Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders
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But for the most part the example of Islam was put to disparaging use, and American Protestants of all denominations also learned to deploy it against fellow Christians when they deviated theologically.52 In 1676, Roger Williams, the Puritan whose heterodox ideas led to his banishment from Massachusetts Bay, summoned anti-Islamic imagery to condemn the Quakers at his new colony in Providence, Rhode Island. Williams reiterated that the Qur’an was an invention of the Prophet Muhammad’s when he charged that George Fox, the founder of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, likewise laid false claims to divine inspiration.53 According to medieval Catholic lore that was later adopted by Protestants, the Prophet had trained a dove, the Christian symbol of the Holy Spirit, to trick his followers into believing his revelation divine.54 Yet Williams also correctly identified the core Islamic tenet that Muhammad, the seal of the prophets and God’s final messenger, superseded the revelations of both Moses and Jesus, earlier prophets sent by the same divine source. Williams thus concluded that both Muslims and Quakers were deceived by false revelations.55
In spite of his vehement condemnation of George Fox, however, Williams admitted and tolerated Quakers in his new colony when they would have been executed in Massachusetts Bay. Similarly, his defamation of Islam’s founder belied his very different views about the proper treatment of individual Muslims, as will be detailed in the next chapter.
Even the dramatic, compelling sermons of the Great Awakening, a revival of evangelical Protestant religious fervor throughout the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, featured preachers who applied such anti-Islamic rhetoric to new circumstances both theological and personal. The American Congregational pastor Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), a key figure in the movement, preached and wrote against Islam, contending that the destruction of both the Catholic Church and Islam would usher in the Judgment Day foretold in the book of Revelation.56
Around this time, the itinerant British evangelical preacher George Whitefield (1714–1770) made several trips across the Atlantic to great acclaim. Whitefield was popular, but he also harshly condemned an Anglican bishop, stating that he was “no more a true Christian than Muhammad, or an infidel.”57 But such insults were so commonly used that even Whitefield himself was not spared similar attacks: his own former printer in London showered him with anti-Islamic slurs, calling him “a Mahomet, a Caesar, an impostor, a Don Quixote, a devil, the beast, a man of sin, the Antichrist.”58
In 1739, multitudes flocked to hear Whitefield’s sermons in Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin observed that the local clergy refused to let him preach from their pulpits, and so “he was obliged to preach in the fields.” To remedy the “inclemencies” attendant on these outdoor meetings, a new building was commissioned by the city’s trustees “expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion who might desire to say something to the people of Philadelphia.” Franklin added that “the building’s design” would not cater to any particular sect, “so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mahometanism to us, he would find a pulpit in his service.”59 Franklin’s apparently universal religious toleration and inclusion of Islam in planning this new Philadelphia religious gathering site ignored the reality that even if a Muslim cleric were to be dispatched from the hated regime of the Ottoman Turks, Whitefield and other Protestants would certainly have monopolized the building to demonize Islam.60 Franklin’s inclusion of Islam as a potential American faith was a decidedly unusual point of view, one that the majority of Protestant Americans would have abhorred and rejected.
DESPOTISM AND TYRANNY: BRITISH AND AMERICAN POLITICAL DEPICTIONS OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, 1720–76
The view of the Prophet as a militant zealot laid the foundation of the idea that the Ottoman Empire, ruled by the sultan and his standing army of janissaries, was the epitome of tyranny. In this political defamation, the pope and the Catholic powers, such as France and Spain, were again linked to the Ottomans, just as Islam and Catholicism were conflated to represent the Antichrist in apocryphal imagery.61 As colonists, rebels, and citizens of a new nation, Americans, long fed Protestant eschatological dogma, rapidly adopted these political fears of Islam and Catholicism. Later these suspicions would also influence prejudices about Muslims and Catholics as citizens of the new country.
