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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  Ibrahima was not the first Muslim Adams had met, having attended President Jefferson’s dinner reception for the Tunisian ambassador in 1805. In his journal entry for May 15, 1828, the day of the meeting, he wrote, “Abdel Rahman is a Moor, otherwise called Prince or Ibrahim, who has been forty years a slave in this country. He wrote, two or three years since, a letter to the Emp of Morocco, in Arabic.”182 In that encounter, however, Ibrahima disabused Adams of the idea that he was originally from Morocco, and revealed his preference to go to Liberia, which was closer to his true native land.183 The president, reported Secretary Clay, “thought it proper to yield to his inclination on this subject.”184 Ibrahima also asked the president to contribute to the emancipation fund for his enslaved children and grandchildren, but Adams declined.185

  On his tour through the Northeast, whenever he was asked, Ibrahima never declined to demonstrate that he could write Arabic. Examples of his calligraphy still exist. Often he would claim that the specimen produced was the Lord’s Prayer, but in fact he had written the Fatiha, the revered first chapter of the Qur’an, which has been called “the Lord’s Prayer of the Muslims.”186 Of course, his American audience never knew the difference. His reliance on this one passage, no less than his actual calligraphy, suggests that after forty years of slavery Ibrahima’s Arabic had become rusty.187

  Ibrahima and his wife arrived in Monrovia, Liberia, on March 18, 1829.188 As soon as the coast of Africa came into view, the former slave publicly resumed his Islamic prayers, proof that he had never truly embraced Christianity.189 Ibrahima would never see his African family again or reach his homeland nearly three hundred miles away. Four months after his arrival, he would succumb to illness at age sixty-seven. His hope of raising money to bring his entire family back to Africa was only partially fulfilled. Eight of his children arrived in Liberia in 1830, a year after his death, and were reunited with their mother.190 It is possible that seven other members of his family later migrated to Liberia in 1835,191 but most of Ibrahima’s progeny would remain in slavery in Mississippi, never to see him or his wife again.192

  OMAR IBN SAID IN FAYETTEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

  In 1789, Fayetteville, North Carolina, became the site for the state’s second and final convention to consider ratification of the Constitution. Today, there is a mosque in that city, the Masjid Omar ibn Sayyid, which commemorates the Muslim slave Omar ibn Said.193 Omar had fled to Fayetteville in 1811, after a month’s journey from Charleston, South Carolina, to escape the harsh treatment of an owner he described as a “weak, small, evil man called Johnson, an infidel (kafir) who did not fear Allah at all.”194 Omar had been captured and taken in slavery from his home in Senegal.195

  Omar ibn Said, another Muslim slave from West Africa, wrote his autobiography in Arabic, and likely retained his faith until his death. (illustration credit 5.3)

  Although many American Muslim slaves distinguished themselves by writing Arabic, Omar’s proficiency allowed him to write an entire autobiography of fifteen pages in that language in 1831.196 Indeed, it was his Arabic literacy that first brought him to the attention of his future owners in North Carolina, the prominent and wealthy Owen family, when Omar reportedly used coal to write Arabic on the walls of his Fayetteville jail cell following his daring escape from South Carolina.197 In his autobiography, Omar praised the family with whom he would live more than fifty years, before dying in his nineties.198 In his Arabic autobiography, he exclaimed:

  O, people of North Carolina; O, people of South Carolina; O, people of America, all of you: are there among you men as good as Jim Owen and John Owen? They are good men for whatever they eat, I eat; and whatever they wear they give me to wear.199

  A decade before writing his life story Omar joined the Presbyterian Church and was baptized.200 David Caldwell, the Anti-Federalist delegate who expressed such fears about the “emigration of those people from the eastern hemisphere” at the 1788 North Carolina ratification debate, might have been shocked by Omar’s presence at a church of his Presbyterian denomination. In 1822, the convert was sent a copy of the Bible in Arabic by Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and belonged to the American Colonization Society, the group that had helped Ibrahima and other freed slaves return to Africa.201 Someone else would give Omar a Qur’an in English, though he would never own one in Arabic.202 That nonetheless did not prevent his reproducing parts of it.

  Omar begins his autobiography with the bismillah—“In the name of Allah”—followed by “the merciful, the compassionate” and “May God bless our Lord Mohammed.”203 He then re-creates from memory (despite a few errors) the sixty-seventh chapter of the Qur’an, known as al-Mulk, which can be translated as “the Sovereignty” but also as “the Dominion” or “the Ownership.” Though the author does not identify or explain these verses, Omar’s choice, as one scholar has suggested,204 represents an implicit “resistance” to the earthly dominion of slavery, to ownership of him as a human being.205 The chapter emphasizes Allah’s role as the ultimate owner of “all things” and the Prophet Muhammad’s role as “a warner.”206 The twelfth and thirteenth verses, which suggest that only God knows the nature of an individual’s spiritual beliefs, may have had a special significance for Omar:

  12 Lo! Those who fear their Lord in secret, theirs will be forgiveness and a great reward.

  13 And keep your opinion secret or proclaim it, lo! He is Knower of all that is in the breasts (of men).207

  Was this perhaps Omar’s confession, even repudiation, of his outward conversion to Christianity?208 In any case, most scholars of African Muslims in America believe that Omar, despite appearances, did not fully embrace Christianity.209

