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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  The door to toleration for non-Anglican Protestants had been opened by the last clause of the June 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights:141

  That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence, and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of their conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity, towards each other.142

  In theory, the clause opened the door to full freedom of religion in Virginia, but it assumed that the state’s population remained exclusively Christian, and thus implicitly excluded non-Christians from the sphere of equal rights. Under the establishment of Anglicanism, other Protestants, though lacking religious equality, were obligated to pay for the financial support of Anglican churches and ministers. So were non-Protestants. Jews and Catholics were also denied religious freedom or political equality, but they were present in much smaller numbers. Muslims, if any had been known to exist in Virginia, would have been similarly denied full rights of citizenship.

  As a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, Jefferson was appointed to the nineteen-member Committee on Religion on October 11, 1776.143 Having proposed throwing off the yoke of British political tyranny in the Declaration of Independence in the spring and summer of that year, he was not about to relent in the face of homegrown oppression. Indeed as the Presbyterian petitioners in Virginia put it, Jefferson was “forming independent Governments upon equitable and liberal foundations … freed from all the incumbrances which a spirit of Domination, prejudice, or bigotry hath interwoven with most other political systems.”144 For Presbyterians and Baptists particularly, this necessitated a complete separation of the Anglican religion from the state in Virginia, and that is precisely what they demanded. Reflecting on this time in his 1821 autobiography, Jefferson would allow that these petitions “brought on the severest contests in which I have ever been engaged.”145

  One petition addressed to Jefferson’s committee was called “Memorial of the Presbytery of Hanover,” Virginia. Dated October 24, 1776, it demanded “free exercise of Religion, according to the dictates of our Consciences.” The Presbyterians charged that this ideal was infringed by the levy of taxes supporting the construction of Anglican churches and “the established Clergy.” Such, they said, represented “so many violations of their natural Rights; and in their consequence a restraint upon freedom of inquiry and private judgment.”146 The Protestant dissenters sought the disestablishment not just of the Anglican Church but also of Christianity, for which they asked no preferment beyond what Islam might claim,147 “no argument in favour of establishing the Christian Religion, but what may be pleaded with equal propriety for establishing the tenets of Mahommed by those who believed the Al-Coran; or, if this be not true, if it is at least impossible for the Magistrate to adjudge the right of preference among the various Sects that profess the Christian Faith without erecting a Chair of Infallibility which would lead us back to the Church of Rome.”148

  Dissenting Presbyterian petitioners well understood the difference between asking for religious equality among Christians, which would require an official status for Christianity, and a universal religious freedom, which might include the most far-fetched of possible Virginian believers—Muslims. But whatever their distaste for Islam—and it would have been typical of their day—they more passionately feared the establishment of some repressive regime like that of the pope, whom they viewed as the chief, eternal persecutor of Protestants. It was inscribed in the collective memory of these dissenting Protestants to prefer no established religion at all, and an end to all religious inequality, even at the expense of a Christian polity.149

  These petitioners may not have owned a Qur’an as Jefferson did, but they knew of the text’s sacredness to Muslims. It was a commonplace of English culture. As early as 1386, Geoffrey Chaucer referred to the Qur’an’s “holy laws,” and many English authors would express the same notion in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, most without having read the Muslim holy book. Even later in 1777, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, whose works Jefferson owned, would refer to the Qur’an as “a sacred book.”150

  In 1776, as a response to numerous petitions from Presbyterians as well as Baptists, Jefferson proposed two separate pieces of legislation. The first was a bill for Disestablishing the Church of England and for Repealing Laws Interfering with Freedom of Worship; the second, for Exempting Dissenters from Contributing to the Support of the [Anglican] Church.151 These groundbreaking efforts were clearly the logical extension of the same beliefs Jefferson had expounded about the new nation’s government in the Declaration of Independence. For it must have occurred to Jefferson that he could scarcely declare all (free, white) men “created equal” and “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights” if the Virginians among them did not have the right to freely practice their chosen faith.152 Furthermore, he questioned the legitimacy of compelling payment to support a sect to which the majority of citizens did not belong, proposing that this was but another form of taxation without representation.153

  In his autobiography, Jefferson would reflect upon the oppressive status quo his bills aimed to reform as “unrighteous compulsion, to maintain teachers of what they deemed religious errors,” and he referred to the petitioners as having sought “to abolish this spiritual tyranny.”154 When it came to matters of conscience, whether political or religious, Jefferson advocated complete intellectual freedom.155 Religion, as he understood it, was after all “a system of opinions,” and these were “formed in the mind.”156

  But at this time, how did he define Islam? In 1776, Jefferson’s speeches in the Virginia House of Delegates to disestablish the Anglican Church relied on negative comparisons to Islam, which he described as a religion that repressed free inquiry. It was an illegitimate characterization but it served Jefferson’s immediate goal: to discredit the coercion of a state religion.157 Extant Protestant polemics would suffice for his negative representation of Islam, but he would tweak the emphasis. For Jefferson was not aiming to elevate another Protestant denomination, as others in Britain—and America—had before him.158 Instead, he compared the Anglican Church to Islam, in order that no Protestant denomination could legally oppress another.

