Saturday, Oct 5, 2013 06:00 PM UTC
Our Founding Fathers included
Islam
Thomas Jefferson didn't just own a Quran -- he
engaged with Islam and fought to ensure the rights of Muslims
By
Denise
Spellberg
Excerpted from
"Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an"
[He] sais “neither Pagan nor Mahamedan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be
excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his
religion.” Thomas Jefferson, quoting John Locke, 1776
At a time when most Americans were uninformed, misinformed, or simply
afraid of Islam, Thomas Jefferson imagined Muslims as future citizens of
his new nation. His engagement with the faith began with the purchase of
a Qur’an eleven years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson’s Qur’an survives still in the Library of Congress, serving as
a symbol of his and early America’s complex relationship with Islam and
its adherents. That relationship remains of signal importance to this
day.
That he owned a Qur’an reveals Jefferson’s interest in the Islamic
religion, but it does not explain his support for the rights of Muslims.
Jefferson first read about Muslim “civil rights” in the work of one of
his intellectual heroes: the seventeenth-century English philosopher John
Locke. Locke had advocated the toleration of Muslimsand Jewsfollowing
in the footsteps of a few others in Europe who had considered the matter
for more than a century before him. Jefferson’s ideas about Muslim rights
must be understood within this older context, a complex set of
transatlantic ideas that would continue to evolve most markedly from the
sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.
Amid the interdenominational Christian violence in Europe, some
Christians, beginning in the sixteenth century, chose Muslims as the test
case for the demarcation of the theoretical boundaries of their
toleration for all believers. Because of these European precedents,
Muslims also became a part of American debates about religion and the
limits of citizenship. As they set about creating a new government in the
United States, the American Founders, Protestants all, frequently
referred to the adherents of Islam as they contemplated the proper scope
of religious freedom and individual rights among the nation’s present and
potential inhabitants. The founding generation debated whether the United
States should be exclusively Protestant or a religiously plural polity.
And if the latter, whether political equalitythe full rights of
citizenship, including access to the highest officeshould extend to
non-Protestants. The mention, then, of Muslims as potential citizens of
the United States forced the Protestant majority to imagine the
parameters of their new society beyond toleration. It obliged them to
interrogate the nature of religious freedom: the issue of a “religious
test” in the Constitution, like the ones that would exist at the state
level into the nineteenth century; the question of “an establishment of
religion,” potentially of Protestant Christianity; and the meaning and
extent of a separation of religion from government.
Resistance to the idea of Muslim citizenship was predictable in the
eighteenth century. Americans had inherited from Europe almost a
millennium of negative distortions of the faith’s theological and
political character. Given the dominance and popularity of these
anti-Islamic representations, it was startling that a few notable
Americans not only refused to exclude Muslims, but even imagined a day
when they would be citizens of the United States, with full and equal
rights. This surprising, uniquely American egalitarian defense of Muslim
rights was the logical extension of European precedents already
mentioned. Still, on both sides of the Atlantic, such ideas were marginal
at best. How, then, did the idea of the Muslim as a citizen with rights
survive despite powerful opposition from the outset? And what is the fate
of that ideal in the twenty-first century?
This book provides a new history of the founding era, one that explains
how and why Thomas Jefferson and a handful of others adopted and then
moved beyond European ideas about the toleration of Muslims. It should be
said at the outset that these exceptional men were not motivated by any
inherent appreciation for Islam as a religion. Muslims, for most American
Protestants, remained beyond the outer limit of those possessing
acceptable beliefs, but they nevertheless became emblems of two competing
conceptions of the nation’s identity: one essentially preserving the
Protestant status quo, and the other fully realizing the pluralism
implied in the Revolutionary rhetoric of inalienable and universal
rights. Thus while some fought to exclude a group whose inclusion they
feared would ultimately portend the undoing of the nation’s Protestant
character, a pivotal minority, also Protestant, perceiving the ultimate
benefit and justice of a religiously plural America, set about defending
the rights of future Muslim citizens.
