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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  In 1647, John Cotton responded to what he deemed outlandish ideas with another tract entitled The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lamb. After asserting that he had not personally persecuted Williams, Cotton refused Williams’s analogy of toleration and leaving judgment to God as described in Matthew; to do so was to allow the spread of “dangerous” and “damnable infection.”133 Williams had the final word in 1652, the last year of Cotton’s life, when he published another attack against him in The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody. Addressed to the English Parliament, Williams’s new tract cited the example of Holland, which he said had “paid so dearly for the purchase of their freedoms,” but had finally learned “that one poor lesson of setting absolutely the consciences of all men free.”134

  Williams had been, at least for a few months in 1638 or 1639, a Baptist.135 Indeed, he helped found America’s first Baptist church in Providence, but he began to regret his decision to join after a few months.136 Ultimately, though Williams realized that no earthly organized church could fulfill his needs, he would continue to welcome Baptists fleeing persecution in Massachusetts for Rhode Island, and also the Quakers, a sect persecuted in both England and North America. Such was his principled tolerance that the refuge he gave Quakers came despite having disputed Quaker leaders in Newport for three days in 1672 and writing a tract attacking their beliefs in 1676.137

  In 1655, while serving as the elected president of the Providence Plantations, Williams described his vision of the ideal government, one that made room for Muslims, Jews, and Catholics, as long as they obeyed civil authority in earthly matters.138 Almost a decade after he had first imagined universal toleration, Williams adopted a new metaphor to define his ideal society:139

  There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls in one ship, whose weal and woe is common, and is a true picture of a commonwealth, or a human combination or society. It hath fallen out sometimes, that both papists and protestants, Jews and Turks, may be embarked on one ship; upon which supposal I affirm, that all the liberty of conscience, that ever I pleaded for, turns upon these two hinges—that none of the papists, protestants, Jews or Turks, be forced to come to the ship’s prayers or worship, if they practice any. I further add, that I never denied, that notwithstanding this liberty, the commander of the ship ought to command the ship’s course, yea, and also command that justice, peace and sobriety, be kept and practiced, both among the seamen and all the passengers.140

  In Williams’s ideal, religiously plural society, passengers might even refuse to come to prayers.141 In a swipe at Puritan Massachusetts, he described his model as “the true picture of a commonwealth,” a society whose “weal and woe” is common to all.

  In reality, no Muslims, Jews, or Catholics applied to join Williams’s experiment in religious liberty and pluralism. In 1656 or 1658, a few Jews from Spain and Portugal arrived in Newport, only to leave before a second group arrived in 1678.142 But they lived outside of Williams’s Providence jurisdiction. There is thus no way to know whether the political equality for those non-Christians who figured so consistently in his writings ever would have worked in practice.143 Still, it seems likely that at the very least he would have offered the adherents of Islam safe harbor in Providence. He had despised, debated, and vilified the beliefs of the Quakers by comparing them to Muslims, and yet in practice, Williams had continued to offer Quakers a protected place in his colony.

  TOLERATION IN AMERICAN PRACTICE: THE FLUSHING REMONSTRANCE, 1657

  Two years after Williams framed his vision of a multireligious ship of state, thirty-one residents of the Dutch territory of Flushing, in New Amsterdam (now Long Island, New York), would advocate a similar tolerated protection for both Christians and non-Christians. They had never read Roger Williams, but as Williams himself was well aware, the Dutch had their own history of religious toleration. Freedom of conscience had been guaranteed by Article 13 of the Dutch Union of Utrecht in 1579.144 Yet how applicable was this precedent across the Atlantic? That would become clear when the principle of freedom of conscience was threatened in 1657.

  Like the Puritans of Massachusetts, Dutch authorities feared the spread of Protestant sects outside their tradition, most particularly Baptists and Quakers.145 Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director-general of the territory, “commanded” that “no conventicles or meetings shall be kept in this Province” other than those of the Dutch Reformed Church.146 By Dutch law, a “conventicle” was defined as a public gathering for worship that included many families, and it was a legal practice for the state’s Dutch Reformed Church, but not for other religions in Holland.147 While not abrogating the guarantee of liberty of conscience, Stuyvesant did threaten to curtail freedom of public worship for those outside the state church. But this distinction between individual religious belief and public practice was not acceptable to some in Stuyvesant’s colony.148

  Thirty-one residents of Flushing and Jamaica signed what would later be known as the Flushing Remonstrance, astutely characterized by Neil Kamil as “seventeenth-century ‘multiculturalism’ … extending even to the Jews and Islam.”149 The signatories charged Stuyvesant with interfering in matters of conscience and refused to participate in what they deemed the persecution of Quakers and Baptists. As an alternative, they promoted a form of “Christian inclusiveness,” which now had precedents in Rhode Island, England, and the European continent:150

  [W]ee desire therefore in this case not to judge lest wee be judged neither to Condemn lest wee bee Condemned but rather let every man stand and fall to his own. Maister wee are bounde by the Law to doe good unto all men, especially to those of the Household of faith.151

