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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  Finally, Abd al-Rahman thought he would seal the deal for the priciest option, perpetual peace, by painting a picture of what American sailors could expect in a pirate assault:

  That it was a law that the first who boarded an enemy’s vessel should have one slave, more than his share with the rest, which operated as an incentive to the most desperate valour and enterprise, that it was the practice of their corsairs to bear down upon a ship, for each sailor to take a dagger in each hand and another in his mouth, and leap on board, which so terrified their enemies that very few ever stood against them, that he verily believed the Devil assisted his countrymen, for they were almost always successful.147

  It was probably a wild overstatement of the pirate’s martial zeal as well as his lust for captives—and the ransom they would bring, particularly considering that war for the sake of profit is condemned in the Qur’an as the practice of liars, hypocrites, and unbelievers (Qur’an 48:15). But it was true that the seizure of prisoners, who might be killed, sold into slavery, or ransomed, could be sanctioned by the sacred text (Qur’an 33:26–27, 47:4). Not surprisingly, the ambassador failed to mention that the Qur’an also enjoined Muslims to feed prisoners, out of compassion toward the less fortunate (Qur’an 76:8). And while it was lawful to keep property seized in warfare (Qur’an 48:15, 48:19, 48:20, 8:69), the rules had not always been the same. During the Prophet’s lifetime, a revelation called for one-fifth designated for the financial support for his relatives as well as the poor (Qur’an 8:41). Over time, more complex calculations evolved for the divisions of spoils, both property (ghanima) and captives (asra).148

  The ambassador’s description of the devil’s involvement as guarantor of Muslim success was simply wrong. Al-shaytan, meaning Satan or the devil, far from aiding Muslims in the Qur’an, is a beguiler, who lies in wait to lead them astray, as he did both Adam and Eve in the garden of heaven (Qur’an 4:76, 4:60, 20:120–23).149 But even without satanic assistance, the ambassador had the Americans where he wanted them.

  The Americans hazarded no response based on Christian belief to this line of reasoning, realizing that their only option was to accede to the demands, which they must have reluctantly understood from the beginning. Adams and Jefferson recorded no comment on Abd al-Rahman’s selective reading of the Qur’an. In the same paragraph reporting invocation of the devil, they merely said, “We took time to consider and promised an answer, but we can give him no other, than that the demands exceed our expectations, and that of Congress, so much that we can proceed no further without fresh instructions.”150

  In the penultimate paragraph, Adams and Jefferson suggest why Holland might be the only potential source of the necessary funds, before presenting an update on their agent’s negotiations with Algiers and Morocco, commenting grimly, “and we wish it may not be made more disagreeable than this from Tunis and Tripoli.”151 Adams and Jefferson understood the predicament in which they found themselves.152 Though of divided opinion on the influence of religion in the conflict, they were in perfect agreement as to the ultimate issue. As Frank Lambert observed, “Indeed, in all of the treaty negotiations, tribute, not theology, was the sticking point.”153

  Adams’s fifth and final meeting with Abd al-Rahman took place in London in January 1787, after which the Tripolitan ambassador planned to return home. Adams reported that he had no direction from his government with which to continue or conclude negotiations.154 There would be no treaty for all these protracted negotiations between Tripoli and the United States.

  JEFFERSON EXPLAINS HIS DIFFERENCES ON PIRACY POLICY TO ADAMS, JULY 11, 1786

  Three months later, Jefferson admitted to Adams that their ideas about how to deal with piracy continued to differ. Allowing that their “instructions” from Congress had “required us to proceed by way of negotiation to obtain peace,” and that “Whatever might be our private opinions, they were to be suppressed,” he acknowledged biting his tongue though he had followed his orders “honestly” and “zealously.” “Though, it was therefore never material for us to consult together on the best plan of conduct toward these states,” Jefferson continued to think “it would be best to effect a peace thro’ the medium of war.” He outlined his reasons systematically. These included ethical propositions, but no religious ones, and he assumed Adams’s assent to the first four, though this compatriot thought “respect” from European powers would be won more easily by forging treaties, not waging war:

  1. Justice is in favor of this opinion. 2. Honor favors it. 3. It will procure us respect in Europe, and respect is a safe-guard to interest. 4. It will arm the federal head with the safest of all the instruments of coercion over their delinquent members and prevent them from using what will be less safe. I think that so far you go with me.