  “Not a ready debater,” in the judgment of some historians, Jefferson made painstaking outlines to bolster his legislative proposals.159 His notes, comprising a four-page document “written in a long, narrow column,” are organized in question-and-answer format; the shorthand abbreviations are sometimes difficult to interpret.160 Most, however, are straightforward. For example, in support of his resolution for “Religs. Lib.,” or religious liberty,161 he outlined the long history of Christian heresy, dissent, and repression.162

  Jefferson included two direct negative references to Islam. First, he likened his opponents to Muslims, with a variation of Voltaire’s claim that Muslims wished for no form of science other than the Qur’an. Jefferson then asserted more generally that a state religion quashed “free enquiry,” by which he meant the spiritual exploration of others whose “uncoerced reason” led them to a different truth.163 In his shorthand, his point was rendered thus:

  ans. Truth cnt. suffr. by fre. Enquiry—only w. propag.

  [Answer: Truth cannot suffer by free enquiry—only with propagation.]164

  His main theme throughout the argument was the protection of the individual’s right to choose, and to question everything, even religion: “Free enquiry enemy only to Error,” by which he meant that rational inquiry could threaten only religion that could not reasonably defend itself. By 1784, when he had finally revised his Notes on Virginia, he would reproduce this argument:

  Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test
of their investigation. They are natural enemies of error, and of error only.165

  In 1776, however, Jefferson took the Islamic counterexample against an Anglican establishment further, by suggesting that the Prophet Muhammad had denied rational argument, and that this was the mark of repressive religion. As he wrote in his debate notes:

  if m. forbd. free Argum’—Mahomsm.

  prevnt. Reformn.

  [If Mahomet forbade free argument—Mahometanism prevented Reformation.]166

  Jefferson used Voltaire’s notion about Islam and free inquiry a second time under the heading, “Is Uniformity [of religion] desirable?”167 His shorthand provides his answer:

  if evr. cd. b. obtd. wd. be b. suffoctg. free enqry.

  [If ever [uniformity of religion] could be obtained, it would be by suffocating free enquiry.]168

  Jefferson then provided some historical examples of the dangers attending a single state religion. He included Islam, but only after first expounding the dangers of Catholicism. It was a long-standing Protestant polemical approach to denigrate both Islam and Catholicism together, as also reflected in his reference to the Reformation:

  Monksh. Imposns.—ignorce.—darknss. suppd. on

  ruins Enqry.

  [Monkish impositions—ignorance.—darkness. supported on

  ruins [of] enquiry.]

  Glorious Reformn. effect of shakg. off Pub. opn.

  [Glorious Reformation [had] effect of shaking off public opinion.]

  Mahomsm. supportd. by stiflg. free enqry.

  [Mahometanism supported by stifling free enquiry.]169

  Under this declaration, Jefferson concluded that “Philos. reformd by free enq.,” or “Philosophy is reformed by free enquiry,” to which he appended as proof the names of two towering scientific figures: Galileo and Newton.170 (Galileo, whose ideas were repressed by the Catholic Inquisition, may seem rather a victim of “monkish impositions” than a proof of “free enquiry,” but Jefferson acknowledged as much later in his Notes on Virginia.)171 He argued that suppression of rational thought, whether religious or not, was a sign of the weakness, even error, of whatever system relied on such means to control its adherents. This premise, he believed, held true universally, whether that system of thought was Islam or Christianity.

  WHY JEFFERSON CHOSE NOT TO DRAW EXPLICITLY ON SALE’S QUR’AN, CHOOSING INSTEAD CATO’S LETTERS in HIS POLITICAL VOCABULARY ON ISLAM

  Why did Jefferson neglect Sale’s Qur’an and its more thorough, better-informed views of Islam? In short, he recognized what he needed when he saw it.172 Though a meticulous reader and note taker, Jefferson was also a politician and knew what his audience would respond to and how to sway them.

  Long before taking notes on Voltaire’s anti-Islamic essay, Jefferson had probably absorbed similar caricatures from Cato’s Letters, an even more popular text in the American colonies. He owned the 1748 edition173 of these Whig political tracts, which were published between 1720 and 1723,174 and though he recorded no notes regarding Islam, he had certainly read Cato’s Letters long before his debates on religion in Virginia, as had most of his Revolutionary American cohort.175 As described in chapter 1, these tracts contained repeated pleas for greater civil and religious liberties, along with a vision of Islam as the foundation of the most religiously and politically repressive regimes on earth.176

  Attempting to divorce religion from state control, Jefferson found in Cato’s Letter number 66 an example of the Islamic fusion of these spheres. The tract “Arbitrary Government proved incompatible with true Religion, whether Natural or Revealed,” published on February 17, 1721, condemned both the Islamic conquests and Muslim rulers. The conquests in the Middle East were inaccurately attributed to “the Caliphs of Egypt, who founded the Saracen Empire there,” and who “were at once Kings and Priests.” As to the rulers, Trenchard and Gordon revile them roundly: “there never lived more raging Bigots, or more furious and oppressive Barbarians.” But the kernel of the objection here was to the merging of political and religious power in one entity, the caliph, as khalifat rasul Allah, or “the successor to the Prophet of God.”177

