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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  Sale’s translation was commissioned by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, a British Anglican Protestant group dedicated to “missionary and educational goals.”23 As the group also had an anti-Catholic bent,24 Sale inextricably linked Catholicism with Islam, a connection previously expounded in the Whig treatise Cato’s Letters.25 Sale’s immediate goal was to remind his Christian readers that Islam was a false religion, but he also intended his work to help convert Muslims to Protestant Christianity, which, like preceding translators of the Qur’an, Sale believed to be their only hope of salvation.26

  But Sale also seemed determined to present his translation as a rigorously scholarly work, referring to it as “an impartial version.”27 He acknowledged a debt to earlier Christian translations, but did not neglect to criticize their mistakes. Having, for instance, made a careful study of the seventeenth-century Latin translation by the Catholic priest Ludovico Maracci (d. 1700), who worked from several manuscripts in the Vatican,28 Sale rejected many of what he termed Maracci’s “impertinent” interpretations, claiming that “Protestants alone are able to attack the Koran with success.”29

  The first English translation of the Qur’an was published almost a century before Sale’s appeared in 1734. Alexander Ross’s dubious effort of 1649 was translated not from the original Arabic but from a French edition published two years earlier by the diplomat André du Ryer.30 And yet Ross’s work was deemed explosive: Even before publication, his publisher was imprisoned and all copies were seized. After Ross’s testimony at a hearing before the Council of State, the charges were dropped. When the book was finally published on May 7, 1649,31 a cautionary disclaimer was added. The Qur’an, it declared, may be “dangerous and scandalous” to a few weak Christians, but true believers would not be “swayed from their faith.”32

  Ross’s translation was also the first to cross the Atlantic, read by colonists such as Cotton Mather, who branded the Prophet the Antichrist.33 When Sale’s Qur’an appeared in the American colonies, it was deemed the most informative and accurate translation then available, which indeed it was, for Sale had attempted to correct some of the most egregious distortions about Islam, out of a sincere desire for accuracy.34 Sale also critiqued Ross’s translation as “utterly unacquainted with the Arabic, and no great matter of French,” filled with “fresh mistakes.”35 (Not that Sale was immune to mistakes, as when he identified the tribe of Khazraj in Medina as Jewish rather than Arab.)36

  Sale appended footnotes to earlier translations of the Qur’an, which he’d read closely, and referred to Muslim as well as Christian commentaries on the sacred text.37 He’d studied the prophetic precedents, or hadith, compiled by the Sunni scholar al-Bukhari (d. 870), as well as the medieval Qur’anic commentary, or tafsir, of al-Zamakhshari (d. 1144). Sale also drew from the Latin translations of Islamic history by Dr. Edward Pococke.38

  An enormous success throughout Europe, Sale’s translation was reprinted four times during the eighteenth century, and was translated into German, French, Russian, and Dutch.39 It would remain the best available English version of the Qur’an into the nineteenth century.40

  Voltaire, who owned Sale’s Qur’an and praised it as “wise and judicious,” would claim that the translator had spent twenty-five years in Arabia to complete the work.41 In fact, Sale had never left England, and learned Arabic from two Arab Christians in London, Salomon Negri of Damascus and Carolus Dadichi of Aleppo. The two had themselves already produced an Arabic translation of the New Testament, intended for distribution to the Arab Christian communities along the Mediterranean, in the parts of the Ottoman Empire within reach of the British Levant Company—and Anglican attempts at the conversion of indigenous Christians there.42

  The first volume of Sale’s 1764 edition contained a two-hundred-page “Preliminary Discourse” on the history of Islam. What Jefferson may have learned from the “Preliminary Discourse” remains critical because Sale, despite his missionary objectives, had collected a substantial amount of relevant, accurate information on Islamic history, ritual practice, and law. Sale sought to approach the conversion of Muslims in much the same manner as that of the Jews: with well-informed reason. To that end, he proposed four rules for the mission that was presumably to take place in the Middle East rather than in London. First, he argued that one must “avoid compulsion,” with a grudging admission that Islamic political dominance made the point moot anyway: “though it [compulsion] be not in our power to employ at present, I hope will not be made use of when it is.”43 Sale did not mention that the Qur’an states categorically that “there is no compulsion in religion” (Qur’an 2:256), substituting the word “violence” in his translation of the verse: “Let there be no violence in religion.” In a footnote, however, Sale adds incorrectly that this principle lasted only during the Prophet’s lifetime, when he protected Medinan pagans and Jews from forced conversion to Islam.44

