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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  It was at this critical juncture in his defense of Christian dissenters in England, that Locke now demanded the same civil equality for Muslims and Jews:263

  Nay, if we may openly speak the Truth, and as becomes one Man to another, neither Pagan, nor Mahumetan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the Civil Rights of the Commonwealth, because of his Religion.264

  Inverting the logic of Bagshaw’s 1660 precedent, which argued for extending Muslim and Jewish prerogatives to Christian dissenters, Locke now argued that if all Christians deserved civil rights, so too did non-Christians, a case he made only after his earlier qualification about the potential for Muslim foreign loyalties. There is a further emendation of Locke’s original Latin text: Popple’s addition of the phrase “Civil Rights.” A more literal translation of Locke’s Latin would read “neither Pagan nor Mahometan nor Jew should be excluded from the commonwealth because of his religion.”265 But Locke approved this change and went on to defend the concept of “civil rights” for Muslims and Jews in three subsequent English letters.266

  Locke’s was not “the first favorable pronouncement about the status of Muslims in Christian England”—Helwys and Williams had preceded him in that—but it was the earliest, most resonant attempt to make the case as part of a political rather than purely religious argument.267 Nevertheless, Locke’s ultimate argument that Muslims ought not to be excluded from “the civil rights of the commonwealth” still rested on his assertion, “The Gospel commands no such thing.” And so Locke promoted a reasoned, Christian argument for the toleration of non-Christians in “a Christian Commonwealth.”268 Locke’s toleration, after all, was also motivated by a desire to spread Protestant Christianity, his toleration being a form of mission, one that reached out not only to Jews and Muslims but also to “pagan” Native Americans and African slaves throughout the colonial Americas, specifically in seventeenth-century Virginia and the Carolinas.269 (He could not have known that some of those African slaves were not actually pagans, meaning polytheists, but Muslims from West Africa.)

  In 1689, Locke also made a break with European precedents that linked Christian heretics to Muslims and Jews. He declared both Islam and Judaism to be unique religions, not heresies. This critical distinction would save Muslims and Jews from persecution in England by Anglican authorities as heretics, as well as safeguarding former Christians, including the few English seafarers who, captured by North African pirates, had converted to Islam in order to gain their freedom:270

  [I]f any man fall off from the Christian Faith to Mahumetism, he does not thereby become a Heretick or Schismatick, but an Apostate and an Infidel. This no body doubts of. And by this it appears that men of different Religions cannot be Hereticks or Schismaticks to one another.271

  Despite this seeming equanimity, the distinction makes clear enough that Locke held no high opinion of Islam and indeed his understanding of the faith was significantly errant.272

  In 1690, a year after the appearance of A Letter Concerning Toleration in London, Locke was attacked in print by Jonas Proast, an Anglican clergyman of All Souls College, Oxford.273 (Locke’s authorship, while officially anonymous, quickly became known.) Proast argued that although extreme violence should be avoided, the use of “moderate” force and other penalties were acceptable in the treatment of Muslims, Jews, and Christian dissenters.274 Locke responded quickly in his Second Letter on Toleration, attempting to refute Proast’s rejection of the inclusion of Muslims and Jews as citizens. In defense of Muslim and Jewish civil rights, Locke would never waver, answering with “the largeness of the toleration” he proposed.275

  While allowing that “we pray every day for their conversion,” he reaffirmed that this end would not be achieved by their exclusion, either by “driving them” away or “persecuting them when they are among us.” For the first time, Locke defined toleration as the opposite of religious persecution: “Force, you allow, is improper to convert men to any religion. Toleration is but the removing of that force.”276

  Locke continued this line of argument on legal grounds in his Third Letter in 1692:277

  Besides, I think you are under a mistake, which shews your pretence against admitting Jews, Mahometans, Pagans, to the civil rights of the commonwealth is ill-grounded; for what law I pray is there in England, that they who turn to any of those religions, forfeit the civil rights of the commonwealth by doing it?278