They did so, however, not for the sake of actual Muslims, because none
were known at the time to live in America. Instead, Jefferson and others
defended Muslim rights for the sake of “imagined Muslims,” the promotion
of whose theoretical citizenship would prove the true universality of
American rights. Indeed, this defense of imagined Muslims would also
create political room to consider the rights of other despised minorities
whose numbers in America, though small, were quite real, namely Jews and
Catholics. Although it was Muslims who embodied the ideal of inclusion,
Jews and Catholics were often linked to them in early American debates,
as Jefferson and others fought for the rights of all
non-Protestants.
In 1783, the year of the nation’s official independence from Great
Britain, George Washington wrote to recent Irish Catholic immigrants in
New York City. The American Catholic minority of roughly twenty-five
thousand then had few legal protections in any state and, because of
their faith, no right to hold political office in New York. Washington
insisted that “the bosom of America” was “open to receive . . . the
oppressed and the persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall
welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges.” He would
also write similar missives to Jewish communities, whose total population
numbered only about two thousand at this time.
One year later, in 1784, Washington theoretically enfolded Muslims into
his private world at Mount Vernon. In a letter to a friend seeking a
carpenter and bricklayer to help at his Virginia home, he explained that
the workers’ beliefsor lack thereofmattered not at all: “If they are
good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be
Mahometans [Muslims], Jews or Christian of an[y] Sect, or they may be
Atheists.” Clearly, Muslims were part of Washington’s understanding of
religious pluralismat least in theory. But he would not have actually
expected any Muslim applicants.
Although we have since learned that there were in fact Muslims resident
in eighteenth-century America, this book demonstrates that the Founders
and their generational peers never knew it. Thus their Muslim
constituency remained an imagined, future one. But the fact that both
Washington and Jefferson attached to it such symbolic significance is not
accidental. Both men were heir to the same pair of opposing European
traditions.
The first, which predominated, depicted Islam as the antithesis of the
“true faith” of Protestant Christianity, as well as the source of
tyrannical governments abroad. To tolerate Muslimsto accept them as part
of a majority Protestant Christian societywas to welcome people who
professed a faith most eighteenth-century Europeans and Americans
believed false, foreign, and threatening. Catholics would be similarly
characterized in American Protestant founding discourse. Indeed, their
faith, like Islam, would be deemed a source of tyranny and thus
antithetical to American ideas of liberty.
In order to counter such fears, Jefferson and other supporters of
non-Protestant citizenship drew upon a second, less popular but crucial
stream of European thought, one that posited the toleration of Muslims as
well as Jews and Catholics. Those few Europeans, both Catholic and
Protestant, who first espoused such ideas in the sixteenth century often
died for them. In the seventeenth century, those who advocated universal
religious toleration frequently suffered death or imprisonment,
banishment or exile, the elites and common folk alike. The ranks of these
so-called heretics in Europe included Catholic and Protestant peasants,
Protestant scholars of religion and political theory, and fervid
Protestant dissenters, such as the first English Baptistsbut no people
of political power or prominence. Despite not being organized, this
minority consistently opposed their coreligionists by defending
theoretical Muslims from persecution in Christian-majority
states.
As a member of the eighteenth-century Anglican establishment and a
prominent political leader in Virginia, Jefferson represented a different
sort of proponent for ideas that had long been the hallmark of dissident
victims of persecution and exile. Because of his elite status, his own
endorsement of Muslim citizenship demanded serious consideration in
Virginiaand the new nation. Together with a handful of like-minded
American Protestants, he advanced a new, previously unthinkable national
blueprint. Thus did ideas long on the fringe of European thought flow
into the mainstream of American political discourse at its
inception.
Not that these ideas found universal welcome. Even a man of Jefferson’s
national reputation would be attacked by his political opponents for his
insistence that the rights of all believers should be protected from
government interference and persecution. But he drew support from a broad
range of constituencies, including Anglicans (or Episcopalians), as well
as dissenting Presbyterians and Baptists, who suffered persecution
perpetrated by fellow Protestants. No denomination had a unanimously
positive view of non-Protestants as full American citizens, yet support
for Muslim rights was expressed by some members of each.