  Secondly, Sale urged would-be missionaries to “avoid arguments against common sense,” adding that Muslims particularly resisted “worshipping images,” and “the doctrine of transubstantiation,” or the mystical transformation of the host into the flesh and blood of Jesus. Thirdly, he urged that “ill words” should be avoided with Muslims.45 Finally, he directed Christian missionaries “not to quit any article of the Christian faith to gain” the conversion of the Muslims.46 In this vein he criticized the Unitarians, previously known as Socinians, who had emphasized Islam and Christianity’s essential similarity as monotheisms in their heretical denial of Jesus’s divinity and the Trinity:47 “it is absolutely necessary to undeceive those who, from the ignorant or unfair translations which have appeared, have entertained too favorable an opinion of the original, and also to enable us effectually to expose the impostures.”48 Sale, then, was as determined to save the Unitarians from being misled by the “ignorant” translations casting Islam in a positive light as he was to redeem Islam’s own followers.49

  Nevertheless, under the inevitable influence of treatises by Christian dissenters, Deists, and Unitarians, who endorsed Islam as a religion and as a philosophy,50 Sale’s treatment of the Prophet and Islam was ultimately more sympathetic than those of previous European translators, and he himself would eventually suffer from charges of pro-Islamic bias.51 Even while condemning the heresy of such heterodox sects and their view of Islam as an uncorrupted monotheism, Sale was perhaps softened a bit, at least on the margins, by familiarity with their work. Consider their emphasis on Muhammad’s role as a legislator, which had gathered traction among some Anglicans as well as Christian dissenters since the seventeenth century.52 Sale echoes their speculation as to whether Muhammad “deserves not equal respect, though not with Moses or Jesus Christ, whose laws came really from heaven, yet with Minos or Numa,”53 who were legislators in ancient Greece and Rome.54

  Sale, for example, also criticizes Prideaux, the Anglican dean of Norwich and the author of The True Nature of Imposture (1697), the anti-Islamic and anti-Deist polemic immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic.55 Conceding that Prideaux “has given the most probable account” of the Prophet as an impostor, Sale deftly attacks his sources as “Christian writers, who generally mix such ridiculous fables with what they deliver, that they deserve not much credit.”56 He also allows that Muhammad “gave the Arabs the best religion he could, as well as the best laws.”57 Apart from Henry Stubbe’s unpublished vindication of Islam of 1671, Sale’s objectivity is unexampled in his time, reflecting his preoccupation with fairness.58 He also avoids “all reproachful language,” a habit he claims as a rule in his personal moral code.59 Sale explained, “I have not, in speaking of Mohammed or his Koran, allowed myself to use those opprobrious appellations, and unmannerly expressions, which seem to be the strongest arguments of several who have written against them.”60

  And so while offering a standard disclaimer—“for how criminal soever Mohammad may have been in imposing a false religion on mankind”—Sale allows that “the praises due to [Muhammad�
��s] real virtues ought not to be denied him.”61 These the translator enumerates as “piety, veracity, justice, liberality, clemency, humility, and abstinence,” and especially charity and selflessness. As to the polygamy for which the Prophet was commonly vilified, Sale asserts that it was not only “frequently practiced in Arabia” in Muhammad’s time, but was common even among the Jews of the Old Testament, implying that the Prophet might have thought the custom “the more just and reasonable, as he found [it] practiced or approved by the professors of a religion, which was confessedly of divine origin.”62 Thus Sale underscores the Prophet’s belief in God’s revelations to the Jews.

