catholic opponents would question his opposition to the Ottomans. He did in the end support the war against the Muslims, urging Christians not to worry about killing Turks; according to Luther’s interpretation of the book of Daniel, Muslim souls were already forfeit, condemned to hell for all eternity.13 Luther also considered their most sacred text, the Qur’an, “a foul book of blasphemy.”14 He supported the 1542 publication in Basel, Switzerland, of a Latin translation of the Qur’an so that Christians would learn firsthand of its “lies and fables.”15 To further educate his followers, Luther also translated one thirteenth-century Latin anti-Islamic polemic and wrote two anti-Ottoman tracts.16 His literary production was part of a larger trend in writing about Islam and the Ottomans, and by 1600, aided by the advent of the printing press, European authors had generated roughly six thousand titles on the feared but fascinating subject of the Ottoman Turks.17

  John Calvin (1509–1564), the sixteenth-century French Protestant reformer, was another theologian whose views on Islam directly influenced American Protestants. Like Luther, he identified the Antichrist in Islamic terms, but he envisioned the Prophet Muhammad rather than the sultan as the pope’s twin in the “two horns of the Antichrist.”18 Calvinist theology was by far the most influential on Protestants in North America. And so the majority of early Americans, regardless of their Protestant denomination, would adopt Calvin’s idea about Islam and the Antichrist as theological truth.

  Just as Martin Luther and John Calvin denigrated the Catholic Church and the pope by comparing them to Islam, their Catholic opponents employed similar insults against both Protestant reformers. Catholic authorities asserted:

  The Turk tears down churches and destroys monasteries—so does Luther, the Turks turn convents into horse stables and make cannon out of church bells—so does Luther. The Turk abuses and treats lasciviously all female persons, both secular and spiritual. Luther is just as bad for he entices monks and nuns out of their monasteries into false marriages.19

  One sixteenth-century Catholic tract claimed, “Both seek to destroy the Christian faith, both deny the divinity of Christ, not only is the pseudo-Gospel of Calvin no better than the Qur’an of Muhammad, but in many respects it is wickeder and more repulsive.”20 Islam was thus for Christians of all denominations a weapon with which to vilify fellow believers, and it would prove effective, eventually to be appropriated for additional political and personal attacks on both sides of the Atlantic.21

  The perception of Islam as a theological and military threat was not limited to the European continent. In England, John Foxe (1516–1587), a Protestant who chronicled in eight illustrated volumes the suffering of his coreligionists as martyrs of Catholic zealotry, added in 1566 a two-hundred-page section that briefly mentions the origins of Islam but mostly focuses on Ottoman military history.22 Foxe described the “unspeakable cruelty and slaughter” of “Turkish tyrants upon poor Christian men’s bodies, within the compass of these latter three hundred years.” To stir his readers’ sympathies, he exaggerated Turkish atrocities and the enslavement of conquered Christians, even comparing new Christian “martyrs” of the Ottoman conquests to the early Christians who suffered “the first persecutions of the Romans.”23 In reality, the Ottomans adhered to the Qur’anic command, “There is no compulsion in religion” (Qur’an 2:256).24 Indeed, Islamic law allowed both Christians and Jews to retain their faith as tolerated believers, as long as they paid an annual tax and accepted key disabilities that reinforced their subordinate political and religious status (Qur’an 9:29).25 But Foxe did accurately refer to an Ottoman innovation that ran counter to the Qur’anic command of religious tolerance: their practice of seizing Christian boys and youths in the Balkans and forcing them to convert to Islam. The captives were then trained as crack musket-bearing soldiers or administrators loyal only to the sultan. These troops known originally in Turkish as the “new troops” became famous in English as the janissaries.26 Foxe decried this institution as “of all bondage and servitude that the Christians suffer under the Turks” the “most intolerable.” He lamented for the Christian families who suffered their children to be “pulled from the faith of Christ” and to become “professed enemies of Christ, and his church, to make war against Heaven, and to perish everlastingly.”27

  Foxe concluded his addendum on the Ottomans with “A Prayer against the Turks,” which attempted to rally the faithful against “the malicious fury of these Turks, Saracens, Tartarians, against Gog and Magog, and all the malignant rabble of Antichrist, enemies to thy Son Jesus, our Lord and Saviour.” By invoking the last battle between Gog and Magog in the book of Revelation, Foxe drew a now familiar comparison between the pope and the Ottoman sultan, judging that “the Turk is the more open and manifest enemy against Christ and his church.” But he could not in the end decide whether the Ottoman sultan or the pope “hath consumed and spilt more Christian blood.”28 Aided by illustrations, Foxe’s work would become “the most influential” of Protestant martyrologies in America’s British colonies.29

