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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  As a parting shot, Caldwell allowed, “All those who have any religion are against the emigration of people from the eastern hemisphere.”134 Johnston, the Federalist, agreed with him. While admitting the possibility of more Jews and other non-Christians entering the country, he assured his opponent that “in proportion to the emigration of Christians who should come from other countries; that, in all probability the children even of such people would be Christians; and that this, with the rapid population of the United States, their zeal for religion, and love of liberty, would, he trusted, add to the progress of the Christian religion among us.”135

  Clearly, neither the Anglican Johnston nor the Presbyterian Caldwell saw any value in debating which Protestant denomination deserved to prevail. It was enough that they agreed upon the impossibility that “the people of America lay aside the Christian religion altogether.”136

  THE CERTAINTY OF A CATHOLIC OR MUSLIM PRESIDENT, PREDICTED BY THE ANTI-FEDERALIST WILLIAM LANCASTER

  Could a Muslim be president of the United States? The assurance of the Federalists Iredell and Johnston that it was possible only in theory failed to persuade the Anti-Federalist William Lancaster, a Baptist minister, who believed, along with his constituents from Franklin County, that a religious test was the only certain way of keeping objectionable religious groups from the highest offices in the land.137 He argued for upholding the state’s current religious test, which made officeholding exclusively Protestant. He declared:

  As to a religious test, had the article which excludes it provided none but what had been in the states heretofore, I would not have objected to it. It would secure religion. Religious liberty ought to be provided for.138

  Lancaster took Iredell’s point about the pope: “For my part, in reviewing the qualifications necessary for a President, I did not suppose that the pope could occupy the President’s chair.” However, in a country without a religious test, where office was open to all free white men, he argued, anything short of papal usurpation might well happen, including a presidency occupied by a representative of either of the two faiths that had sown terror in the hearts of Protestants since the Reformation. Lancaster saw real and present danger in what Federalists would present as absurdities:

  But let us remember that we form a government for millions not yet in existence. I have not the art of divination. In the course of four or five hundred years, I do not know how it will work. This is most certain, that Papists may occupy that chair, and Mahometans may take it. I see nothing against it. There is a disqualification, I believe, in every state in the Union—it ought to be so in this system.139

  While avoiding hyperbolic speculation about the pope or the Ottoman sultan, Lancaster focused on the somewhat more plausible future notion of an individual Catholic or Muslim. His vision of the world in four or five hundred years did not require a majority Catholic or Muslim population. Nor was it predicated on the emergence of Catholic or Muslim candidates so extraordinary that their countrymen would ignore religion and look only to excellence of character. Lancaster did not hang his fears on the two improbable scenarios that Johnston had described. It was enough for him that a non-Protestant president existed at the farthest edge of possibility; not feeling obliged to describe the unknowable future, he remained “most certain” that the presidency needed to be protected from the equal threats of a Catholic or a Muslim occupant. Thus the office became the focus of contestation between those determined to preserve Protestant hegemony and those who believed in an alternative of potential pluralism made possible by the elimination of religious tests for federal officeholders.

  Catholicism and Judaism would have been better understood than Islam, but extant prejudices against adherents of the first two provided a serviceable enough template for characterizing those of the third, with whom the delegates had no direct acquaintance. Throughout the day’s debate the three groups were linked together, with each stirring negative associations among the Protestant delegates. But if Muslims, Jews, and Catholics collectively embodied all that was alien and menacing to the American status quo, they also became simultaneously emblematic of the principles of universal religious freedom and political equality enshrined in the Constitution, principles that were uniquely American and that for many, Federalist and Anti-Federalist alike, had their own allure, irrespective of the chance of undesirable consequences. Assumed commonality would never be a basis for resident Jews and Catholics to make common cause; even after the ratification of the Constitution, they would remain enemies with similar problems.140 And throughout the eighteenth century, whenever compared with Muslims, Jews would perceive an insult meant to cast them beyond the pale of full and equal rights.141 Nevertheless, the three groups would continue united in the Protestant imagination, with arguments for and against their inclusion whenever definitions of rights and citizenship were discussed.

