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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  1. THE EUROPEAN CHRISTIAN ORIGINS OF NEGATIVE BUT SOMETIMES ACCURATE AMERICAN IDEAS ABOUT ISLAM AND MUSLIMS, 1529–1797

  1. Quoted in John Leland, “Extracts from Number Two, A Little Sermon Sixteen Minutes Long,” in The Writings of the Elder John Leland, ed. L. F. Greene (New York: G. W. Wood, 1845), 410.

  2. This is not a new idea. Anti-Islamic representations predominate in most historical works. For example, see Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 35–59; Thomas S. Kidd, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), xii–xiii; Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5–9. One exception to this pattern is David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 15–20. Most recently, Edward E. Curtis IV, “Stereotypes,” in Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History, ed. Edward E. Curtis IV, 2 vols. (New York: Facts on File, 2010), 2:529–30.

  3. Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 11–12, 15–17.

  4. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 35, 57–59.

  5. The historian who first noted, “There was a Christian picture in which the details (even under the pressure of facts) were abandoned as little as possible, and in which the general outline was never abandoned.… There were shades of difference, but only within a common framework,” is Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), quote on 260. See also R. W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 91–92, 108–9; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 61–73; Daniel J. Sahas, John of Damascus on the “Heresy of the Ishmaelites” (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), 127–59; John Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 40–67.

  6. Daniel, Islam and the West, 184–88. The idea that, with the exception of John of Damascus in the eighth century, Islam was perceived until the twelfth century as a form of idolatry or paganism has been documented by Daniel, Islam and the West, 70, 105–34; Sahas, Heresy of the Ishmaelites, 93–95, 131–37; Alberto Ferreiro, Simon Magus in Patristic, Medieval, and Early Modern Traditions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005), 221; Frederick Quinn, The Sum of All Heresies: The Image of Islam in Western Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 24–43, 221. The idea of the heretical Christian monk was described first as an Arian by John of Damascus; Daniel, Islam and the West, 4–5. The same monk later was referred to as a heretical Nestorian Christian. Later, his name was revealed as Sergius (or in Islamic texts Bahira); see Susan R. Boettcher, “Insiders and Outsiders,” in Reformation Christianity, ed. Peter Matheson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 239.

  7. Robert Fuller, Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3, 33, 157.

  8. Quoted in George W. Forrell, “Luther and the War Against the Turks,” Church History 14, no. 4 (December 1945): 264.

  9. R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of the Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 182–83, plates 150–52. My thanks go to Caroline Castiglione for this reference.

  10. Daniel, Islam and the West, 184–85.

  11. Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 110.

  12. Forrell, “Luther and the War Against the Turks,” 260.

  13. Quinn, Sum of All Heresies, 44.

  14. Forrell, “Luther and the War Against the Turks,” 259, 263 (quote); Adams S. Francisco, Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and Apologetics (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 4–5, 45–69, 75–121, 174–237; Sean Foley, “Muslims and Social Change in the Atlantic Basin,” Journal of World History 20, no. 3 (2009): 380–85; Egil Grislis, “Luther and the Turks,” Muslim World 64, no. 3 (July 1974): 180.

  15. Quoted in Tolan, Saracens, 275.

  16. Quinn, Sum of All Heresies, 44; Tolan, Saracens, 275.

  17. Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 14; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 3.

  18. Quoted in Jan Slomp, “Calvin and the Turks,” in Christian-Muslim Encounters, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Wadi Z. Haddad (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 134.

  19. Quoted in J. Gregory Miller, “Holy War and Holy Terror: Views of Islam in German Pamphlet Literature, 1520–1545” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1994), 146.

  20. Quoted in Albert Hourani, Europe and the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 26.

  21. Thomas S. Kidd, “ ‘Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?’ Early American Uses of Islam,” Church History 72, no. 4 (December 2003): 767, 774, 776, 787; Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 1–2.

  22. Thomas S. Freeman, “Foxe, John (1516/17–1587),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 58 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 20:165–209.

  23. John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, with a Life and Defence of the Martyrologist by the Late Rev. George Townsend, D.D. (London: George Seeley, 1870), 4:80, 39–41, quotations on 4:80.

  24. Muhammad M. Pickthall, trans., The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an: Text and Explanatory Translation (New York: Muslim World League, 1977), 40; Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in Muslim Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 87–120.

