Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders
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Polygamy and warfare, two aspects of Islam historically denigrated by Christian authors, also found a champion in Stubbe. Stubbe reminded readers that King David had been a polygamist. Rather than institutionalizing licentiousness, Stubbe argued, the Prophet had solved a social problem because, as he asserted strangely, “East and South” “there are far more Women than Men.” In the chapter devoted to “the justice of the Mahometan Warrs,” Stubbe refuted as “a falsehood” the notion that Islam was spread by the sword.197 At the same time, he noted that many Christian theologians had addressed spreading their own faith by force, a premise the author rejected.198
Stubbe emphasized that the Islamic precedent for the toleration of Christians and Jews came from the Qur’an, was practiced by the successors of the Prophet during the conquest of the Middle East, and continued to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire.199 The lesson for his readers? Toleration for fellow Christians would promote peaceful coexistence and prevent the sort of civil strife witnessed repeatedly in seventeenth-century England.200
Noting that “Christians and other Religions might peaceably subsist under their Protection, if they payed the Tribute demanded,” meaning the annual poll tax called the jizya, Stubbe implied that Christians defined as heretics in England might in fact be better treated in the Islamic world: “As Mahomet persecuted none for Religion, who believed one God & the day of Judgment, so lest of all the Christians, who, as we have seen before, enjoyed more of his Favours than any of the other Religions.”201 That he “did not see fit to publish” his manuscript may well suggest he knew that King Charles II would have answered such criticism with prison or worse.202
Stubbe’s treatise would remain unpublished during Locke’s lifetime, but as a friend and correspondent, Locke may have had access to the widely circulated manuscript.203 In his later work on toleration, Locke also notes the Ottoman Turkish toleration of Christians, but this does not appear to be the origin of his support for the “civil rights” of Muslims.204 Still, plagiarized parts of Stubbe’s manuscript would find their way into the English Deist Charles Blount’s Oracles of Reason (1693), four years after Locke’s first letter on toleration was published, as part of the connection between Deism’s remote but unitary God and the God of Islam that was first established in late-seventeenth-century England.205 A form of this heretical association with Islam would be linked to Locke at the end of his life.206
The partial appearance of Stubbe’s treatise in the Deist Blount’s work may have in turn provoked Humphrey Prideaux’s 1697 attack on the Prophet Muhammad, which was also intended as an indictment of the ideas of English Deists.207 By the end of the seventeenth century, not only Deists but Unitarians (as the Socinians, who rejected the Trinity, came to be known) and Muslims were “linked in the public mind,” according to James Jacob.208 More recently, John Marshall has asserted that “Islam was thus central to tolerationist debates in late seventeenth-century England because of the similarities alleged between Islam and anti-Trinitarianism,” including both Deism and Unitarian thought.209 Both were heresies in need of extirpation in the eyes of Anglican Protestants like Humphrey Prideaux, who compared them to Islam.210 By contrast, the English minority who embraced Deist or Unitarian viewpoints often represented Islam in a positive light, presenting it as one of three similar “pristine” monotheisms, its revelations equal to but not surpassing those of the Old and New Testaments.211 But such relatively positive views of Islam were limited to the extent that the faith mirrored their own heterodox Deist and Unitarian Christian-based theologies. In 1682, English Unitarians attempted to meet with the Moroccan ambassador in London to discuss their theological unity.212 Locke knew about this meeting and wrote an acquaintance for a description of the Muslim ambassador.213 He would eventually in his work on toleration defend both Unitarians and Muslims from persecution. In other ways, the same English Protestants also simultaneously denigrated Islam in order to critique repressive Anglican Christianity, the established faith of the English government. And so Islam, understood on its own terms, remained selectively overwritten and frequently distorted.214
