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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  Sale’s attempt to present a relatively unbiased picture of the Prophet and Islam would result in the cooling of relations with his employer, the Anglican Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.94 And he would suffer even more illustrious disapproval: Edward Gibbon (d. 1794) condemns Sale in the fifth volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788) as “half a Musulman” for criticizing Prideaux’s anti-Islamic invective.95 But Sale, who had died two years after the completion of the translation that would make him famous, would never read it, nor its echo in the treatment of Royall Tyler, who, just over a decade later, would be condemned for being influenced by the “liberality of the good Sale” in his novel The Algerine Captive.96 Anything less than a complete condemnation of Islam reliably provoked rebuke in eighteenth-century Britain and America.

  Jefferson, like Sale, would not be daunted by the certain negative reception for any views sympathetic to Islam. But unlike Sale, Jefferson had no interest in converting Muslims, seeking only their acceptance and enfranchisement, toward which end he applied his study of their faith. His earliest preserved references to Islam, however, relied not on Sale’s extensive overview, but instead on four European authorities on religion and law.

  JEFFERSON’S EARLIEST REFERENCES TO ISLAM: A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LEGAL PRECEDENT AND BOLINGBROKE’S VIEWS ON RELIGION AND RATIONAL PROOFS, 1765

  In the decade between 1765 and 1775, Jefferson wrote on Muslims and Islamic theology, practice, and history in four separate series of notes in his Literary and Legal Commonplace Books.97 What appears to be his earliest reference to Muslims under British law may also be his most terse—and provocative. In notes on William Salkeld’s Reports of Cases Adjudg’d in the Court of the King’s Bench (1717), Jefferson duly numbered and copied out hundreds of legal decisions, with the original volume and page number, to which he added a single-line description. For case 97, Jefferson wrote, “Turks and Infidels, perpetui inimici,” meaning “enemies for life.” But to that he added “groundless,” a word he preserved from the original English legal ruling, an older precedent dating to the rule of King Charles I (r. 1625–49).98 Under the text’s subheading “Aliens” regarding “Allegiance, Denizen,” the legal precedent refuted the idea that Muslims and “Infidels,” probably including Jews, are perpetual enemies of the English crown:

  Turks and Infidels are not perpetui inimici, nor is there a particular Enmity between them and us; but this is a common Error founded on a groundless Opinion of Justice Brooke; for tho’ there be a difference between our Religion and theirs, that does not oblige us to be Enemies to their Persons; they are the Creatures of God and of the same kind as we are, and it would be a Sin in us to hurt their Persons. Per Littleton (afterwards Lord Keeper to Charles I).99

  Jefferson was studying British legal precedents in order to apply them to his practice in Virginia. What he learned from this passage established a foundation for his initial conception of the toleration of Muslims in America, predating his later notes on John Locke’s views of Muslims and “civil rights.” It may have even spurred him to examine Locke’s view of the issue. What is clear is that by the mid-1760s, Jefferson had considered Muslims and Jews as people “of the same kind,” who should not be legally proclaimed enemies or persecuted because of their religion, either in Britain or in Virginia.100 This refusal to cast Muslims as perpetual enemies would later be formalized in his legislation on religious freedom, but his comment on this British precedent marks the dawn of Jefferson’s distinctively positive view about the possibility of Muslim citizenship in America.

  Jefferson’s first reference to Islam (as opposed to the status of individual Muslims) appears in his extensive notes on Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke’s (d. 1751) five-volume Philosophical Works.101 In fact, Jefferson transcribed from Bolingbroke more than from any other author.102 Samuel Johnson once called Bolingbroke “a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality,” but Jefferson was clearly fascinated by this fellow Deist who remained deeply skeptical of religion, including not just Judaism and Christianity but also Islam.103