  25. Friedmann, Tolerance, 6-7.

  26. In Turkish, yeni çeri.

  27. Foxe, Acts, 4:36.

  28. Ibid., 4:122.

  29. Susan Juster, “What’s ‘Sacred’ about Violence in Early America? Killing and Dying in the Name of God in the New World,” Commonplace 6, no. 1 (October 2005): 6–7.

  30. Humphrey Prideaux, 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 (London: E. Curll, J. Hooke, and T. Caldecott, 1716), 16–20. Stress on the Prophet as “impostor” has been defined as an “Oriental category” opposite to Jesus; see Edward Said, Orientalism, 72; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 37–39, 41.

  31. Prideaux, True Nature of Imposture, 141–44.

  32. Quoted in Richard H. Popkin, “The Deist Challenge,” in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution in England, ed. Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 195.

  33. Kerry Walters, Revolutionary Deists: Early America’s Rational Infidels (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), 8.

  34. Popkin, “Deist Challenge,” 20.

  35. Ernest Campbell Mossner, “Deism,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Donald M. Borchert (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2006) 2:680–93.

  36. Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 17; Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 5, 10–11, 47–48, 134.

  37. G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 289–92.

  38. James R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 114; Marwan M. Obeidat, American Literature and Orientalism (Berlin: K. Schwarz, 1998), 18.

  39. P. M. Holt, “The Treatment of Arab History by Prideaux, Ockley, and Sale,” in Historians of the Middle East, ed. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 293–94; Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 292. Also noting Prideaux’s distortions is Kevin J. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” Early American Literature
39, no. 2 (2004): 249–50.

  40. Humberto Garcia believes that Prideaux was responding directly to Henry Stubbe; see Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 51.

  41. Jacob, Stubbe, 115.

  42. Henry Stubbe, An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism: with the Life of Mahomet and a Vindication of Him and His Religion from the Calumnies of the Christians, ed. Hafiz Mahmud Khan Shairani (Lahore: Oxford and Cambridge Press, 1911; repr. 1975).

  43. P. M. Holt, A Seventeenth-Century Defender of Islam: Henry Stubbe (1632–1676) and His Book (London: Dr. Williams’s Trust, 1972), 9; Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 291. Toomer says three editions of Prideaux were published in England the first year, as opposed to Holt’s two. For the assertion of a far greater circulation of Stubbe’s manuscript, see Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 30–59.

  44. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 41; Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 9.

  45. Quoted in David A. Pailin, Attitudes to Other Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 103.

  46. Quinn, Sum of All Heresies, 43–47.

  47. Marr, Cultural Roots, 29, 97, 102–3; Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 8; Quinn, Sum of All Heresies, 24, 30, 38, 43.

  48. Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 8.

  49. Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher, ed. Winton U. Solberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 111; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 47.

  50. Solberg, introduction to Mather, Christian Philosopher, lxxiii.

  51. Mather, Christian Philosopher, 11–12.

  52. The point that these slurs were launched by Protestants against one another is made by Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 14; Kidd, “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?,” 767, 774, 776, 787. This point was made earlier for British authors on Islam; Pailin, Attitudes to Other Religions, 104.

  53. Roger Williams, George Fox Digg’d out of His Burrowes, ed. Rev. J. Lewis Diman, in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 7 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 5:125.

  54. Daniel, Islam and the West, 283, also 13, 32, 39, 41, 231, 234–35, 240, 287, 341, 382.

  55. Williams, George Fox, 5:125, in the margin.

  56. Marr, Cultural Roots, 89; Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 13–17.

  57. Quoted in Boyd Stanley Schlenther, “Whitefield, George (1714–1771),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 58:643; Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 13–14.

  58. Quoted in Schlenther, “Whitefield,” 58:646.

  59. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Russell B. Nye (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1958), 97.

  60. A similar point about Catholics and Jews as the objects of Great Awakening opprobrium was first made by H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Anchor, 2002), 149.

  61. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 63.

  62. Ibid., 35–52; Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Vintage, 1974), 27–48.

  63. The first to note this as a transatlantic phenomenon that impacted the American colonies was Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 63–64 n. 8. See also Allison, Crescent Obscured, 47, 52–53, 56; Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 18; Marr, Cultural Roots, 23–26.

  64. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 35, 57–59.

  65. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 36.

  66. Ibid., 63–64 n. 8; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 47, 52–53, 56.

  67. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters, or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, ed. Ronald Hamowy, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 2:526.

  68. Ibid., 1:183.

  69. Marking 1750 as a turning point in British maritime control of the Mediterranean, see Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 103.

