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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  79. The French scholar Jean Bodin (d. 1596) saw the burning of Servetus in Geneva; see Clarence Dana Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought, and Literature (1520–1660) (Paris: Boivin, 1941), 390–91; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 593.

  80. This tendency among Protestants would continue into the seventeenth century; see Ahmad Gunny, “Protestant Reactions to Islam in Late Seventeenth-Century French Thought,” French Studies 40 (April 1986): 131–34. Not only radical English Protestants in the seventeenth century embraced the Ottoman example of religious toleration. Catholics and Protestants applied this comparative tactic, beginning in the sixteenth century. For the English precedent, see Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1–59.

  81. Castellio, Concerning Heretics, 97.

  82. Franck quoted ibid., 101–2.

  83. Ibid., 97; Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 137.

  84. Castellio, Concerning Heretics, 3–4, 107–11.

  85. Ginzburg, Cheese, 51, suggests this.

  86. Castellio, Concerning Heretics, 113–17.

  87. H. Wheeler Robinson, introduction to Thomas Helwys, The Mistery of Iniquity (London: Kingsgate Press, 1935), viii.

  88. Ibid., viii–x.

  89. Ibid., 69. As the “first in England to demand universal liberty,” see Robinson’s introduction, xiii; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 150.

  90. Robinson, introduction to Helwys, Mistery, vii–viii, x.

  91. Ibid., xiv.

  92. Helwys, Mistery, 69.

  93. Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), ix–42.

  94. Cecil Roth, “England,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 16 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 6:412–13.

  95. Robinson, introduction to Helwys, Mistery, xiv.

  96. Ibid., ix.

  97. Helwys, Mistery, 212.

  98. Robinson, introduction to Helwys, Mistery, x.

  99. Helwys, Mistery, 42.

  100. Robinson, introduction to Helwys, Mistery, xiii; William R. Estep, Revolution within the Revolution: The First Amendment in Historical Context, 1612–1789 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1990), 50–58.

  101. L. H. Butterfield, “Elder John Leland, Jeffersonian Itinerant,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 62 (October 1952): 164.

  102. Smyth quoted ibid.

  103. Helwys, Mistery, 69.

  104. I take this definition from David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 293.

  105. Edwin S. Gaustad, Roger Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 96.

  106. Zagorin, Toleration, 198–99.

  107. Gaustad, Roger Williams, 19–20.

  108. Zagorin, Toleration, 198.

  109. Gaustad, Roger Williams, 22.

  110. Zagorin, Toleration, 199.

  111. Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, ed. Samuel L. Caldwell, vol. 3 of The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 3:52; Zagorin, Toleration, 200. My thanks to Holly Snyder for first suggesting I investigate Roger Williams. For a thoughtful discussion of Williams’s impact on liberty of conscience that includes his references to Muslims, see Martha Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 34, 37, 50, 66. The idea that Williams included Islam as a potential American religion is mentioned by Akbar Ahmed, Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010), 46–50.

  112. Gaustad, Roger Williams, 107.

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

  114. Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 37, 68.

  115. Gaustad, Roger Williams, 95–96.

  116. Ibid., 115; “soul liberty” discussed in William G. McLoughlin, Soul Liberty: The Baptists’ Struggle in New England, 1630–1833 (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press/University Press of New England, 1991), 19–20; definition of Williams quoted in Kamen, Toleration, 187; Zagorin, Toleration, 196–208.

  117. Williams, George Fox, 5:125, 240; Thomas S. Kidd, “ ‘Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?’ Early American Uses of Islam,” Church History 72, no. 4 (December 2003): 777–78; 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), 10–11.

  118. Gaustad, Roger Williams, 66, 75.

  119. Ibid., 100.

  120. Ibid., 93–94; Williams, Bloudy Tenent, 3:3.

  121. Williams, Bloudy Tenent, 3:3.

  122. Ibid., 3:3–4.

  123. Quoted in Naomi W. Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17. Another view of the usage of “Turkes” with pagans suggests that Muslims linked to Jews “were not on the same plane with Christianity”; see Maxwell H. Morris, “Roger Williams and the Jews,” American Jewish Archives 3 (January 1951): 27.

  124. Williams, Bloudy Tenent, 3:11.

  125. Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 327.

  126. Williams, Bloudy Tenent, 3:142. The importance of Williams’s views of Muslims as tolerated beings is ably made by Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 327.

  127. Kamen, Toleration, 181.

  128. Gaustad, Roger Williams, 16–20.

  129. John Cotton, “A Discourse about Civil Government,” in The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding, ed. Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009), 133.