  These three groups of non-Protestants were certainly considered outsiders. Each had a unique history and negative resonance for the Protestant delegates to the North Carolina constitutional convention. What these linkages provoked in their minds was precisely the challenge of a powerful, non-Protestant political category in which the most derided outsiders to the new country might one day become insiders. But the rights of Muslims, Jews, and Catholics to be insiders remained a primary fear for their Anti-Federalist opponents. Federalists defended political equality for Muslims, Jews, and Catholics even as they argued that the Protestant majority would most probably never elect them to any office. Arguments about the exclusion or inclusion of Muslims, Jews, and Catholics united them in eighteenth-century definitions of citizenship and rights.

  Despite Iredell’s eloquent attempts to win ratification and defend the rights of future American Muslim citizens, the Federalists had been outnumbered from the first. In the end, predictably, North Carolina’s Anti-Federalist majority at this first convention would prevail by a landslide vote of 184 to 84.142 Technically, the majority of the delegates “chose neither to ratify nor reject the Constitution,” preferring instead to adopt a resolution in support of placing before Congress “a declaration of rights, asserting and securing from encroachment the great principles of civil and religious liberty, and the unalienable rights of the people.” This included a desire to clarify other “ambiguous and exceptionable” parts of the document, presumably including the abolition of religious tests.143 When Iredell attempted to circumvent this decision with a resolution for ratification with a request for amendments, his initiative was overwhelmingly defeated.144 All those who spoke against the Constitution in the debate on religious tests also voted against ratification, with the outline roughly tracking religious affiliation and socioeconomic status. Iredell and Johnston, both lawyers and Anglicans, representatives of a privileged set, were staunch Federalists. The less affluent likes of the Baptist preachers Abbot and Lancaster, as well as the Presbyterian minister Caldwell, remained opposed.145

  Iredell lamented the failure of his state to enter the Union in 1788, eventually writing a newspaper address to “The People of North Carolina” on September 15, 1788, in which he was blunt about the implications for the state’s future:

  Eleven other states have a common united government: We have no share in it. If we can derive pride from the consideration, our independence is increased. We are now independent of all other nations in the world, but entirely independent of the other states.… We may form alliances at our pleasure with Great-Britain, France, Spain, Turkey, the Dey of Algiers, or Rhode Island.146

  Only the state of Rhode Island was in the same predicament with regard to ratification of the Constitution.

  Despite his local failure, Iredell’s compelling arguments in support of the new Constitution and future American Muslim rights were read by congressmen throughout the new Union, especially in New York City. In this way, Iredell’s foresight in having paid a secretary to record the proceedings paid off when they were published in 1789.147 What Locke had only theorized and Jefferson had already conclud
ed but had legislated only in Virginia, Iredell was thus first to champion in open, fractious debate about the Constitution.

  Iredell’s ardor impressed President George Washington, who appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1790, at the age of thirty-eight,148 citing “the reputation he sustains for abilities, legal knowledge, and respectability of character.”149 Even Thomas Jefferson owned Iredell’s 1790 revisions of the laws of North Carolina.150 The new associate justice brought his family to Philadelphia, the nation’s capital, in the 1790s, but he was also required to ride the southern judiciary circuit to adjudicate cases twice a year.151 By the time of his Supreme Court appointment in 1790, Iredell owned forty-five hundred acres and eight slaves.152

  The year before, Iredell’s brother-in-law, Samuel Johnston, had left the governorship of North Carolina to become his state’s first senator, but only after presiding over the ratification of the Constitution at a second convention, at Fayetteville in 1789. Returning to North Carolina after one term as senator, he would remain active in judicial matters until 1813, when he was seventy.153 For his part, Iredell would not be so blessed, meeting an untimely death at forty-eight. The strain of riding circuit through rough terrain did him in only nine years after his appointment to the high court.154