  Jefferson’s debate points in Virginia in 1776 echoed the anti-Islamic precedents that his fellow legislators would have already known and accepted.178 His point in comparing Islam to the Anglican establishment of state religion in Virginia would have been lost on no one as he suggested that this form of repressive Christianity had become antithetical to individual liberties, a belief his listeners already attributed to Islam. Jefferson did not pioneer this strategy, but he put it to good use in the House of Delegates. But, unlike Voltaire, Jefferson distinguished between Islam, which he freely disparaged, and its adherents, whose civil rights figured in his most important Virginia legislation, A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which sought political and religious equality for all believers. In framing this legislation in 1777, he followed his intellectual hero, John Locke, but would surpass him by aiming for universalism.179 Unlike Locke, Jefferson would brook no exceptions based on religion in his concept of citizenship in Virginia—and, by extension, the newly founded United States.180

  While Locke proposed that Muslims and Jews should be officially tolerated as citizens in English Anglican society, Jefferson imagined them as full citizens with equal civil rights in a non-Anglican, and even a non-Christian society.181 Nor did he share Locke’s qualms about including Catholics or atheists in the new country.

  JEFFERSON BORROWS IDEAS ABOUT MUSLIM AND JEWISH RIGHTS FROM LOCKE, OCTOBER 1776

  In October 1776, a month before his debate to end the Anglican establishment in Virginia, Jefferson considered a more universal question: “Why persecute for diffce. [difference] in religs. [religious] opinion?”182 Many in Europe had already struggled and suffered in the absence of an answer, leading a critical minority in seventeenth-century England and North America to consider the toleration of Muslims as a basis for ending the scourge of religious persecution of Christians. But no one until Thomas Jefferson had ventured to legally substantiate the idea of Muslims as citizens in the United States.

  Jefferson drew his inspiration for Muslim “civil rights” directly from John Locke’s 1689 A Letter Concerning Toleration. While Locke had made multiple references to Muslims and Islam, Jefferson preserved only the salient ones in his notes: “[He] sais ‘neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.’ ”183 Here in Jefferson’s notation is the first attempt in the new nation to consider the “civil rights” of both Muslims and Jews.184

  As in earlier European thought on tolerance and toleration, the fates of both groups remained entwined. While Locke, as we have seen, would continue a vigorous defense of Muslim civil rights in his second, third, and fourth letters on toleration, Jefferson never cited these, relying entirely on the first letter for his precedent.185

  Jefferson’s paraphrase of Locke included a slight abbreviation of the original, omitting the introductory words: “Nay, if we may openly speak the Truth, and as becomes one man to another.” But he does replicate William Popple’s 1689 English translation of Locke’s groundbreaking idea that “neither Pagan nor Mahumetan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the Civil Rights of the Commonwealth because of his Religion.”186

  Jefferson’s notes on Locke: “[He] sais ‘neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.’ ” (illustration credit 3.3)

  Jefferson’s notes ignore Locke’s defense of various Christian heretical sects preceding his mention of Muslims and Jews: “Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arminians, Quakers and others.” It was perhaps another matter of rhetorical strategy: Locke was using the case of Christian heretics to clear his way to toleration for Muslims and Jews, whereas Jefferson was using the case of Muslims and Jews to extend tolerance not just to dissenting Protestants but to all faiths. Nor did Jefferson choose to repeat Locke’s reference to the
Christian scriptures—“The Gospel commands no such thing”—which immediately followed his demand not to exclude Muslims and Jews from the civil rights of the Commonwealth on religious grounds. Defending the rights of non-Christians, Jefferson would make no appeal to Christian precepts, as Locke, Helwys, and Williams had done in the seventeenth century.187

  Instead, paraphrasing Locke’s defense of the rights of non-Christian groups, Jefferson posed a question grounded in what appeared to be cultural neutrality: “shall we suffer a Pagan to deal with us and not suffer him to pray to his god?”188 Locke had originally put the question in more ecumenical terms, asking, “shall we not suffer him [the pagan] to pray unto and worship God?”189 It is a subtle distinction: Jefferson’s absolute tolerance of other religions as against Locke’s qualified plea for tolerance, based on an implicit belief in the superiority of Protestant Christianity. But both men, to be sure, placed commercial and diplomatic considerations above any disapproval they harbored of the idolatrous religious beliefs of “pagans,” by which term Locke also encompassed Native Americans and African-born slaves, a measure of inclusiveness that Jefferson, a slave owner, would have likely rejected.190

  Locke might tolerate Muslims and Jews as residents under an Anglican Protestant government, but he never expected their salvation except through conversion to the state religion.191 (In this regard, his view was not unlike that of George Sale.) Jefferson, however, believed it was not for the state but the individual to be concerned about his own salvation, be he Christian, Muslim, Jew, or pagan. His ideal society was, from the first, one of religious pluralism and not foundationally Protestant or even Christian, a fact reflected in his legislation of October 1776 on immigration and citizenship.