Views like Prideaux’s anti-Islamic, anti-Deist, and anti-Unitarian arguments would prevail among Protestants into the eighteenth century.215 Prideaux eventually rose through the Anglican clerical ranks to become dean of Norwich.216 In contrast, Stubbe’s surreptitiously circulated manuscript in defense of Islam would not be published in England until 1911, thanks to a subscription by a group of Muslims residing in London.217 Although Humberto Garcia has emphasized the importance and scope of Stubbe’s underground circulation in England, his views in praise of Islamic toleration did not contribute directly to debates about Muslim rights or citizenship in the Anglo-Atlantic world, having been limited to the reform of English religious and political liberties.218
Locke’s long association with the seditious Lord Shaftesbury, a founder of the opposition Whig party and advocate of religious and civil toleration for dissenters but not Catholics, resulted in suspicion falling on Locke too. (Locke never knew that Prideaux, a copy of whose anti-Islamic polemic Locke owned, had spied on him at Oxford in 1681, reporting directly to Charles II’s undersecretary of state.)219 Locke wrote a pamphlet to aid Shaftesbury’s defense, which only exacerbated suspicions about the author. After his exoneration at trial, Shaftesbury fled to Holland in 1682, where he died the next year. In 1683, Shaftesbury’s radical Whig associates plotted to assassinate the king and his brother. Although Locke’s involvement in this conspiracy is also debated by scholars, his acquaintance with the conspirators put him at risk.220 He too fled to Holland in 1683, where he remained active in opposition to the government. By 1685, all associates of the Whig movement in England had been removed from office, imprisoned, or fled the country amid renewed persecution of religious dissenters. Locke’s support for the failed insurrection forced him to live in hiding in Holland beginning in 1685, when the rule of the Catholic James II (r. 1685–88) began.221 It was then that he began to write his first letter on toleration.
Locke would travel throughout the Netherlands during his exile, but his idea of religious toleration for Muslims had already been formed in England a quarter century before. He had acquired it from someone with whom he disagreed, initially, about the toleration of Christian dissenters.
LOCKE’S PRECEDENT FOR THE TOLERATION OF MUSLIMS, DRAWN FROM EDWARD BAGSHAW IN 1660
Unlike Stubbe, Locke never found in Islam a theology or a prophet worthy of praise.222 Yet Locke chose to use the example of Muslims in England to advance the toleration of Christian dissenters there, building initially on a conceptual connection that had originated in Europe in the sixteenth century. Both the Baptist Helwys and Roger Williams had already advocated complete religious liberty for Muslims (in 1612 and 1644 respectively), together with the separation of church and state, based on purely Christian references to Jesus and the New Testament. Locke took the same cause but argued for it as an individual right grounded in “immutable principles of reason.” His A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) would be far more influential than either of these earlier works.223
Locke may have been aware of both Helwys and Williams, but his most direct influence was Edward Bagshaw’s work The Great Question concerning Things Indifferent in Religious Worship, published in 1660.224 Bagshaw (1629 or 1630–1671) was a fellow graduate of Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, but unlike the Anglican Locke, he was a Christian dissenter for whom the matter of religious freedom for non-Anglicans was of more personal urgency.