  Jefferson then outlined the “next steps,” those “in which we shall differ”:

  5. I think it least expensive. 6. Equally effectual. I ask a fleet of 150. guns, the one half of which shall be in constant cruise. This fleet built, manned and victualled for 6. months will cost 450,000 £ sterling. It’s annual expence is 300 £ sterl. a gun, including every thing: this will be 45,000 £ sterl. a year.155

  After offering other financial calculations, Jefferson admitted that war carried risks, but he weighed these against “the greater uncertainty of the duration of a peace bought with money, from such a people, from a Dey 80. years old, and by a nation who, on the hypothesis of buying peace, is to have no power on the sea to enforce the observance of it.”156 It was not an unwarranted concern about the eighty-year-old ruler of Algiers, the end of whose life would likely not just end his rule but also abrogate his treaty arrangements.

  Jefferson was optimistic that the United States would not bear “the whole weight of this war,” for Naples would join them and possibly Portugal. He had an even more unusual hope: “that a Convention might be formed between Portugal, Naples and the U.S. by which the burthen of the war might be quotaed on them according to their prospective wealth, and the term of it should be when Algiers should subscribe to peace with all three on equal terms.” He further envisioned that “sooner or later” the other powers of Europe (except France, England, Holland, and Spain) would “enter into the confederacy,” increasing its efficacy and further distributing the costs.157

  Knowing they were of very different minds on the matter, Jefferson was careful not to offend Adams, allowing that he shared his ideas to show that “a semblance of reason” had taken him thus far, “and not with the expectation of their changing your opinion.” He even graciously admitted that because “The same facts impress us differently,” this led him to humbly “suspect an error in my process of reasoning tho’ I am not able to detect it.”158 But however polite, he was less than forthright about how far he had taken his plans for a naval force to oppose piracy.

  Unbeknownst to Adams, sometime earlier in July 1786, Jefferson had started working behind the scenes in France to enlist international support for a multinational naval force to suppress piracy in the Mediterranean. The idea, forward-looking for the eighteenth century, had actually been first proposed by Benjamin Franklin, who informally observed that it was in the interest of the European powers to join forces against piracy.159 There is evidence that Jefferson privately presented his plan for a naval confederation on July 4, 1786, to Del Pio, the Neapolitan minister to France. The only surviving copies of his Proposed Convention against the Barbary States are in French and Italian.160

  Jefferson also discussed this plan with Lafayette, who on October 22, 1786, without mentioning Jefferson’s role, proposed it to President George Washington,161 as well as to John Jay, whom he urged to bring the idea before Congress. As Julian Boyd has concluded, Jefferson may have chosen to keep his authorship from Adams, knowing it “could only have accentuated the difference of opinion” between them and the legislature, thinking it would have “weakened the presentation of the plan to Congress.”162

  Jefferson’s convention invited any willing nation to work
“in concert” against the pirate states of North Africa, “beginning with the Algerines.” His object was nothing less than “to compel the pyratical states to perpetual peace, without price, and to guarantee that peace to each other.”163 This would be accomplished by the deterring effect of patrolling the Mediterranean, not by bombarding North African land targets. Once Algiers agreed to a perpetual peace, the attentions of the naval confederation would be directed to the less threatening pirate states. Though he never claimed public credit for the idea, Jefferson copied this proposal in his autobiography, but alas Secretary Jay and Congress were not convinced, “and so it fell through.”164