  In addition to proclaiming the individuality of faith, the signatories made the point that the state was without power to mediate for human salvation: “who shall pleade for us in the case of Conscience betwixt god and our owne soules the power of this world can neither attack us neither excuse us for if god justifye who can Condemn and if god Condemn there is none can justifye.”152

  Referring to the standard in their native Holland for a freedom of conscience that included Muslims (termed “Turkes and Egiptians”) and Jews, they asserted:

  The law of love peace and libertie in the states extending to Jewes Turkes and Egiptians as they are Considered the sonnes of Adam which is the glory of the outward State of Holland, soe love peace and libertie extending to all in Christ Jesus Condemns hatred, warre and bondage … desireing to doe unto all men as wee desire all men shoulde doe unto us which is the true law both of Church and State.153

  Such protestations, however, did not stop Director-General Stuyvesant from arresting a notable Quaker named John Bowne, imprisoning him, and, ultimately, banishing him from Dutch territory, just as he would arrest and banish Tobias Feake, the first to sign the Remonstrance.154

  THE IMMEDIATE FAILURE OF WILLIAMS’S IDEAS AND THEIR POSSIBLE LATER IMPACT, 1663

  In 1663, Roger Williams was forced by competing claims to apply for a new charter for his Providence colony, finally receiving one from Charles II (r. 1660–85). In it the king confirmed the individual’s right to freedom of religious practice:

  Our royal will and pleasure is that no person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be in any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called into question, for difference in opinion in matters of religion, [that] do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said colony; but that all and every persons may, from time to time, and at all times hereafter, freely and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgments and consciences in matters of religious concernment.155

  Williams joyfully declared, “Our Charter excels all in New England or the world as to the souls of men.”156 An exact echo of this promise of freedom of conscience “in matters of religious concernment” would appear in 1664 in New Jersey’s charter and again in 1665 in the charter for the two Carolinas.157 But Williams rejoiced too soon. His treatises on religious persecution failed to persuade the English Parliam
ent to extend his vision of toleration to Muslims or Jews.158 Failing to become a legal precedent, his precocious idea about extending liberty of conscience to Muslims would have no direct influence on Thomas Jefferson or other pivotal figures of the American Revolutionary era more than one hundred years later.159 Even his books, which remained rare in Massachusetts, would not be accessible to most Americans. Not until the nineteenth century would any work of his be republished in the United States.160

  Nevertheless, many of Williams’s key ideas appear to resurface in John Locke’s pivotal A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), though a direct connection is difficult to prove.161 Locke (1632–1704) was only twelve when Roger Williams’s Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution for Cause of Conscience was published in London, but forty-five years later he would reach remarkably similar conclusions concerning the toleration of Muslims.162 Locke, a great borrower, never credited Roger Williams as a source, possibly because he had other, closer sources of inspiration.163 And while both men supported the religious liberty of Muslims and their civil toleration in a Christian polity, they approached the issue differently.164

  In his letter, Locke emphasized a new theory of inalienable natural rights, derived from reason, in contrast to Williams’s exclusively theological claim.165 Locke’s ideas about toleration evolved over time; indeed, they reversed direction from intolerance early in his career toward toleration as a state policy in his later thought. His references to Muslims, however, remained constant, despite his change of mind on the broader, more pressing issue of the toleration of Christian heretics, or dissenters, from the Anglican Church. As with Williams, his views would force him to write about religious toleration in exile. Ultimately, Locke would first promote “civil rights” for Muslims, moving beyond Williams, but he would not divorce this idea completely from the precedents of the Gospels. He maintained that it was a Christian duty to tolerate most others in a predominantly Anglican Protestant state.166

  JOHN LOCKE IN THE “AGE OF ARABICK”: HIS INTEREST IN ISLAM AND TOLERATION, 1646–71

  In England, “the Age of Arabick,” to use G. A. Russell’s evocative phrase, began during John Locke’s lifetime as a thinker and writer, and Locke’s education included exposure to Arabic and Islam as well as scholars of Islamic history.167 A chair in Arabic was established at Oxford University in 1636, when Locke was four years old.168 Underlying this new interest in the language was a combination of theological, diplomatic, and commercial developments. Protestants who wished to study the Hebrew Bible found Arabic, also a Semitic language, philologically helpful. In 1580 Elizabeth I had licensed the Turkey Company, which a decade later became the Levant Company, to do business in the Ottoman Empire.169 More immediate contacts resulted from the rise of North African pirates in the Atlantic and Mediterranean from Elizabethan times to the mid-eighteenth century. The threat to English shipping necessitated constant attempts at negotiating treaties and ransoming English captives, for which Arabic was needed.170

  Locke probably first studied Arabic in 1647 at Westminster, his secondary school, where his headmaster emphasized the language, having become convinced at Oxford of its importance.171 At Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1652, while he also studied history, astronomy, and mathematics, Locke probably attended twice-weekly Hebrew and Arabic instruction,172 delivered by Dr. Edward Pococke, who held the chair in both languages.173 While there is no evidence that he ever used the language in his research, it is known that Locke developed close friendships with those who taught and translated Arabic, and by 1660 Dr. Pococke was one of them, a professor “he most revered.”174 Locke would later also tutor Pococke’s son, also named Edward.