Eighteenth-century American hatred of the Ottoman Empire was further fueled by anti-government tracts evoking the Whig ideology then emerging in England. These treatises emphasized the importance of individual rights, including the natural right to form a government by compact, exercise freedom of speech and the press, and worship freely without government control.62 Inherent in these uniquely British liberties was the belief that a government that infringed on these rights could be legitimately overthrown. The Whigs proposed the Ottoman regime as an antithesis of these ideals, commonly calling the sultan’s subjects his “slaves.” Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Ottomans depicted as the symbol of despotism allowed Englishmen to make veiled criticisms of their own government.63 The Whig characterization of the Ottomans would eventually cross the Atlantic and become the antithesis of American political ideals. Americans thus sought to assert their rights as British subjects, in opposition to Ottoman and all other Islamic governments—a pattern that would prevail through the Revolution and during the framing and ratification of the Constitution.64
Among the Whig texts, those of John Trenchard (1662–1723) and Thomas Gordon (d. 1750) especially influenced the American revolutionaries. The two first united to produce a London weekly called the Independent Whig, as a vehicle to attack the establishment of religion. From 1720 to 1723, Trenchard and Gordon together adopted the pen name Cato the Younger (95–46 BCE), after the Roman critic of political corruption, authoring a series of tracts known as Cato’s Letters, or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, first issued in the London Journal and later produced as a book.65 In these essays, they would repeatedly vilify the Ottoman Empire and North African states as symbols of Islamic religious and political tyranny in order to advance their Whig agenda.66
In one essay on absolute monarchy, Trenchard and Gordon depicted the Ottoman sultan’s “power” as “absolutely despotick: His will, that is to say, his lust, his maggots, or his rage, is his only law, and the only bounds to the authority of the vice-regent of God.”67 Likewise, Sultan Ismail of Morocco (r. 1672–1727) was called a despot, “an armed tyrant” who waged “unrelenting war … upon his unarmed subjects.”68 This Whig example referred to North African naval forces’ attacks on English ships by Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya beginning in the sixteenth century. The British navy would quell the threat by 1750, but when Trenchard and Gordon were writing Cato’s Letters, North African pirates still dominated the seas.69
Taking a page from Protestant polemic, Cato’s Letters tied tyranny to Islam in asserting that the problem with all Islamic governments was the faith they shared: “the Mahometan religion, which enjoins a blind submission to all [the sultan’s] commands, on a pain of damnation,” leaving the sultan’s subjects in “abject postures of crouching slaves.” Yet the authors of Cato’s Letters were also aware that this extreme characterization of the Ottomans, though useful political rhetoric, was not fully accurate. Even the janissaries, those most feared, musket-bearing Ottoman troops, the authors of Cato’s Letters admitted, sometimes “killed the tyrants.”70 Throughout the sixteenth century, in fact, local uprisings in Damascus, Macedonia, and Baghdad plagued the Ottoman Empire. In 1622 Osman II (r. 1618–22) became the first sultan to be assassinated by janissary revolt, setting an unfortunate precedent. After him, others would also be deposed, including Mehmed IV in 1687, in the aftermath of the second failed siege of Vienna. Trenchard and Gordon would also have known that in 1703 a janissary rebellion forced the abdication of the sultan Mustafa II (r. 1695–1703).71 But the authors of Cato’s Letters may not have known—and certainly never acknowledged—that in this last uprising the milita
ry elite in Istanbul were also joined by members of the ulama, or religious authorities, and tradesmen. So much for the British belief that Islam fostered mindless political passivity.
In a tract entitled “Arbitrary Government proved incompatible with true Religion, whether Natural or Revealed,” Trenchard and Gordon argued that “true” religion could not “subsist under tyrannical governments.” They claimed that the Islamic faith of the Ottoman Empire was “founded on imposture, blended with outrageous and avowed violence; and by their religion, the imperial executioner is, next to their Alcoran, the most sacred thing amongst them,”72 views that echoed those of Prideaux, whose work on matters theological and historical was well known to both authors.73 The blend of imposture and violence linked to the Qur’an found a ready audience among Protestants in Britain and the American colonies.
Predictably, the Ottoman Turkish sultan (termed “the Turk”) and the pope as the two heads of the Antichrist appeared again in one of Cato’s Letters, reiterating the Protestant idea promoted since the sixteenth century. Thus an originally theological symbol was transformed in these tracts into a political vision of individual oppression:
[W]hen people are taught to reverence, butchers, robbers, and tyrants, under the reverend name of rulers, to adore the names and persons of men, though their actions be the actions of devils: Then here is confirmed and accomplished servitude, the servitude of the body, secured by the servitude of the mind, oppression fortified by delusion. This is the height of human slavery. By this the Turk and Pope reign. They hold their horrid and sanguinary authority by false reverence, as much as the sword.74
The dichotomies were clear and intractable on both sides of the Atlantic: Islamic imposture versus Protestant Christian truth and Ottoman tyranny versus English liberty.
These anti-Islamic tracts continued to inspire American revolutionaries, who might have read reprints of Cato’s Letters in newspapers from New England to the southern colonies.75 And so when they began to apply the Whig political theory of Cato’s Letters in defense of their rights, the American rebels defamed British tyranny in anti-Islamic terms.