  130. Ibid., 145.

  131. Williams, Bloudy Tenent, 3:43. The New Testament verses Williams referred to were these: “Let them both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn” (Matthew 13:30), and “The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one” (Matthew 13:38), King James Bible.

  132. Williams, Bloudy Tenent, 3:43; Zagorin, Toleration, 202.

  133. Gaustad, Roger Williams, 100; quote on 102.

  134. Williams, Bloudy Tenent, 3:10.

  135. Lecler, Toleration, 2:467; Gaustad, Roger Williams, 52. The two disagree on whether 1639 or 1638 was the year in which Williams briefly joined the Baptist faith.

  136. Gaustad, Roger Williams, 52–53.

  137. James Hutson, Church and State: The First Two Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 24; Gaustad, Roger Williams, 53, 107–8.

  138. The status of Catholics in Williams’s Rhode Island, however, is debated. For the idea of Catholics as the one exception to his otherwise universal support for religious freedom, see Hutson, Church and State, 24. In contrast, the idea that Williams’s charter “made no exceptions … nor denied any civil privileges to Roman Catholics” is promoted by McLoughlin, Soul Liberty, 261; Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 50, 66.

  139. Gaustad, Roger Williams, 106–7.

  140. Roger Williams, “To the Town of Providence,” in The Letters of Roger Williams, ed. John Russell Bartlett, The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 6:278–79; Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 50.

  141. Ahmed, Journey, 46–50.

  142. Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 3 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 1:314–15.

  143. For the assumption that Williams did not include Muslims or Jews in officeholding, despite their “freedom of worship and
equality before the courts,” see Morris, “Roger Williams and the Jews,” 27.

  144. I follow Kaplan in his helpful discussion of the practical division of public and private worship and religious dissent in Holland; see Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 177–78.

  145. Kamil, Fortress of the Soul, 869.

  146. Quoted ibid.

  147. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 178, defines the word.

  148. Kamil, Fortress of the Soul, 871.

  149. Ibid., 875.

  150. I have quoted Kamil’s term “inclusiveness” in describing the Flushing Remonstrance; ibid.

  151. “Flushing Remonstrance, 1657,” in The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding, ed. Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009), 108–9.

  152. Ibid.

  153. Ibid.

  154. Kamil, Fortress of the Soul, 872; Martin Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land (New York: Penguin, 1984), 71.

  155. Quoted in Gaustad, Roger Williams, 113.

  156. Quoted ibid.

  157. Quoted ibid., 114. Similar universal protections for religious freedom appeared in the Quaker William Penn’s 1682 laws for the government of Pennsylvania, but Penn made no explicit mention of Muslims in his treatise on the rights of conscience; see Hutson, Church and State, 37; Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 77.

  158. Gaustad, Roger Williams, 100.

  159. See Perry Miller, Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953); Leroy Moore, “Religious Liberty: Roger Williams and the Revolutionary Era,” Church History 34 (1965): 68.

  160. Moore, “Religious Liberty,” 68.

  161. Gaustad, Roger Williams, 117; Moore, “Religious Liberty,” 65–66; Martha Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 66–69.

  162. Gaustad asserts that neither Thomas Jefferson nor James Madison borrowed from Williams, but insists that Locke did. See Gaustad, Roger Williams, 117; Edwin S. Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 72.

  163. John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 60–61. Hereafter cited as John Locke.

  164. For the best comparison of the differences between Williams and Locke, see Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience, 67–68.

  165. Moore, “Religious Liberty,” 66. For the Christian underpinnings of Locke’s theory, see Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke’s Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12–20.

  166. Marshall, John Locke, 367. This idea of a Christian duty is Marshall’s idea.

  167. I am indebted to the pathbreaking work on Locke and Islam by G. A. Russell, “Introduction: The Seventeenth Century: The Age of ‘Arabick,’ ” 1–19, and “The Impact of The Philosophus Autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke, and the Society of Friends,” 236–53, both in The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. G. A. Russell (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994); Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 1–19, 67–77; G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 113 n. 36, 221, 265–68; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 388–95, 593–617.

  168. Russell, “Philosophus,” 237.

  169. Ibid., 8.

  170. Matar, Islam in Britain, 1–20, 21–49.

  171. While Russell believes this to be the case (“Philosophus,” 236–38), Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 267 n. 258, disputes this, pointing out that Locke never took exams in Arabic, but instead focused on Latin and Hebrew at Westminster.