  THE PROBLEM OF HOSTAGES: JEFFERSON CONSIDERS CATHOLIC PRIESTS AS INTERMEDIARIES

  On July 25, 1785, the schooner Maria of Boston was captured by Algerian pirates near Cape St. Vincent, off southern Portugal. Five days later, pirates of the same power took the Dauphin (or Dolphin) of Philadelphia off Lisbon.165 The result was not simply the loss of both ships and cargoes, but the imprisonment of twenty-one American citizens.166 That Adams and Jefferson were aware of this situation while negotiating the next year in London can have only exacerbated their frustration at not being empowered by Congress to offer ransom. Nevertheless, when the American agent John Lamb arrived in Algiers in March 1786, they instructed him to offer no more than two hundred dollars per man, a sum they thought they could answer for.167 But the dey of Algiers was asking $59,486 for all twenty-one men, with $18,000 for the captains and much less for each of the ordinary sailors.168

  The fate of the prisoners was still unresolved when Jefferson returned to Paris after the failed negotiations in London. It was then he turned to the Order of the Holy Trinity and Redemption of Captives, known as the Mathurins, for help.169 The Catholic order had members throughout North Africa and a headquarters in Paris. Jefferson hoped that they might act as covert go-betweens to redeem the American prisoners in Algiers. This they agreed to do early in 1787, but Jefferson still awaited funds. While he did, he set about publicly affecting to have lost interest in the American prisoners, hoping thereby to reduce the price of their ransom.170 But the posturing impressed no one but the prisoners themselves, who despaired. They wrote him with “the most afflicting reproaches.”171 It was not until Jefferson was about to return to the United States in August 1789 that the funds were finally secured from Holland. By then, however, the French Revolution had put an end to the Mathurin order, and with it American hopes for their intercession.172 The group of twenty-one sailors seized by Algiers in 1785 would be held for eleven years. Two of them were released by private donations; almost half of them would die of disease waiting for their freedom.173

  JEFFERSON, ADAMS, AND THE QUR’AN

  As we have seen, Jefferson and Adams differed as to the best remedy for the piracy crisis. They also differed as to the role religion played in it. For while Jefferson took the pragmatic view that it was a matter of simple pecuniary opportunism, Adams was prepared to see an element of religious conflict, whatever he may have thought of Abd al-Rahman’s Qur’anic justifications. It is interesting, then, to consider the efforts each man made to understand the religion of the nation’s adversaries.

  Jefferson bought his Qur’an eleven years before piracy became a practical diplomatic issue and his initialing of his copy bears scrutiny, offering tantalizing clues not only to his interest in consulting the holy book but also to the provenance of the copy that survives. In fact, his interview in London with the ambassador from Tripoli may explain why he placed his initials in his copy of Sale’s translation precisely where he did, near verses that refer to warfare. There are different possible circumstances for his doing so.

  First, presuming that Jefferson’s Qur’an had survived the 1770 fire and remained behind in his Virginia library, he may have initialed the book sometime after his 1789 return to the United States, before becoming secretary of state in 1790. He may have then placed his initials beneath verses of the Qur’an’s fourth chapter that detail the importance of fighting “in the path of God,” and the wisdom that those who strive in this way are “preferred” by God for their industry (Qur’an 4:94–96). Equally, he may have been moved to mark these particular verses somewhat later, perhaps in 1801, when as president he faced the choice of whether or not to go to war against Tripoli.174

  But if Jefferson had lost his two-volume Qur’an in the 1770 fire, he may have taken the opportunity while in London to purchase a replacement copy. There is no recorded evidence of this. What remains certain is that in volume 1, this page, Jefferson inscribed his characteristic “T” and “I” at the bottom of the page (following the eighteenth-century practice of using the Latin “I” instead for the “J” in Jefferson).175

  this page of Jefferson’s Qur’an with his initials inscribed at the bottom. (illustration credit 4.1)

  It is also possible, though less likely, that he randomly decided where to indicate his possession of the book when he first purchased it in 1765. He left no other notes in his copy.