  Locke also sarcastically reminded his opponent that Christians in the Ottoman Empire faced no force at all, compared with the “moderate” or “sufficient force” Proast proposed to use against non-Christians in England:

  I think a conscientious and sober Dissenter might expect fairer dealing from one of my Pagans or Mahometans, as you please to call them, than from one who professes moderation, that what degrees of force, what kind of punishments will satisfy him, he either knows not, or will not declare.279

  He also expressed a new religious relativism when he suggested that Turks, like Christians, also “sincerely seek the truth,” however misguided he knew them to be.280 In fact, he allowed that Muslims believed as adamantly in their salvation through the Qur’an as Christians did through their own scripture. Both groups, he understood, were fixed on the rewards of the next life:281

  Do not think all the world, who are not of your church, abandon themselves to an utter carelessness of their future state. You cannot but allow there are many Turks who sincerely seek the truth to whom you could never bring evidence sufficient to convince them of the truth of the Christian religion, whilst they looked on it as a principle not to be questioned, that the Koran was of Divine revelation.282

  Pressing the point even further, Locke sounds almost like Menocchio, the heretical Italian miller, when he allows that Turks believed in their “way,” just as Christians did. Yet the philosopher held out as the only possibility for the salvation of Muslims their conversion to Christianity:283

  And why then may you not allow it to a Turk, not as a good way, or as having led him to the truth; but as a way, as fit for him, as for one of your church to acquiesce in; and as fit to exempt him from your force, as to exempt any one of your church from it?284

  Irrespective of their rightness or wrongness, Locke believed that doctrinal differences, whether among Christians or between Christians and non-Christians, should not be subject to state coercion.

  In a fourth, posthumous letter, published in 1706, Locke would reaffirm the futility of religious polemic. These matters were not to be resolved on earth, particularly not by the magistrate or ruler:

  Try when you please with a Brahmin, a Mahometan, a Papist, Lutheran, Quaker, Anabaptist, Presbyterian, etc., you will find if you argue with them, as you do here with me, that the matter will rest here between you, and that you are no more a judge for any of them than they are for you. Men in all religions have equally strong persuasions, and every one must judge for himself; nor can anyone judge for another, and you last of all for the magistrate.285

  The ultimate form of Locke’s near universal religious toleration resulted, then, from a kind of disapproving empathy, a reasoned if saddened understanding of why Muslims and Jews continued to defend their beliefs, even unto death. What others had defined previously as heresy or fanaticism, Locke finally describes as natural and common to all believers:

  Nor is there among the many absurd religions of the world, almost any one that does not find votaries to lay down their lives for it: and if that be not firm persuasion and full assurance that is stronger than the love of life, and has force enough to make a man throw himself into the arms of death, it is hard to know what is firm persuasion and full assurance. Jews and Mahometans have frequently given instances of this highest degree of persuasion.286

  Violence over matters of religion, Locke understood, produced only more violence and death. These were the unjust if predictable wages of state coercion.287 Even in the aftermath of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, the year Locke fled to Holland, when most other European Christ
ians viewed all Muslims as agents of religious error and a foreign threat, Locke chose to defend the civil rights of Muslims.288 In this context, particularly, it was a remarkable choice. From 1660 until his death in 1704, the adherents of Islam would remain part of Locke’s principled, reasoned, and ultimately Christian ideal of state-supported universal toleration. He would not live to see it become a political reality in his lifetime, but his words would survive him, granting him his most notable afterlife in eighteenth-century America.

  LOCKE, DEFENDER OF MUSLIMS AND SOCINIANS OR UNITARIANS, ATTACKED AS BOTH, 1696

  After repeatedly defending the religious and political rights of Muslims, in 1696 Locke would be accused in print of being one as well as a Socinian and a Deist.289 John Edwards (d. 1716), an Anglican clergyman and friend of Proast’s, attacked the theological views Locke expressed in The Reasonableness of Christianity in 1695.290 Impugning Locke’s apparent lack of support for the Trinity, Edwards defamed him as a heretic Christian and, by extension, a supporter of Islamic monotheism.291 The connection in England between Islam and the Socinian or Unitarian heresy was an insidious attempt to place Locke beyond any legally tolerated status in his own country.