  Omar does explicitly confess the faith into which he was born: “Before I came to the Christian country, my religion is the religion of Mohammad, the Prophet of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.”210 The sentence reads no less oddly in the original, with Omar deliberately using the Arabic present tense. Here is another potential indication of his religious ambivalence, or a refusal to put Islam in his past. He then describes essential Islamic rituals he no longer observed in North Carolina, including walking to the mosque, ablutions before prayer, and prayer several times a day. As a Muslim in Africa, he tells us, he gave zakat, or alms, one of the five pillars of the faith; fought in jihad against non-Muslim tribes; and even made the pilgrimage to Mecca.211

  Omar may have outwardly embraced Presbyterianism in order to please his owners, or because he missed the fellowship of a community of believers of the sort he’d known in Africa. His church attendance may also reflect a Muslim reverence for Jesus as a prophet in Islam. But a few pages later, the tensions in Omar’s religious commitment became more pronounced: “I am Omar,” he declares, “I love to read the book, the Great Qur’an.”212 But literally the sentence could also be read, “I am Omar, he loves to read the book the Great Qur’an,” because the verb is in the third-person masculine, not the first person. And this happens more than once.213 All translators assume that Omar means the first person throughout his text, which is perfectly reasonable. Yet this remains an odd grammatical choice for an autobiography. In English translations, the repetition throughout of the first-person pronoun “I” evokes an immediacy and agency somewhat less palpable in the original. It may be another instance of his ambivalence, or simply that despite Omar’s claims to have studied Islamic subjects for twenty-five years in Africa with various learned men, his Arabic-language skills had predictably eroded over time, reflecting the imperfect memory of a script that he could no longer accurately reproduce.214

  While Omar tried to retain the memory of his past, his owner Jim Owen and his wife “used to read the Bible to me a lot.” But rather than mention Jesus, Omar’s account goes on simply to ask that his “heart” be “open to the Bible,” and he concludes the thought with a Qur’anic form of praise for Allah, “Lord of the Worlds.”215 When he does mention Jesus on the following page, it is after Moses,
described as the one to whom God gave the law. He does depict “Jesus the Messiah” as receiving “grace and truth,”216 but then immediately states, “First, [following] Mohammed. To pray I said,” after which he inserts the Fatiha, the first chapter of the Qur’an.217 This sentence could also indicate his view of the superiority of the Prophet Muhammad in the prophetic continuum of the Qur’an.

  Omar provides other clues that he never forsook belief in the Prophet Muhammad’s singular importance. He did write out Christian prayers, and, unlike Ibrahima, when Omar claimed to have written out the Lord’s Prayer or the twenty-third Psalm in Arabic, that is exactly what he wrote. He would never try to pass off verses from the Qur’an as Christian scripture, his efforts no doubt facilitated by the Arabic Bible Scott Key gave him.218 On the other hand, as late as 1855, eight years before his death, his Arabic transcription of the twenty-third Psalm is introduced by the bismillah, followed by this invocation of the Prophet: “May God have mercy on our Lord, the Prophet Muhammad.”219

  Omar died in 1863, two years before the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which would have finally granted his freedom. According to the Constitution under which he had lived, as a slave he remained only three-fifths of a person, a ratio accepted by the free, white male Protestant delegates to his state’s 1788 ratification debate.220

  The historian Michael Gomez has referred to both Omar and Ibrahima, among others, as “Founding Fathers of a Different Sort,” a title both certainly deserve in the annals of American Muslim history.221 These two lives remind us that while hypothetical Muslims inhabited the rhetoric of the Founders, in their midst there also lived flesh-and-blood Muslims who, as slaves, remained invisible and without rights. Only literacy in Arabic set both men apart from their coreligionists in the African slave population, and while that skill was enough to win Ibrahima a rare return journey from the Middle Passage, it would not save Omar, despite his protests, from languishing in the United States.

  COULD A MUSLIM BE PRESIDENT? THE BIRTH OF AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN IDEAL OF POLITICAL EQUALITY

  In constitutional history, Muslims are not traditionally associated with definitions of American citizenship, but for one day in 1788 the adherents of Islam came to symbolize the aspiration of political equality, irrespective of religion, in the new Republic. The lives of America’s actual Muslim inhabitants, slaves from West Africa, like Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman and Omar ibn Said, could not have been more remote from the possibility that any Muslim could conceivably seek the presidency one day. And they remained invisible to the delegates, just as Omar’s words written in Arabic after the vote, his plaintive plea, “O, People of North Carolina,” would remain unread.