  As to the standard Christian anti-Islamic polemical claim, that Islam spread by violence, Sale is again a voice of moderation. While he does not explicitly mention any instance of Islamic tolerance,63 he declares that “they are greatly deceived who imagine it [‘the law of Mohammed’] to have been propagated by the sword alone.”64 He does admit, in the sixth chapter of his “Preliminary Discourse,” that the Qur’an promised rewards in the next life for those who fought “infidels,” but he refuses to portray Islam as the only monotheism that has incited war, reminding his readers that both Jews and Christians have warred in the name of faith, never having “been ignorant of the force of enthusiastic heroism, or omitted to spirit up their respective partisans by the like arguments and promises.”65

  Perhaps finding it easier to condemn Catholics than Christians generally, Sale cites the Crusades in his only usage of the phrase “holy war.”66 And while pointing out that both Judaism and Islam presumed a “divine commission” to “destroy enemies of their religion,” he finds it “very strange” that Christians in particular should “teach and practice a doctrine so opposite to the temper and whole tenour of the gospel.” In conclusion, Sale allows that Christians have “shewn a more violent spirit of intolerance” than either Jews or Muslims.67

  SALE’S DISCUSSION OF GOD, JESUS, AND THE TRINITY IN THE QUR’AN

  But more than his judicious descriptions of Muhammad, Sale’s great accomplishment was his grasp of the most crucial parts of a central Islamic tenet:

  The great doctrine then of the Koran is the unity of God; to restore which point Mohammed pretended was the chief end of his mission.… And he taught that whenever this religion became neglected or corrupted in essentials, God had the goodness to reinform and readmonish mankind thereof, by several prophets, of whom Moses and Jesus were the most distinguished, till the appearance of Mohammed, who is their seal, no other being expected after him.68

  Sale properly identifies Muhammad’s role in Islam as the seal of all previous prophets, sent by the God of Abraham to correct and renew what humans had inevitably corrupted. Like Deists and Unitarians before him,69 he emphasizes the connectedness in Islam of the great prophets, from Adam to Moses to Jesus and, finally, Muhammad.70 Sale furthermore acknowledges Muhammad’s acceptance of the divine authority of the Pentateuch, Psalms, and the Gospels, though wrongly pointing out that parts of the Bible, as well as the Apocrypha, appear in the Qur’an, contrary to Muslim belief in the Qur’an as God’s literal words to the Prophet.71

  Sale takes particular pains to delineate the weaknesses of Christianity in the seventh century, when the Prophet had promulgated Islam, by way of a rationale for the success of the Islamic conquests in the Christian Middle East.72 As an explanation for Christian defeat, Sale accuses Middle Eastern Christians of various heresies, including worshipping the Virgin Mary, which charge served also to implicate more generally Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, who venerate Mary. The sanctification of Mary, he points out, led to the idea that both she and Christ were coequal with the Father, a view expressed in the fact that seventh-century Christians sometimes called Mary “the complement of the Trinity.”73 It was such error, the Anglican asserts, that enabled Muhammad to attack the Trinity itself:74 “And say not three” (Qur’an 4:171).75 Yet Sale does not elaborate upon the Islamic definition of Jesus as merely a prophet and a mortal, albeit one who could perform miracles.76 Perhaps he did not intend to emphasize what Unitarians had done in England since the seventeenth century, which was to define Islam as a monotheism that rejected both the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus.

  Sale does, however, expound the Islamic vision of the afterlife in detail, emphasizing its belief in a final judgment, which would determine rewards in heaven or punishment in hell. In this connection, he challenges the “falsehood of a vulgar imputation … that women have no souls, or, if they have, that they will perish, like those of brute beasts, and will not be rewarded in the next life.”77 By contrast, Sale allows that the Prophet “had too great a respect for the fair sex to teach such a doctrine,” and he correctly identifies several passages in the Qur’an “which affirm that women, in the next life, will not only be punished for their evil actions, but will also receive the rewards of their good deeds, as well as the men, and that in this case God will make no distinction of sexes.”78

  It is an indication of Sale’s deep immersion in early Islamic prophetic precedents that he even appends to his Qur’an’s chapter 66, verses 11–12, a note about the two most praised women of the sacred text: Maryam, or Mary the mother of Jesus, and the pharaoh’s wife, later called Asiya. Sale does not cite the source, al-Tabari (d. 929), a famed Sunni Qur’anic commentator, but he paraphrases his commentary: “That among men there had been many perfect, but no more than four of the other sex had attained perfection; to wit, Asia [Asiya], the wife of Pharaoh, Mary, the daughter of Imran, Khadijah the daughter of Khowailid (the prophet’s first wife,) and Fatema [Fatima] the daughter of Mohammed.”79