  70. Trenchard and Gordon, Cato’s Letters, 1:461.

  71. Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923 (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 200–201, 325, 329.

  72. Trenchard and Gordon, Cato’s Letters, 1:462, 470–71.

  73. Ibid., 1:224, 333, 350–76, 381–82, 394, 403, 2:941.

  74. Ibid., 2:907.

  75. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 35–36, 44–52; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 47, 52–53.

  76. Samuel West, “On the Right to Rebel Against Governors,” in American Political Writing During the Founding Era, 1760–1805, ed. Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 1:438.

  77. Curtis, “Stereotypes,” in Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History, 2:530.

  78. C. A. Patrides, “ ‘The Bloody and Cruell Turke’: The Background of a Renaissance Commonplace,” Studies in the Renaissance 10 (1963): 126–35; Kevin M. McCarthy, “The Derisive Use of Turk and Turkey,” American Speech 45, no. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1970): 157–59.

  79. “Mahometan,” Oxford English Dictionary, 13 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 6:38.

  80. Robert Battistini, “Glimpses of the Other Before Orientalism: The Muslim World in Early American Periodicals, 1785–1800,” Early American Studies 8, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 474.

  81. Marr, Cultural Roots, 6.

  82. Battistini, “Glimpses of the Other,” 473–74.

  83. “Moor,” Oxford English Dictionary, 6:645.

  84. Ahmad Gunny, Images of Islam in Eighteenth-Century Writings (London: Grey Seal, 1996), 156; “Alcoran,” Oxford English Dictionary, 5:260.

  85. The earliest identification of the importance of Voltaire’s play in circulation in Britain, Dublin, and New York, but not Baltimore, was found by Allison, Crescent Obscured, 43–46.

  86. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 43–46. In opposition, Voltaire’s play is cast as “atypical” by Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 5.

  87. Jack B. Moore, introduction to Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive (1797), ed. Jack B. Moore, 2 vols. in 1 (Gainesville, FL: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967), 1:viii. English captivity accounts began in the sixteenth century, but the genre as nonfiction and fiction survived into the eighteenth. See Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 169–83; Colley, Captives, chapter 2, “The Crescent and the Sea,” and chapter 4, “Confronting Islam.”

  88. Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 49–58.

  89. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 35–59, 94; Marr, Cultural Roots, 7–8; Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms, 4, 8–10; Battistini, “Glimpses of the Other,” 446, 472–73.

  90. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 43–46, 57–59, 94; Marr, Cultural Roots, 7–8; Kidd, American Christians and Islam, xii; Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms, viii–ix, 4, 10; Battistini, “Glimpses of the Other,” 446.

  91. Daniel, Islam and the West, 101, 144–45, 242, 267; Tolan, Saracens, 54.

  92. Daniel, Islam and the West, 96–102.

  93. One historically extant Islamic name chosen by Voltaire might be Seide, or Zayd, who was the Prophet’s foster son. See Gunny, Images of Islam, 136.

  94. Jonathan A. C. Brown, Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 54.

  95. Voltaire, Mahomet the Prophet or Fanaticism: A Tragedy in Five Acts, trans. Robert L. Myers (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964), 57.

  96. Voltaire, Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète, tragédie, in Les oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Christopher Todd (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002), 20B:207–8. In Voltaire’s original French, “Le glaive et l’Alcoran dans mes sanglantes mains, / Imposerait silence au reste des humains.”

  97. For Voltaire’s description of t
he character “Mahomet” and “sa physionomie de singe,” see Magdy Badir, Voltaire et l’Islam, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 125 (Banbury, UK: Voltaire Foundation, 1974), 23; Robert Edward Mitchell, “The Genesis, Sources, Composition, and Reception of Voltaire’s Mahomet” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1961), 75; Gunny, Images of Islam, 137–38; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 43.

  98. Gunny, Images of Islam, 134, 136, 141; Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld Press, 2009), 81, 84.

  99. Badir, Voltaire, 96–97.

  100. Fatima Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press), 80.

  101. “La présence de l’ambassadeur turc risquait de provoquer un incident.” For the quotation, see Jeroom Verycruysse, Les Voltairiens (Nendeln: KTO Press, 1978), 1:x; Marvin Carlson, Voltaire and the Theatre in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 55.

  102. Where Voltaire describes the pope as “al capo della vera religione,” and the Prophet as “il fondatore d’una falsa e barbara seta,” see François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1938), 222–23.