  In all, Edwards would write three tracts attacking Locke’s religious views as heretical: Some Thoughts Concerning the Several Causes of Atheism (1695), Socinianism Unmask’d (1696), and The Socinian Creed (1697).292 It is likely that Locke did indeed embrace Socinian or Unitarian theology by the late 1690s, for he read extensively on the subject and knew many Socinians, but he prudently never professed the position publicly, and would be counted an Anglican during his lifetime.293

  Nonetheless, Locke’s presumed rejection of the Trinity cleared a path for the accusation of his being a Muslim. Edwards wrote that “it is likely I shall further exasperate this author when I desire the reader to observe that this lank faith of his is in a manner no other than the faith of a Turk.”294 A subsidiary charge was that he “seems to have consulted the Mahometan bible,” a damning accusation.295 Indeed, Locke had in his library a copy of the 1647 French translation of the Qur’an by André du Ryer.296

  The assumption that Locke was both a Christian heretic and a Muslim, perhaps, was also the result of his repeated pleas for the rights of both groups in his work on toleration. As we have seen, accusing a Christian theological or political adversary of being a Muslim (or a Turk) was by now a time-honored feature of Christian polemic. Menocchio, Servetus, and the Italian translator of Servetus’s questioning of the Trinity had all been termed Turks or Muslims in the sixteenth century. Thomas Jefferson, almost two centuries later, would suffer the same fate for his own defense of Muslim rights, only to find in John Locke’s thoughts about toleration his most powerful precedent.

  3

  What Jefferson Learned—and Didn’t—from His Qur’an

  His Negative Views of Islam, and Their Political Uses, Contrasted with His Support for Muslim Civil Rights, 1765–86

  To be acquainted with the various laws and constitutions of civilized nations, especially those who flourish in our own time, is, perhaps, the most useful part of knowledge.

  —George Sale, from the “Preliminary Discourse”

  to his English translation of the Qur’an, 1734

  [T]hat our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions … that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.

  —Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,

  drafted in 1777; proposed in Virginia, 1779;

  made state law, 1786

  IN 1765, the Virginia Gazette, the local newspaper in Williamsburg, which also served as the only bookseller in the colony, recorded a purchase by Thomas Jefferson.1 The item at the bottom of this page, under the heading “Williamsburg October 1765,” indicates Jefferson acquired “Sale’s Koran,” in “2 Vols,” for sixteen shillings.2 The books had been shipped from London, where in 1734 George Sale had first published his translation of what in English was commonly called “the Alcoran of Mohammed.”3 Jefferson would have bought the third edition, printed in 1764.4

  Jefferson was not the only one to possess Sale’s Qur’an in eighteenth-century Virginia. In 1781, Dr. James Bryden of Goochland County would claim that British troops during the Revolutionary War had seized not just his many medical books but also what he listed as “Al Coran of Mahomet” in two volumes, whose value he estimated at one pound, more than Jefferson had paid sixteen years before. Dr. Bryden did not mention Sale as translator, but that the book was in two volumes with the title “the Alcoran of Mohammed” makes the identification certain.5 Whether Bryden was ever reimbursed for his loss is unknown, but the more important question remains: What happened to Jefferson’s Qur’an of 1765?