  Detailing the five pillars of Muslim belief, Sale begins with the first, known as the shahada: “there is no god but the true God; and that Mohammed is his apostle.” (He included “the true” in his addition to the original Arabic phrase, and he inserted the word “that” in the second clause, but both changes serve to clarify the intended meaning.) The four remaining pillars are accurately described as well: prayer five times a day (salat); the giving of alms annually in support of the needy in the community (zakat); fasting during the holy month of Ramadan in commemoration of the beginning of the Qur’an’s revelation (sawm); and the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj).80 Sale devotes considerable attention not only to the specifics of the pilgrimage ritual, but also the configuration of the holy city with the help of a map and a diagram of the sacred shrine of the Ka‘ba.81

  In addition to describing Muslim obligations, Sale also details the prohibitions: wine, pork, gambling, theft, murder, and adultery. He also explains more recent Islamic legal debates concerning two new products: tobacco, from North America, and coffee, from Yemen.82 The latter had first reached the Ottoman Empire and continued westward, with the first coffee house in England appearing around 1652; the English would come to regard the new beverage as a brew of “the Mahometan berry.”83 Sale was informed enough to understand that Muslim legal authorities did not initially agree about the lawfulness of either tobacco or coffee.

  Praising the Prophet as “the lawgiver of the Arabians,” Sale devotes sections six and eight of his introduction to a brief outline of Islamic legal schools.84 He describes the four Sunni schools, noting that all were considered orthodox by the majority of Muslims.85 Of the famed jurist al-Shafi‘i (d. 820), Sale tells us that he “is said to have been the first who discoursed of jurisprudence, and reduced that science into a method,”86 and particularly emphasizes legal precedents concerning marriage, divorce, and inheritance for both men and women.87 Sale also defines the basic doctrinal differences between Sunni and Shi‘i Muslims, chiding the philosopher Spinoza for his ignorance of this division.88

  THE IMPORTANCE OF SALE’S QUR’AN IN JEFFERSON’S LIBRARY

  Committed as he was to cultivating an awareness of law and culture beyond those of Britain and continental Europe,89 Jefferson probably would have approved of Sale’s introductory statement: “To be acquainted with the various laws and constitutions of civilized nat
ions, especially those who flourish in our own time, is, perhaps, the most useful part of knowledge.”90 In his Notes on Virginia, published in 1784 in Paris and 1787 in London, he had a rather similar recommendation for students in America: “History, by apprizing them of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations.”91

  But is there evidence that Jefferson gleaned anything from Sale’s work to enhance his own knowledge and judgment? Jefferson’s voluminous writings, including legislation and correspondence from 1765 to 1776, offer virtually none. Although Jefferson owned a Qur’an, there is no indication that he scrutinized the text verse by verse, as he would the New Testament much later, to create two expurgated volumes of Gospel selections he could accept as true, a version known after his death as the Jefferson Bible.92

  The phrase “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an” implies no such interest in creating a version of the Islamic text he could approve, but it symbolizes a pivotal starting point in his lifelong exploration of Islamic belief and history. His direct references to the Qur’an, with one exception, appear neither as numerous, detailed, or systematic as those issuing from his lifelong engagement with Christianity. Indeed, Jefferson has been criticized for his “many unfair, unnuanced, and shallow caricatures” of several faiths, including Calvinism, Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam.93 Such a sweeping assertion does not reflect the totality of his views about Islam. At this juncture, suffice it to say, Jefferson did subscribe to the anti-Islamic views of most of his contemporaries, and in politics he made effective use of the rhetoric they inspired.

  In the absence of any notes of Jefferson’s on Sale’s translation of the Qur’an, we can only speculate how Sale’s views would have struck him. Although both men were lawyers and Anglicans, Jefferson privately rejected the theological doctrines that Sale unquestioningly accepted. But they had in common a rejection of coercion or violence against religious minorities on account of their faith, and this alone puts them both within an alternative strain of European thought endorsing religious toleration; Jefferson would go even further, calling for the guarantee of individual rights regardless of religion.