What the supporters of Muslim rights were proposing was extraordinary
even at a purely theoretical level in the eighteenth century. American
citizenshipwhich had embraced only free, white, male Protestantswas in
effect to be abstracted from religion. Race and gender would continue as
barriers, but not so faith. Legislation in Virginia would be just the
beginning, the First Amendment far from the end of the story; in fact,
Jefferson, Washington, and James Madison would work toward this ideal of
separation throughout their entire political lives, ultimately leaving it
to others to carry on and finish the job. This book documents, for the
first time, how Jefferson and others, despite their negative, often
incorrect understandings of Islam, pursued that ideal by advocating the
rights of Muslims and all non-Protestants.
A decade before George Washington signaled openness to Muslim laborers in
1784 he had listed two slave women from West Africa among his taxable
property. “Fatimer” and “Little Fatimer” were a mother and daughterboth
indubitably named after the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima (d. 632).
Washington advocated Muslim rights, never realizing that as a slaveholder
he was denying Muslims in his own midst any rights at all, including the
right to practice their faith. This tragic irony may well have also
recurred on the plantations of Jefferson and Madison, although proof of
their slaves’ religion remains less than definitive. Nevertheless, having
been seized and transported from West Africa, the first American Muslims
may have numbered in the tens of thousands, a population certainly
greater than the resident Jews and possibly even the Catholics. Although
some have speculated that a few former Muslim slaves may have served in
the Continental Army, there is little direct evidence any practiced Islam
and none that these individuals were known to the Founders. In any case,
they had no influence on later political debates about Muslim
citizenship.
The insuperable facts of race and slavery rendered invisible the very
believers whose freedoms men like Jefferson, Washington, and Madison
defended, and whose ancestors had resided in America since the
seventeenth century, as long as Protestants had. Indeed, when the
Founders imagined future Muslim citizens, they presumably imagined them
as white, because by the 1790s “full American citizenship could be
claimed by any free, white immigrant, regardless of ethnicity or
religious beliefs.”
The two actual Muslims Jefferson would wittingly meet during his lifetime
were not black West African slaves but North African ambassadors of
Turkish descent. They may have appeared to him to have more melanin than
he did, but he never commented on their complexions or race. (Other
observers either failed to mention it or simply affirmed that the
ambassador in question was not black.) But then Jefferson was interested
in neither diplomat for reasons of religion or race; he engaged them
because of their political power. (They were, of course, also
free.)
But even earlier in his political lifeas an ambassador, secretary of
state, and vice presidentJefferson had never perceived a predominantly
religious dimension to the conflict with North African Muslim powers,
whose pirates threatened American shipping in the Mediterranean and
eastern Atlantic. As this book demonstrates, Jefferson as president would
insist to the rulers of Tripoli and Tunis that his nation harbored no
anti-Islamic bias, even going so far as to express the extraordinary
claim of believing in the same God as those men.
The equality of believers that Jefferson sought at home was the same one
he professed abroad, in both contexts attempting to divorce religion from
politics, or so it seemed. In fact, Jefferson’s limited but unique
appreciation for Islam appears as a minor but active element in his
presidential foreign policy with North Africaand his most personal Deist
and Unitarian beliefs. The two were quite possibly entwined, with their
source Jefferson’s unsophisticated yet effective understanding of the
Qur’an he owned.
Still, as a man of his time, Jefferson was not immune to negative
feelings about Islam. He would even use some of the most popular
anti-Islamic images inherited from Europe to drive his early political
arguments about the separation of religion from government in Virginia.
Yet ultimately Jefferson and others not as well known were still able to
divorce the idea of Muslim citizenship from their dislike of Islam, as
they forged an “imagined political community,” inclusive beyond all
precedent.
The clash between principle and prejudice that Jefferson himself overcame
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains a test for the nation
in the twenty-first. Since the late nineteenth century, the United States
has in fact become home to a diverse and dynamic American Muslim
citizenry, but this population has never been fully welcomed. Whereas in
Jefferson’s time organized prejudice against Muslims was exercised
against an exclusively foreign and imaginary nonresident population,
today political attacks target real, resident American Muslim citizens.
Particularly in the wake of 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror, a
public discourse of anti-Muslim bigotry has arisen to justify depriving
American Muslim citizens of the full and equal exercise of their civil
rights.