  IBRAHIMA ABD AL-RAHMAN AND OMAR IBN SAID: MUSLIM SLAVES IN AMERICA, 1788–1863

  While Iredell argued for rights that would extend in theory to hypothetical future Muslim citizens, there were, unbeknownst to him, actual American Muslims in his state and throughout the new nation languishing in slavery, unable to exercise rights of any kind. Two coincidences, one chronological, the other geographical, invite us to consider them. The first, Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman (d. 1829), was transported against his will to the United States in 1788, the same year as North Carolina’s debate.155 The second, Omar ibn Said (d. 1863), arrived in the United States in chains at the age of thirty-seven in 1807, a year before the end of the slave trade. He ran away to Fayetteville, North Carolina, twenty-two years after the Constitution was adopted there at the second state convention in 1789. Neither of these men were the only Muslims in their vicinities, much less the United States, but both became famous in their time.156

  Ibrahima and Omar had more than their faith and West African origin in common. I render their names as they traditionally appear in American sources, though in a more accurate transliteration from the Arabic they would be Ibrahim and Umar. It would perhaps have mattered to them, as both men knew Arabic, which skill they used to impress their white owners with their intelligence.157 And both had studied the Qur’an in their West African homes. Despite appearing to profess Christianity in order to improve their conditions, there is evidence that neither truly abandoned Islam. In Ibrahima’s case, his seeming conversion eventually allowed him to return to Africa and pay for the freedom of some of his children. Omar’s two-page Arabic plea in 1819 for his release and repatriation, on the other hand, failed.158 Neither man would ever be considered a free American citizen, or a voter, much less a potential candidate for political office.

  Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman came from a town called Timbo in what is today Guinea.159 According to his memoir, written by a secretary in English in 1828, this member of the Fulbe tribe spent a torturous six weeks in the Middle Passage before submitting to bondage in North America.160 In what was presented as his words, Ibrahima tells us:

  They sold me directly, with fifty others, to an English ship. They took me to the Island of Dominica. After that I was taken to New Orleans. Then they took me to Natchez, and Colonel F[oster] bought me. I have lived with Colonel F. 40 years. Thirty years I laboured hard. The last ten years I have been indulged a good deal. I have left five children behind, and eight grand children. I feel sad, to think of leaving my children behind me. I desire to go back to my own country again; but when I think of my children, it hurts my feelings. If I go to my own country, I cannot feel happy, if my children are left. I hope, by God’s assistance, to recover them.161

  The characterization that he had been “indulged” was perhaps partly an effort to flatter his owner, who could have read the account.

  Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman, a Muslim slave who became known as “the Moorish Prince.” The Arabic caption below the picture, in his own hand, reads: “His name is ‘Abd al-Rahman.” His Arabic literacy fascinated the public and eventually secured his freedom. (illustration credit 5.2)

  Born in Timbuktu around 1762, Ibrahima had received a solid Muslim education in the city that had been a famed center of Islamic learning since medieval times.162 His Arabic was learned in this context, though it was not his native language. In fact, Ibrahima spoke three African languages: Bambara, Mandingo, and Jallonke.163

  His father having been a religious and military leader, Ibrahima himself led men in local wars against enemy animist tribes, captives from which were often sold to Europeans as slaves. Eventually he was ambushed by these enemies and himself enslaved and sold to the British in 1788.164 His owner in Natchez, Mississippi, Colonel Foster, named him “Prince” because “of his still proud ways” and Ibrahima’s references to his elite position in Africa.165 He would manage Colonel Foster’s plantation from 1800 to 1813, marrying a fellow slave who’d become a Baptist convert around 1794, with whom he had nine children.166 As a Muslim man, Ibrahima was permitted to marry a Christian woman.