  ISLAM AS THE ANTITHESIS OF TRUE CHRISTIANITY: HUMPHREY PRIDEAUX’S ATTACKS ON DEISM AND SOCINIANISM IN ENGLAND, 1697

  Foxe’s book was followed by an equally popular anti-Islamic polemic by another Englishman, which would prove extremely influential in the American colonies. In 1697, an Anglican clergyman named Humphrey Prideaux (1648–1724) wrote The True Nature of Imposture Fully Display’d in the Life of Mahomet. With a Discourse Annex’d for the Vindicating of Christianity from this Charge, Offered to the Consideration of the Deists of the Present Age, to attack both Deists and Socinians. Charging that these sects believed “the Gospel of Jesus Christ is an Imposture,” Prideaux thus likened them to the followers of the ultimate impostor, the Prophet Muhammad.30 Mahomet, Prideaux argued, had “pretended to receive all his Revelations from the Angel Gabriel,” and had “forged” chapters of the Qur’an based on Jewish and Christian sources.31

  Prideaux drew other similarities between Islam and the two new Protestant sects. The Deists in England were never “an organized religious group”; nevertheless, they were deemed dangerous because they emphasized that God could be understood by human reason.32 Even more alarming was their rejection of miracles and the divine authority of the Bible.33 The Deists also opposed religious intolerance and the clergy’s imposition of Christian orthodoxy.34 Most important, Deists, like Socinians, rejected both the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity; both, like Muslims, believed in a unitary God.35 Indeed, some Deists and Socinians looked favorably upon Islam’s uncompromising monotheism, much to the consternation of their critics.36

  Prideaux claimed to know Arabic, which would have been taught at both his secondary school of Westminster in London and his college of Christ Church, Oxford; but his published works demonstrate little interest in the original sources of the faith.37 Instead, The True Nature of Imposture Fully Display’d in the Life of Mahomet merely echoes earlier English texts in its depiction of the Prophet as an impostor. Already in 1678, nineteen years before Prideaux, Lancelot Addison had anonymously published a book titled First State of Muhametism, or an Account of the Author and Doctrine of that Imposture.38 Drawing from such contemporary English publications, flawed Latin translations of Arabic texts, and medieval Christian polemic, Prideaux would make numerous erroneous assertions about Islam.39

  Prideaux’s book may have been written as a response to a treatise authored by Henry Stubbe in 1671.40 Stubbe denied the charge that Islam was spread by the sword, and portrayed the Prophet in a uniquely positive light.41 The pro-Islamic argument of Stubbe’s work had prevented it from being published; nevertheless, it had circulated widely in manuscript form.42 In contrast, Prideaux’s rebuttal would become enormously popular in England, with three editions the first year and multiple later ones on both sides of the Atlantic.43 British editions of Prideaux appeared in Philadelphia in 1758 and in Connecticut in 1784; an American edition was published in Vermont in 1798.44 Through Prideaux’s b
ook, the Prophet in American political discourse evolved to become not just a religious impostor, but also a militant zealot who held the “sword in one hand, and the Qur’an in the other.”45

  EARLY AMERICAN USES OF ISLAM: THE ANTICHRIST AND SLURS AGAINST FELLOW PROTESTANTS

  After crossing the Atlantic, anti-Islamic polemic found a ready audience in Protestant congregations throughout the American colonies. Following their European predecessors, American preachers across denominations demonized Islam (or the Prophet or the Ottoman sultan) as one of the twin-headed manifestations of the Antichrist.46 In the colony of Massachusetts Bay, the Puritan leader Cotton Mather (1663–1728) and the banished Anne Hutchinson (d. 1643) would both condemn Islam, invoking the familiar image of the Ottoman Antichrist’s head merged with that of the pope.47 In New York, the Lutheran pastor Erick Tobias Bjorck identified the Antichrist with Martin Luther’s grotesque conflation of the pope and “Mahomet.”48

  But such vilification of Islam did not preclude selective appropriation of its ideas and precedents. In his 1721 book The Christian Philosopher, Mather directs his Christian readers to excel Muslims in their piety and intellectual pursuits: “May our Devotion exceed the Mahometan as much as our Philosophy!”49 And although Mather denigrated Islam as a religion, he found in it a useful example for the reconciliation of natural science and philosophy. He had read a 1686 English translation of the medieval Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185), who had demonstrated that human reason led ineluctably to belief in the existence of God.50 Mather found this idea so compelling that despite his general disdain for Islam, he would urge, “Reader, even a Mahometan will shew thee one, without any Teacher, but Reason in a serious View of Nature, led on to the Acknowledgement of a Glorious GOD.” Mather even proclaimed that “God has thus far taught a Mahometan!”—thus acknowledging Islam’s solution to a philosophical problem he himself also wished to solve.51 The first Latin translation of Ibn Tufayl’s Islamic treatise that Mather thus praised had earlier influenced the English philosopher John Locke to develop one of the key ideas of the Enlightenment.