As shown by Nabil Matar, Bagshaw was the first to make the case for greater toleration of Christian dissenters in England, based on an analogy to the protections already extended to Muslims and Jews by Cromwell’s government (1649–60) for the purpose of increasing trade.225 In 1656 Jews were allowed to return to England, for the first time since the Edict of Expulsion forced them out in 1290.226 Muslim diplomats, traders, and possibly a very few English converts to Islam seem also to have practiced their
faith privately without government interference.227
Locke would cite Bagshaw in his own unpublished Two Tracts on Government (1660–61):228 “ ’tis agreed that a Christian magistrate cannot force his religion on a Jew or a Mahomedan, therefore much less can he abridge his fellow-Christian in things of lesser moment.”229 But while Bagshaw supported complete religious toleration for all Christians, arguing that they should enjoy whatever protections Muslims and Jews already did, Locke rejected toleration for Christian dissenters. In 1660, he still believed the magistrate or king had power over religious issues where Christians were concerned. It made sense to him, since at the time he was interested in promoting civil order, not toleration per se.230
What is most interesting, however, is that Locke, again according to Nabil Matar, “rejected neither the presence nor the toleration of Muslims and Jews” while accepting the “political logic” behind royal religious authority over non-Anglican dissenters and Catholics. Locke rejected any English ruler’s interference with Muslim or Jewish practice because it would “give Christian legitimacy to a non-Christian belief.”231
By 1667, Locke had reversed his views about the king’s right to interfere with Christian dissenters, while his support for the toleration of Muslims and Jews endured unchanged.232 In his An Essay Concerning Toleration, he presented two pragmatic reasons for the toleration of dissenting Christians: The individual’s relationship to God could pose no danger to society, and the ruler was not infallible in matters spiritual.233 By this time, Locke had also rejected religious coercion for both political and moral reasons, charging that such tactics did not change belief and only provoked opposition to the government. What accounts for this shift is unclear, but his arguments moved closer toward depriving the state of control over religion.234
In 1685, as Locke began A Letter Concerning Toleration, the issue of religious toleration continued as a pressing public concern.235 He became close friends with men of various Christian denominations deemed heretical, and listened to their arguments in favor of toleration.236 The same year, Locke watched as French Protestants, or Huguenots, fled their country for Holland after King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had previously provided them some protection from Catholic persecution.237 Important works on toleration by Huguenot refugees, such as Pierre Bayle (d. 1706), with whom Locke met in 1687 or 1688, also came to his attention.238 While preserving Bagshaw’s 1660 justification for the toleration of Muslims and Jews, Locke also noted Bayle’s assertion that “Pagans, Jews and Turks have a right to it,” meaning religious toleration, a statement that predated that of Locke, who developed his own more expansive plea to include Christian dissenters and non-Christians.239
LOCKE’S EMPHASIS ON MUSLIM CIVIL RIGHTS IN HIS FIRST LETTER ON TOLERATION, 1689
Accepting that a handful of Muslims were probably already lodged in London for diplomatic or trade purposes, Locke did not consider the practice of Islam a barrier to residence or rights in his country.240 Under English law, “aliens” including Muslims were divided into “friends” and “enemies,”241 but a mid-seventeenth-century ruling designated resident Muslims as friends, thus obviating any “enmity” toward “Turks” or “Infidels.”242 But while religious persecution of Muslims was forbidden, as aliens they were still denied full citizenship.243 Locke’s advocacy of equal “civil rights” for Muslims rejected their designation as “denizens,” a subcategory for non-English and non-Christian alien residents.244 With one key qualification, Locke proposed that Muslims be granted the same legal rights to religious toleration and, presumably, citizenship that he also insisted upon for Christian dissenters.
Locke’s proposal carefully disqualified all those who would hold primary allegiance to “another Prince,” a foreign Muslim ruler, and would thus be deemed enemy aliens in England.245 In particular, Locke worried about adherence to Islamic law as a sign of allegiance to the Ottoman sultan, though as John Marshall suggests in his magisterial study of Locke, his concerns would have included only a “small” number of Muslims.246 Locke wrote:
It is ridiculous for any one to profess himself to be a Mahumetan in his Religion, but in every thing else a faithful Subject to a Christian Magistrate, whilst at the same time he acknowledges himself bound to yield blind obedience to the Mufti of Constantinople; who himself is intirely obedient to the Ottoman Emperor, and frames the feigned Oracles of that Religion according to his pleasure. But this Mahumetan living among Christians, would yet more apparently renounce their Government, if he acknowledged the same Person to be Head of his Church who is the Supreme Magistrate in the State.247
Locke revealed some basic misconceptions by referring to the mufti of Constantinople. He probably meant instead the position of shaykh al-Islam, also known as the chief mufti of Istanbul, whose role in the Ottoman Empire had evolved by the seventeenth century to allow him to render verdicts in consultation with the sultan on policy issues, such as war and peace.248 But far from being subject to the sultan, this legal expert often was consulted about the ruler’s depositions. In any case, the function of the chief mufti was not to demand religious and political allegiance from Muslims outside the Ottoman sphere.249 Nor would all Muslims with dealings in England in the seventeenth century owe allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. Moroccans, for example, had first established trade relations with England under Ahmad al-Mansur (d. 1603), who was never subject to the Ottomans; neither were those Moroccan rulers who founded the Alawi dynasty in 1664.250 As for rulers in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, while they had acknowledged Ottoman rule in the sixteenth century, during the seventeenth century as they became more autonomous, that allegiance became increasingly nominal.