  Under his father’s supervision, the younger Pococke translated Hayy ibn Yaqzan, a medieval Arabic philosophical text by Ibn Tufayl, a native of Granada, who served at the court of a North African dynasty.175 The work, known as Philosophus Autodidactus in Latin, was an allegorical tale whose hero, alone on an island from infancy, demonstrates that his innate powers of observation and reason are sufficient to master all knowledge.176 The Arabic title in English stresses instead the relationship of the protagonist, Hayy (“Alive”), to his mind and soul’s realization of God.

  Pococke’s Latin translation created a sensation in Europe, where it was repeatedly reprinted, influencing many European thinkers, including the English Quaker George Keith.177 Translated later into English, the text inspired Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe.178 By 1721, the impact of the Islamic text would be noted across the Atlantic in Massachusetts, where the Puritan Cotton Mather took time off from his vilification of the Prophet as Antichrist to praise this medieval Muslim philosopher’s idea that reason and revelation could be reconciled in natural philosophy.179

  Locke may also have drawn inspiration for empirical philosophy in his Essay on Human Understanding from Pococke’s translation first published in 1671, the very year in which Locke began his Essay, which was published in 1690.180 Indeed, Locke’s concept of the human mind as a blank slate, capable of acquiring all knowledge though empirical observation, is tantalizingly similar to ideas expressed in the medieval Islamic philosopher’s allegory, even if Locke left no direct evidence of the influence of this work on his thought.181 As to Locke’s ideas on religious toleration, those exemplified by Hayy, who refuses to use coercion to rescue others from religious error and accepts the existence of other faiths, also bear comparison.182 But Locke had begun to read about toleration directly more than a decade earlier in the work of the English author Henry Stubbe.183

  HENRY STUBBE: TOLERATION AND A DEFENSE OF ISLAM, 1659–71

  Locke’s first documented interest in religious toleration was prompted by a 1659 treatise by Henry Stubbe (1632–1676), a fellow student of Arabic at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford.184 Stubbe’s An Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause, or a Discourse concerning the Rise and Extent of the Power of the Civil Magistrate in reference to Spiritual Affairs sought to define the proper limit of political authority regarding religion and outlined a history of religious toleration. After reading the book, Locke wrote the author full of praise for the “strength and vigor” of his style, suggesting that Stubbe expand his history of toleration to include Holland, France, and Poland.185 As to Stubbe’s belief that government authorities should not meddle in religion, and that individual faith was a matter better left between the believer and God, Locke, while not explicitly disagreeing, did not share these ideas at the time.186 He did, however, warn Stubbe that toleration for Catholics was a mistake, believing their loyalty to the pope made their civil allegiance suspect. The disagreement did not prevent him from signing his letter to Stubbe, “your Admirer.”187

  In 1671, the same year that Locke read Pococke’s Latin translation, Stubbe attempted the first sustained English defense of Islam and its Prophet. Presenting Islam as a more tolerant faith than Christianity, Stubbe contrasted it with his own Christian society’s intolerance, but his rigorous defense of Islam and critique of English religious persecution proved too inflammatory for publication, and his work circulated only in manuscript form.188

  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 drew heavily upon Dr. Pococke’s Latin translations of early Islamic history, suggesting that the author of the first English treatise defending Islam was, like Locke, unable or unwilling to use Arabic, or else found it unnecessary.189 Stubbe’s intention was to assault the “great untruths” and “little integrity” in Christian histories of Islam,190 single-handedly challenging a millennium of anti-Islamic Christian polemic. Unlike all of his predecessors, he characterized the seventh-century Islamic conquests of the Middle East as “that Stupendous Revolution.” He postulated that the triumph of Islam could be explained in part by Christianity’s being weak, rife with “irreligion, impiety, & division into Sects,”191 in what was clearly also a comment on circumstances in seventeenth-century England.

  But
while aiming to correct certain prevailing distortions, Stubbe made several glaring mistakes of his own. He claimed, for instance, that the Prophet traveled to North Africa and Spain during his lifetime, and served in Christian armies under a powerful early convert named Abu Bakr (d. 634), whom Stubbe claimed to be his uncle, but was actually his father-in-law.192 Finally, following one of the more common Christian misrepresentations of Islamic tradition, Stubbe insisted that the Prophet “wrote” the Qur’an.193

  Stubbe praised the Prophet as a political leader, contradicting what he described as “the Calumnies charged upon him by the Christians.” His Muhammad was an “extraordinary person,” of “ready Wit,” “penetrating Judgment,” and “undaunted courage,” who was “equally qualified for Actions of Warr, or the Arts of Peace and civil Government.”194 At the same time, Stubbe expressed admiration for Islam’s emphasis on the oneness of God and its rejection of the Trinity, which he attributed to the influence of Arianism, a Christian heresy.195 By implication, then, the Prophet Muhammad’s religion was not new; he had revived an early, truer form of Christianity, in which the Trinity and Jesus’s divinity were later corruptions.196 Clearly, Stubbe’s support for these unorthodox and unpopular ideas made him a Christian heretic.