For example, recent anti-Islamic slurs used to deny the legitimacy of a
presidential candidacy contained eerie echoes of founding precedents. The
legal possibility of a Muslim president was first discussed with vitriol
during debates involving America’s Founders. Thomas Jefferson would be
the first in the history of American politics to suffer the false charge
of being a Muslim, an accusation considered the ultimate Protestant slur
in the eighteenth century. That a presidential candidate in the
twenty-first century should have been subject to much the same false
attack, still presumed as politically damning to any real American Muslim
candidate’s potential for elected office, demonstrates the importance of
examining how the multiple images of Islam and Muslims first entered
American consciousness and how the rights of Muslims first came to be
accepted as national ideals. Ultimately, the status of Muslim citizenship
in America today cannot be properly appreciated without establishing the
historical context of its eighteenth-century origins.
Muslim American rights became a theoretical reality early on, but as a
practical one they have been much slower to evolve. In fact, they are
being tested daily. Recently, John Esposito, a distinguished historian of
Islam in contemporary America, observed, “Muslims are led to wonder: What
are the limits of this Western pluralism?” Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an
documents the origins of such pluralism in the United States in order to
illuminate where, when, and how Muslims were first included in American
ideals.
Until now, most historians have proposed that Muslims represented nothing
more than the incarnated antithesis of American values. These same voices
also insist that Protestant Americans always and uniformly defined both
the religion of Islam and its practitioners as inherently un-American.
Indeed, most historians posit that the emergence of the United States as
an ideological and political phenomenon occurred in opposition to
eighteenth-century concepts about Islam as a false religion and source of
despotic government. There is certainly evidence for these assumptions in
early American religious polemic, domestic politics, foreign policy, and
literary sources. There are, however, also considerable observations
about Islam and Muslims that cast both in a more affirmative light,
including key references to Muslims as future American citizens in
important founding debates about rights. These sources show that American
Protestants did not monolithically view Islam as “a thoroughly foreign
religion.”
This book documents the counterassertion that Muslims, far from being
definitively un-American, were deeply embedded in the concept of
citizenship in the United States since the country’s inception, even if
these inclusive ideas were not then accepted by the majority of
Americans. While focusing on Jefferson’s views of Islam, Muslims, and the
Islamic world, it also analyzes the perspectives of John Adams and James
Madison. Nor is it limited to these key Founders. The cast of those who
took part in the contest concerning the rights of Muslims, imagined and
real, is not confined to famous political elites but includes
Presbyterian and Baptist protestors against Virginia’s religious
establishment; the Anglican lawyers James Iredell and Samuel Johnston in
North Carolina, who argued for the rights of Muslims in their state’s
constitutional ratifying convention; and John Leland, an evangelical
Baptist preacher and ally of Jefferson and Madison in Virginia, who
agitated in Connecticut and Massachusetts in support of Muslim equality,
the Constitution, the First Amendment, and the end of established
religion at the state level.
The lives of two American Muslim slaves of West African origin, Ibrahima
Abd al-Rahman and Omar ibn Said, also intersect this narrative. Both were
literate in Arabic, the latter writing his autobiography in that
language. They remind us of the presence of tens of thousands of Muslim
slaves who had no rights, no voice, and no hope of American citizenship
in the midst of these early discussions about religious and political
equality for future, free practitioners of Islam.
Imagined Muslims, along with real Jews and Catholics, were the consummate
outsiders in much of America’s political discourse at the founding. Jews
and Catholics would struggle into the twentieth century to gain in
practice the equal rights assured them in theory, although even this
process would not entirely eradicate prejudice against either group.
Nevertheless, from among the original triad of religious outsiders in the
United States, only Muslims remain the objects of a substantial civic
discourse of derision and marginalization, still being perceived in many
quarters as not fully American. This book writes Muslims back into our
founding narrative in the hope of clarifying the importance of critical
historical precedents at a time when the idea of the Muslim as citizen
is, once more, hotly contested.
Excerpted from
“Thomas
Jefferson’s Qur’an” by Denise A. Spellberg. Copyright © 2013 by
Denise A. Spellberg. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of
Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/05/our_founding_fathers_included_islam/
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