  After nearly twenty years of slavery, Ibrahima met by chance a Dr. Cox, whom Ibrahima’s father had saved when the white traveler was ill and lost in West Africa in the 1780s.167 Cox recognized Ibrahima immediately. He, and later his sons, would attempt to buy Ibrahima’s freedom. The effort would fail, but Cox’s story made Ibrahima a celebrity. Local newspaper editors interviewed the slave in the 1820s.168

  In 1826, the year Thomas Jefferson died, Ibrahima, at the suggestion of Andrew Marschalk, one of the local newspapermen, wrote a missive in Arabic, which was in fact a passage he remembered from the Qur’an.169 Marschalk forwarded the letter to the senator from Mississippi, with an explanation wrongly identifying Ibrahima as a member of “the royal family of Morocco.”170 On Ibrahima’s behalf, Marschalk pled for the slave known as Prince to be able to return to this homeland.171 The ascription of Moroccan origin would have played into erroneous contemporary assumptions that African slaves necessarily differed from North Africans in color and faith. But since Ibrahima himself claimed an ethnic and religious superiority setting him apart from non-Muslim Africans, he would initially “not dispute” that he was “a Moor,” and further claimed that he had “no ‘negro’ blood.”172

  In 1827, when Marschalk’s letter reached the State Department, the U.S. government began to correspond with Morocco on the slave’s behalf via the U.S. consul in Tangier. Sultan Abd al-Rahman II recognized that the author of the Arabic text was a Muslim, and volunteered to pay for his freedom and his passage home. Manumitting Ibrahima seemed a diplomatic windfall for the U.S. government, a way to improve relations with Morocco and secure the future return of any Americans shipwrecked on those North African shores. Secretary of State Henry Clay, a slaveholder himself, recommended the action, to which President John Quincy Adams assented.173 Colonel Foster, Ibrahima’s owner, agreed on two conditions: first, that he himself would pay nothing;174 second, that his slave would “not remain free or at liberty in any part of the United States.”175 Only in Africa would Ibrahima find his freedom. When Colonel Foster finally permitted Ibrahima to leave for Washington, D.C., the slave refused to depart without his wife, who was still valuable as the plantation’s midwife. Local whites raised the price of her freedom in a day.176 But Ibrahima’s children and grandchildren remained behind in Mississippi.

  Colonel Foster described Ibrahima as “by birth and education a strict Mahometan,” yet added that “he expresses the most reverential respect for the Christian religion, the moral precepts of which he appears to be well informed [about] and speaks of having read some of the Christian scripture of the Old Testament in his own country in the Arabic language,” having even requ
ested a copy of the Old Testament in Arabic.177 Marschalk, the newspaperman, went so far as to imply that Ibrahima had renounced Islam for Christianity.178 In this Ibrahima spied another opportunity. And so when the American Colonization Society, whose purpose was to return freed blacks back to Africa, volunteered to pay Ibrahima’s passage to Liberia, their West African point of colonization, Ibrahima agreed to spread the Gospel and promote American trade in Africa. It was still hundreds of miles away from his former home and true destination, but it was closer than Morocco.179

  One of Ibrahima’s contemporary biographers stated that in 1828 he was “the most famous African in America.” For the departure from the plantation, Marschalk bought Ibrahima a colorful costume he thought befitting only a Moroccan prince: “a white turban topped with a crescent, blue cloth coat with yellow buttons, white pantaloons gathered at the ankles, yellow boots—and, sometimes … a scimitar.”180 With much fanfare, Ibrahima embarked on a trip through many cities in the Northeast in the hope of raising enough money to free all his descendants and pay for their passage to Africa. His tour would take him up the Mississippi to Cincinnati, and then to Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Worcester, Salem, and New Bedford, Massachusetts, as well as Providence, Rhode Island, and New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut.181 He met with many dignitaries, including President John Quincy Adams, who earlier in his political career on his father’s behalf had directed anti-Islamic invective against Thomas Jefferson.