  Nevertheless, it was in North Carolina’s debate on religious tests that Muslims—albeit imaginary ones—stepped directly onto the American political stage for the first time. At a time when fearful visions of Islam as a fanatical religion and foreign threat prevailed, two Federalists in North Carolina promoted the simultaneous establishment of religious and political equality for Muslims as potential American citizens, meeting a predictable response from the majority of delegates, whose negative monolithic vision of Islam would persist and prevail. And yet a new vision of Muslims as individual believers, people who might yet enjoy a full membership in the new polity, was born. Iredell and Johnston created this possibility in debate, without believing or wishing that the rights they advocated in principle would ever come to be practically tested by real Muslims. Nevertheless, in the absence of a religious test, Federalists would be forced to concede the possibility of a Muslim president when they managed to win ratification for their Constitution in 1788. That they did so, however reluctantly, suggested that Americans might depart from inherited European prejudices in realizing their national ideals.

  Thomas Jefferson was not in the United States during debates about the Constitution and Muslim rights, remaining in France until November 1789. The next month, he accepted the post of secretary of state and, returning to the United States, took up the problem of North African piracy once again. He did not expect that even on the domestic political scene references to Islam would figure in attempts to defame him.

  6

  Jefferson Wages War Against an Islamic Power; Entertains the First Muslim Ambassador; Decides Where to Place the Qur’an in His Library; and Affirms His Support for Muslim Rights, 1790–1823

  The expressions, indeed, imply more; they seem, like the Arabian prophet, to call upon all true believers in the Islam of democracy, to draw their swords, and, in the fervour of their devotion, to compel their countrymen to cry out, “There is but one Goddess of Liberty, and Common Sense is her prophet.”

  —John Quincy Adams on Thomas Jefferson, 1791

  As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

  —Article 11, first U.S. peace treaty with Tripoli, ratified 1797

  IN 1790, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson reported to President Washington and Congress that since the peace with the British in 1783, America’s lucrative prewar trade in the Mediterranean had not “been resumed,” owing to North African piracy.1 It was something of an exaggeration. Despite the threat and lack of naval protection, American merchants did indeed continue to risk their ships, their freedom, and even their lives plying the waters of the Mediterranean. By 1785, Algiers had seized two American merchant vessels and twenty-one sailors.2 By 1793, eleven more American merchant vessels and over a hundred sailors would be seized by the same power. Release for these captives in Algiers would not come until treaty and ransom negotiations succeeded in 1796–97.3

  A solution to this crisis would elude Jefferson during his tenure as secretary of state, as vice president, and into his presidential term, until 1806.

  In 1801, Jefferson would become the first executive of the United States to go to war with an Islamic nation. He would also be the first American holder of high office whose political opponents defamed him with accusations of being a Muslim. This experience notwithstanding, he would be the first president to entertain a Muslim ambassador in the nation’s new capital, and in correspondence with Muslim rulers of North Africa he would repeatedly invoke a shared belief in one God. In the conduct of foreign relations, Jefferson had relied on his study of Islam, and when after leaving office he returned to his library at Monticello, he would choose a telling final place in his collection for the Qur’an that had informed his understanding of the Muslim faith. Let us now consider the arc of that understanding and its part in his political career.

  Portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1791) by Charles Willson Peale. (illustration credit 6.1)

  JEFFERSON’S VIEW OF THE NORTH AFRICAN PIRACY PROBLEM, 1790

  In 1790, Jefferson reported to Congress that before the end of the Revolutionary War “about one-sixth of the wheat and flour exported from the United States and about one-fourth” of all “dried and pickled fish, and some rice, found their best markets in the Mediterranean ports.”4 These substantial exports, he estimated, required “eighty to one hundred ships annually, of twenty thousand tons, navigated by about twelve hundred seamen.”5 Jefferson emphasized the extent of the trade by way of rationalizing its continuation in treacherous circumstances, when it “was obvious to our merchants, that their adventures into that sea would be exposed to the depredations of the piratical States on the coast of Barbary.” Temptation existed on both sides, and for the pirate states it was created by the Strait of Gibraltar, which Jefferson described as “only five leagues wide,” and where enemy “cruisers, taking a safe and commanding position near the strait’s mouth, may very effectually inspect wha
tever enters it. So safe a station, with certainty of receiving for their prisoners a good and stated price, may tempt their cupidity to seek our vessels particularly.”6 Greed, Jefferson took pains to imply, was a universal human motive, not particular to followers of any religion.

  Having failed to ransom American captives during his time as ambassador to France, Jefferson was now to insist upon an earlier, more aggressive policy option: America should answer force with force.7 As a feature of this policy, he proposed that captured North African pirates be held for ransom. He even had in mind a price schedule by nationality: North African rulers would, he rightly inferred, value prisoners of Turkish origin more than “Moors,” or indigenous Muslims, because “their government is entirely in the hands of Turks, who are treated in every instance as a superior order of beings.” Nevertheless, he knew the scheme was likely to be fruitless since the exchange of prisoners was not customary for the governments of Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis.8 Indeed the only Tripolitan pirates ever captured, in August 1804, would end up as spectacles on the New York stage in March of the next year; none were ever ransomed to free American captives.9

  Something, however, had to be done for the sake of the American economy—and lives. As Jefferson told Congress, “The liberation of our citizens has an intimate connexion with the liberation of our commerce in the Mediterranean, now under the consideration of Congress. The distresses of both proceed from the same cause, and the measures which shall be adopted for the relief of one, may, very probably, involve the relief of the other.”10