  John Adams, by contrast, for all his concern with religion, displayed only a belated if not decidedly lukewarm curiosity about the Qur’an. He would not buy a copy of the sacred text until 1806, five years after the end of his presidency, and twenty years after his negotiations with the ambassador from Tripoli. The text he ultimately purchased, now preserved in the Boston Public Library’s collection of his books, was not Sale’s English translation but the first American edition of the Islamic holy book, printed in 1806 in Springfield, Massachusetts, based on an earlier, flawed translation from Arabic via French undertaken in the mid-seventeenth century.176 Well before the acquisition, in 1797 President Adams would sign the first U.S. peace treaty with Tripoli.

  Jefferson may have been inspired to check Abd al-Rahman’s Qur’anic references, to better understand his military opponents’ ideology, but he never perceived the conflict with North African powers in primarily religious terms. Indeed, the one reference to “holy war” in his voluminous writings pertains to the only struggle Jefferson considered truly sacred: “for if ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independence.”177 By the time he wrote these words in 1813, he had prosecuted a war against Tripoli during his first presidential term (1801–5) and signed a peace treaty with that power in 1806, at the beginning of his second. Perhaps it was because of what he gathered from the Qur’an that he initially understood the North African piracy crisis in terms economic, military, and diplomatic. Yet during his presidency, religion, both his own and that of the rulers of North African pirate powers, would appear as a factor in his diplomatic actions.

  MUSLIMS ABROAD AND AT HOME IN DEBATES ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION, 1787

  Not long after Jefferson and Adams’s failure to negotiate an effective treaty with Tripoli in 1786, and as American captives continued to languish in North Africa, national debate assumed a new focus: the Constitution proposed in 1787. Thomas Bailey, a diplomatic historian, has asserted that the dey of Algiers might deserve “indirect” credit as one of the “Founding Fathers” of the United States because the plight of the imprisoned Americans did so much to prove the need for a new federal Constitution, with a system of taxation that could raise the funds to pay for their ransom.178 A North Carolina Federalist, Hugh Williamson, made a similar point in 1788, asserting that without a navy the United States could not stave off the pirates from Algiers that one day might attack the coast of his state.179

  While the new Constitution would meet the need for an effective response to actual threats from Muslims in North Africa, Federalists found themselves fending off anxieties about the charter’s potential to create a threat from imaginary Muslims at home. Anti-Federalists worried that the proposed document opened the door to future Muslim citizens—and possibly even presidents. To accept the religious pluralism the Constitution envisioned, including the abolition of a religious test for federal office, was to risk not merely the exclusively Protestant character of the nation but even the po
ssibility, however remote, that non-Protestants, once granted full political rights, might eventually exercise power over an American Protestant majority. It was precisely the sort of oppression that some Protestants had come to America to escape. And so Anti-Federalists instructed their delegates to state ratifying conventions to insist on an explicit guarantee of their own rights of conscience, which was absent from the document being debated.

  Nowhere was the debate over religion and political rights more heated, or its record better preserved in detail, than at the Hillsborough, North Carolina, state convention. There, as the next chapter explores, the chief Federalist defenders of the Constitution became by extension the first and most ardent supporters of future Muslim citizens and their political equality.

  5

  Could a Muslim Be President?

  Muslim Rights and the Ratification of the Constitution, 1788

  There is a door opened for Jews, Turks, and Heathens to enter into publick office, and be seated at the head of the government of the United States.

  —Anonymous Anti-Federalist, Massachusetts, February 1788

  But it is to be objected that the people of America may, perhaps, choose representatives who have no religion at all, and that pagans and Mahometans may be admitted into offices. But how is it possible to exclude any set of men, without taking away that principle of religious freedom which we ourselves so warmly contend for?

  —James Iredell, Federalist, North Carolina, July 1788