  Jefferson’s purchase of “Sale’s Koran, 2 Vols.” recorded in the Virginia Gazette Daybooks. (illustration credit 3.1)

  The title page of Jefferson’s Qur’an, now in the Library of Congress. (illustration credit 3.2)

  ONE QUR’AN—OR TWO? 1770

  In February 1770, five years after his purchase of the Qur’an, Thomas Jefferson wrote his friend John Page with calamitous news: “My late loss may perhaps have reached you by this time, I mean the loss of my mother’s house by fire, and in it, of every paper I had in the world, and almost every book.”6 (The Virginia Gazette would also confirm that Jefferson “lost all his furniture, a valuable collection of books, and what is perhaps worse, his papers.”)7 A true bibliophile, Jefferson lamented, “Would to God it had been the money; then had it never cost me a sigh!”8 What was worse, the loss “fell principally” on his “books of Common Law, of which [he had] but one left, at that time lent out.”9 The answers to the questions of how many and which books were lost remain elusive, but for the lawyer-in-training, the books were all critical.10 There would have been additional losses too, as recorded purchases from the accounts of the Virginia Gazette attest, including the Acts of Parliament and British Common and Chancery law, and the works of Machiavelli and Milton.11 All these were purchased around the same time he acquired the Qur’an.

  When he bought the Qur’an in 1765, Jefferson was an impassioned law student engaged in criticizing the recently passed British Stamp Act.12 The most immediate reason for wishing to study the Qur’an would have been to gain an insight into Islamic law and religion.13 These may have interested him per se—Jefferson had an immense curiosity and a cosmopolitan outlook—but he may have had a more immediate purpose, for in seeking legal precedents for local Virginia cases, he would often look to other cultures around the world.

  After the fire, Jefferson made no mention of the fate of the Qur’an he had purchased five years earlier. Did it perish in the flames, or was it miraculously spared? We will never know. During the mid-1760s, Jefferson had taken detailed notes on the texts he’d read with particular interest; these notes too, however, were lost in the fire at Shadwell, his mother’s house. But if Jefferson’s Qur’an was destroyed in 1770, then what are we to make of the two volumes of Sale’s Qur’an he initialed, now at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.?14

  There are two possibilities: The original Qur’an either survived the fire, or it was later replaced with another copy of the same edition.15 If Jefferson did indeed buy the Qur’an twice, it would be an extraordinary testament to his desire to understand Islam. But even if he purchased the text only once, Jefferson remains unique among America’s Founders in his desire to understand Islam on its own terms, looking directly to its most sacred source. In fact, his purchase of the Qur’an marked only the beginning of his study of Islam. After the 1770 fire, as he immediately began to reconstruct his lost library, Jefferson undertook to acquire numerous volumes about Middle Eastern languages,16 history, and
travel, and he continued doing so for the rest of his life.17

  This chapter traces how Sale’s introduction to the Qur’an may have influenced Jefferson’s thoughts on Islam, in particular his notes on English law and Islam in the decade following his acquisition of the Islamic sacred text. In 1776, as a Virginia legislator, he would resort to anti-Islamic rhetoric in his effort to end the establishment of Anglicanism as the state religion. His notes from the same year, however, reveal that Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration prompted his interest in the rights of Muslims.

  GEORGE SALE’S QUR’AN AND THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATION

  George Sale (c. 1696–1736), a lawyer and an Anglican, described the Prophet Muhammad on the first page of his translation as “the legislator of the Arabs,” words that would have appealed to Jefferson the lawyer.18 Since the twelfth century, Christian translators of the Qur’an had commonly defined the text not as divine revelation but as a repository of Islamic law. Robert Ketton’s first Latin translation in 1143 was entitled Lex Saracenorum, or Law of the Saracens.19 The translations from the twelfth to the eighteenth century served primarily Christian polemics rather than scholarly interest in the accurate representation of Islamic beliefs.20

  Ketton’s translation of the Qur’an in the twelfth century resulted from an attempt to convert Muslims, a strategy conceived after the failure of the Crusades.21 Knowing one’s enemy, however, was a tricky business for Christian translators, who now sought to win by superiority of reason rather than force.22 They thus often willfully distorted key aspects of the Qur’an, with the political aim of representing Islam as a heresy and the Prophet as an impostor.