Samuel West, a Congregational minister in Massachusetts, wrote in 1776 “On the Right to Rebel against Governors.” As he argued, for American rebels, the British were now the new “merciless tyrants” whose “barbarity” surpassed even that of the Ottomans—the ultimate political insult.76 West’s tactic had been pioneered by Protestants of all denominations, who had long impugned their theological foes in the same way. By the American Revolution, the slur best understood on both sides of the Atlantic, whether theological or political, remained an unfavorable comparison to Islam.77
PROBLEMATIC TERMS FOR MUSLIMS AND THE QUR’AN INHERITED BY AMERICANS FROM EUROPE
Embedded within “Turk” and “Mahometan,” the two most popular European terms for Muslims, were older, more pejorative connotations. The term “Turk” was often used as a synonym for “Muslim,” even though Turks were a small portion of an enormous variety of ethnic and linguistic identities in the Islamic world, and it was not a neutral designation. Reflecting fears of Ottoman conquests, a “Turk” in English-language usage since the sixteenth century signified “a cruel, rigorous, or tyrannical man” capable of barbaric behavior.78 Even when the Ottoman military threat subsided in Europe, their continued aggression from the North African coast (as ethnic rulers of all pirate states except Morocco) kept the term in use on both sides of the Atlantic. These multiple negative connotations survived in American religious and political discourse through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Another sixteenth-century English word, “Mahometan,” incorrectly identified a Muslim as a worshipper of “Mahomet,” or Muhammad, rather than as a worshipper of God alone.79 This misrepresentation of a basic Islamic tenet became popular in America, as indicated by a variety of spellings: “Mahomedan,” “Mahommedan,” and “Musselman.”80 (Thomas Jefferson had his own orthographic variation of the word: “Mahamedan.”) American reference to the faith as “Mahometanism” rather than Islam, as both Catholics and Protestants had historically done in Europe, thus compounded inherited European misconceptions of Islamic beliefs.81
Englishmen and Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also referred to Muslims with more ethnically accurate designations. By 1785, various American newspapers used the terms “Arab,” “Moroccan,” “Tunisian,” and “Tripolitan.” The term “Moor” was more problematic in origin and application.82 This English word derived from the Latin Maurus, meaning someone from Mauretania, the name for the northwestern region of North Africa since Roman times. Ethnically, a Moor could be a Berber or an Arab, who had conquered and ruled the Iberian Peninsula until the Reconquista, while some still remained as a subject population until 1614. As late as the seventeenth century, the term also referred to a person of black or dark skin, in which case it was also rendered as “blackamoor.”83 A tertiary meaning of “Moor” was Muslim, although Muslims did not use this term for themselves.
If words for Muslim were fraught with complexities, so was the word for the Islamic sacred text. The Arabic meaning of the word is “Recitation,” a reference to the oral revelation of what, after the Prophet’s death, became a book. The exact transliteration of the Arabic characters into English should be rendered Qur’an, but this spelling was never used in Europe during the medieval or early modern period. More prevalent in both French and English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the term “Alcoran,” which wrongly fused the Arabic definite article, al, with the French spelling “Coran.” So when Europeans called it “the Alcoran,” they were effectively terming it “the the Coran,” a convention that Voltaire recognized as an idiocy, even while maintaining it.84 “Koran,” another common spelling in the eighteenth century, was what George Sale would use for the title of his 1734 English translation, which Thomas Jefferson would eventually acquire for his library. But Americans preferred Alcoran, or “the Alcoran of Mahomet,” wrongly intimating that the Prophet was the sacred text’s author.
With such distortions of Islam and its adherents prevalent, fictional representations could only worsen popular misunderstandings. The following analysis of two eighteenth-century works reminds us of the choice that European and American authors faced in representing Islam: to reprise and elaborate standard misconceptions, or to depict the faith and its adherents more accurately. The latter approach would ultimately prove too extreme for eighteenth-century American Protestant audiences.
THE AMERICAN RECEPTION OF EUROPEAN IDEAS ABOUT ISLAM AND AN AMERICAN FICTIONAL ACCOUNT OF THE RELIGION, 1742–97
The first play about Islam performed in America was written by François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire (1694–1778). Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète, ostensibly about Islam’s founding era, was first staged in Paris in 1742, two years before an English-language production in London. By 1776, a revival of the play had become a hit on the London stage. During the Revolutionary War, Mahomet would be performed on both sides, first by the British troops in 1780, and for American and French allied forces two years later.85 In France, Britain, and America, this play was appropriated as a template for religious and political attacks against various enemies, foreign and domestic, all of them Christians. Voltaire had chosen to depict only the Prophet’s aggressive pursuit of his political ends, a caricature who was both a religious impostor and a political fanatic. Through the filter of a distorted Islamic past, Voltaire intended French audiences to receive a more general message about the evils of religious persecution and intolerance. At a time when Catholic violence against Protestants was a national policy, Voltaire used an imagined Islamic context to avoid direct censure from the clergy and the government. But his ploy failed to fool Catholic censors. The play would find a more receptive audience when reinterpreted in British and American contexts. In the former, with the addition of new prologues, newspaper advertisements, and reviews, this play ostensibly about Muhammad became freighted with co
ncerns about religion and political liberty.86 Americans at war with Britain would follow suit in adapting the play’s Muslim villains to serve their ideological ends.
In contrast to Voltaire’s distorted representation of Islam, the American Royall Tyler’s 1797 novel The Algerine Captive advanced a more accurate depiction of the faith. Tyler claimed his protagonist’s captivity in Algiers was based on facts culled from real American experiences, in line with an older British genre of North African captivity narratives with which Americans were familiar.87 Unlike Voltaire, Tyler allowed his Muslim characters to speak forcefully and often accurately about their beliefs, and in doing so, he criticized European authors for their bigotry against Islam. Along the way, the author condemned Christian religious intolerance and castigated the practice of slavery in both America (by white Americans) and North Africa (by Muslims).88 Like Voltaire’s play, The Algerine Captive provided an opportunity for Americans to reflect upon their own most pressing religious and political issues through the prism of an Islamic context.89 But both literary efforts revealed more about their authors and audiences than about their ostensible subjects.90