  172. Russell, “Philosophus,” 239; Toomer, Eastern Wisedome, 113 n. 36.

  173. Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 389–90.

  174. Quoted in Russell, “Philosophus,” 242.

  175. Matar, Islam in Britain, 98–102.

  176. Russell, “Philosophus,” 225–26, 229–31. See Lenn Evan Goodman, trans., Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale (New York: Twayne, 1972). In this process of intellectual and spiritual self-realization, the protagonist evolves into autodidactic omniscience, which explains the English for the Latin title “The Self-Taught Philosopher.” For a study of how the text diffused throughout Europe and how it impacted Locke via Pococke, see Avner Ben-Zaken, Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 5, 9–10, 102–3, 119–24, 137–39, 161–70, 181.

  177. Samar Attar, The Vital Roots of the European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl’s Influence on Modern Western Thought (New York: Lexington Books, 2007), 49–60; Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 133–34.

  178. Attar, Vital Roots, 19–31.

  179. Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher, ed. Winton U. Solberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 11–12.

  180. Russell, “Philosophus,” 224–65.

  181. Ibid.; J. R. Milton, “Locke, John (1632–1704),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 58 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 34:216–28.

  182. Attar, Vital Roots, 49–50.

  183. Marshall, John Locke, 6–7, 11, 14, 59–60.

  184. John Locke, Epistola de Tolerantia: A Letter on Toleration, ed. Raymond Klibansky, trans. J. W. Gough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 3–4. For the seventeenth-century English translation, I also use John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), ed. James H. Tully (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010). I refer to the Latin version hereafter as Locke, Epistola, and the English as Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689); P. M. Holt, A Seventeenth-Century Defender of Islam: Henry Stubbe (1632–1676) and His Book (London: Dr. Williams’s Trust, 1972), 11.

  185. E. S. De Beer, ed., The Correspondence of John Locke, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1:109–12.

  186. Tully, introduction to Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 3–4.

  187. De Beer, Correspondence, 1:111.

  188. For the most in-depth study of Stubbe’s impact in England, but without reference to Locke, see Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 30–59.

  189. 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; P. M. Holt, Defender of Islam, 19; Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 30–59.

  190. 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), 72.

  191. Ibid., 2, 1.

  192. Ibid., 74–75; Holt, Defender of Islam, 20.

  193. Stubbe, Mahometanism, 89.

  194. Ibid., 141–42.

  195. Ibid., 145–46.

  196. James R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 71–72; Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1–59.

  197. Stubbe, Mahometanism, 180.

  198. Ibid., 181.

  199. Ibid., 181–84.

  200. László Kontler, “The Idea of Toleration and the Image of Islam in Early Enlightenment English Thought,” in Sous le signe des lumières: Articles rédigés à l’occasion du VIIe Congrès International de Lumières, ed. Eva Balazs (Budapest: n.p., 1987), 6–26. Humberto Garcia rightly argues that Stubbe’s references to “Islamic toleration” were used “as a beating stick against English toleration—the entitlement to freedom of conscience that in practice excluded many nonconformists for citizenship.” See Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 5–6.

  201. Stubbe, Mahometanism, 188.

  202. Ibid., 71.

  203. Marshall, John Locke, 6–7, 11, 14, 59–60.
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  204. Locke, Epistola, 81; Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 58–59; Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 71–72. Matar stresses not the Ottoman precedent but instead the importance of the English dissenter Edward Bagshaw’s work on toleration.

  205. Jacob, Stubbe, 147, 154, 161; Holt, Defender of Islam, 10.

  206. See John Toland, Nazarenus or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity (London, 1718), 14–16; J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 126. For this connection between Deists, Unitarians, and Islam, see also Kidd, “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?,” 785–86; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 391–92; Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 30–59.

  207. Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 51. The first use of the term “Unitarian” in English print dates to 1672, according to Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 1:199.

  208. Jacob, Stubbe, 155; David A. Pailin, Attitudes to Other Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 129–32.

  209. Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 393.

  210. Holt, “Arab History,” 292.

  211. Champion, Pillars, 99–132. This “Islamophilia” was a limited English religious and political construction, which embraced toleration, following the impact of Stubbe and Toland, but had its most decided impact on English literature rather than actual political change regarding Muslims on either side of the Atlantic. See Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3. These ideas are most fully explored as they move into the eighteenth-century by Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1–59. For a revisionist view of early Islamic history as comprised of a collective of monotheist “believers” that included Jews and Christians as well as Muslims that Socinian/Unitarians might have hailed as their own, see Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2010).