Whether Muslims could properly reside outside Muslim lands had been vigorously debated by Islamic legal scholars, beginning in the eighth century. Although theoretically the world might be divided between the land of Islam (where the Sharia, or Islamic law, prevailed) and the land of war or unbelief, in practice Muslim minorities continued to live in non-Muslim territory for a variety of historical reasons. Among the four schools of Sunni law, no consensus on the issue was reached between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries.251 The exception to this diversity of legal opinion was the Maliki school, which predominated in North Africa, where memories of warfare with Catholic Spain and Portugal and the expulsion of Muslims in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remained fresh, resulting in doctrinaire insistence on residence only in Islamic lands, though exceptions were made for specific contexts of war or peace, and living in a non-Muslim country for the purpose of trade, for example, was allowed.252
The Islamic judgment about residing outside of Islamic dominion often hinged on whether Muslims could safely practice their faith, something that Locke would guarantee later in his treatise.253 The question divided Sunni and Shi‘i Muslim jurists.254 Locke might have been interested to know, although he probably did not, that Sunni scholars presumed that non-Muslim authorities would offer an aman, or “safe conduct” guarantee, to a Muslim resident.255 As part of what would have been deemed reciprocity for tolerance of Christians in Islamic realms, it was generally accepted that a Muslim living outside of the Islamic world “may not commit acts of treachery, betrayal, deceit or fraud, and may not violate the honor or property of non-Muslims.”256 By this arrangement, Muslims could abide by the local Christian ruler’s authority in civil if not religious matters. Here in essence is exactly what Locke would demand as a precondition for Muslim citizenship and elevation from resident alien status: “But those whose Doctrine is peaceable, and whose Manners are pure and blameless, ought to be on equal Terms with their Fellow-Subjects.”257
Locke’s concern about the divided allegiance of Muslims in England is perhaps a reflection of his more immediate anxieties about Catholics, whom he distrusted for their allegiance to the pope.258 By contrast, these concerns were based on history as well as paranoia. (Accusations in 1678 of a “Popish Plot” to assassinate the king and institute Catholicism, though spurious, w
ere not forgotten.) There was no real parallel between a Catholic’s obedience to the pope and the individual Muslim’s relationship to the Ottoman sultan. Locke would eventually determine that Catholics who disavowed allegiance to the pope should also qualify for full civil rights, but he would remain wary of them.259 Catholics would continue to represent an imminent rather than a theoretical threat to Anglican Protestant government.
In Locke’s 1689 A Letter Concerning Toleration his pivotal statement about Muslim civil rights followed immediately after his defense of Christian dissenters of various sects. Among them, Socinians (later Unitarians) were included in his original Latin text published in Holland, but not the English translation of the same year.260 Socinians were of course also present in England, and their views were well known to Locke. He certainly would have approved the first, anonymous edition of the English translation. Locke’s first English translator, William Popple, a supporter of religious toleration, was an avowed Socinian. Popple may have omitted Socinians knowing that they (and he) would continue to be denied religious and political rights because of their rejection of the Trinity, even after the 1689 Act of Toleration granting protection to all Protestants who embraced the triune divinity.261 Popple doubtless appreciated how dangerous the mention of his own outlawed beliefs remained. Also excluded in the act were Roman Catholics, atheists, and, implicitly, Muslims and Jews. The English Socinian’s translation of Locke was destined for enormous popularity and longevity on both sides of the Atlantic:
But those whose Doctrine is peaceable, and whose Manners are pure and blameless, ought to be upon equal Terms with their Fellow-Subjects. Thus if Solemn Assemblies, Observations of Festivals, publick Worship, be permitted to any one sort of Professors; all these things ought to be permitted to the Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arminians, Quakers, and others, with the same liberty.262