  Douglas L. Wilson, editor of Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, was first to observe the remarkable degree to which Jefferson embraced Bolingbroke’s philosophy. The direct effect is notable not only in Jefferson’s views on religion, but in his reliance on reason as the only valid path to knowledge, as well as a corresponding distrust of theologians and clergymen. Jefferson would also adopt Bolingbroke’s aversion to Plato and his influence on Christian theology, as well as a skepticism about the historicity of biblical accounts.104

  Jefferson took careful note of Bolingbroke’s analysis of the basic tenets of Christianity—the divinity of Jesus, his crucifixion and resurrection—all of which Jefferson too would come to doubt, and of Bolingbroke’s criticism of how Christian dogma gave rise to an unfortunate history of schism, persecution, and torture.105 Paraphrasing Bolingbroke’s moral relativism, Jefferson wrote:

  Who are reputed to be good Christians? go to Rome, they are papists. go to Geneva, they are Calvinists. go to the north of Germany, they are Lutherans. come to London, they are none of these[.] orthodoxy is a mode. it is one thing at one time and in one place. it is something else at another time, and in another place, or even in the same place: for in this religious country of ours, without seeking proofs in any other, men have been burned under one reign, for the very same doctrines they were obliged to profess in another. you damn all those who differ from you.106

  Almost twenty years later, and eight years after rejecting the establishment of a state religion in the legislation of 1776, Jefferson would again echo Bolingbroke in his Notes on Virginia: “Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.”107

  Jefferson also restated in a nutshell the skeptical premise of Bolingbroke’s multivolume treatise concerning all revealed religions, including Islam:

  We must not assume for truth, what can be proved neither à priori, nor à posteriori. a mystery cannot be proved à priori; it would be no mystery if it could: and inspiration is become a mystery, since all we know of it is, that it is an inexplicable action of the divine on the human mind[.] it would be silly, therefore, to assume it to be true, because god can act mysteriously, that is, in ways unknown to us, on his creature man … and the proofs that brought à posteriori for Christian inspiration, are not more decisive to Christians, than those, which the Stoicians brought in favor of vaticination [prophecy] and divination, were to them; nor than those which the Mahometans and the worshippers of Foe bring of the same kind, are to them.

  Jefferson also recorded Bolingbroke’s own more succinct statement of the same: “No hypothesis ought to be maintained if a single phaenomenon stands in direct opposition to it.”108 This premise undermined the acceptance of the miraculous without logical analysis in any belief system, be it Christian, Stoic, or Muslim.

  A SCANDALOUS DIVORCE AND ISLAMIC LAW: JEFFERSON REPEATS MISINFORMATION FROM THE LEARNED VON PUFENDORF, 1772

  In 1767, two years after his purchase of the Qur’an and his first written reference to Islam, Jefferson was admitted to the bar in Virginia.109 In 1772, while working on a difficult divorce case, he would have occasion to seek out Islamic legal precedents, but, once again, he apparently did not consult Sale’s introduction or his translation of the Qur’an. He might have made his job easier if he had.

  Dr. James Blair of Williamsburg was sued for divorce by his wife, Kitty Eustace, who demanded separate maintenance and alimony based on a specific prenuptial agreement.110 The delicacy of the situation had the potential for a local scandal: Jefferson’s notes indicate that the marriage was never consummated, probably due to Dr. Blair’s illness.111 Between November 1772 and Dr. Blair’s death at the end of that year, Jefferson made extensive notes on divorce law from Freiherr von Pufendorf’s legal treatise Of the L
aw of Nature and Nations. (The work of the eminent jurist Von Pufendorf had been first published in 1692 in Latin, but Jefferson consulted a 1749 English edition.)112 For Anglicans, divorce was nearly impossible without an act of Parliament, which was the equivalent of an annulment.113 Such long odds of succeeding would explain why Jefferson’s search for precedents eventually led him so far afield, even to non-Western jurisprudence and Sharia law.

  Jefferson divided his findings on divorce into “pro” and “con” sections, comparing the permissive and prohibitive cases around the world. Under the heading “Miscellaneous Practices of several Nations,” he included references to the Dutch in Japan, ancient Athens, the Maldives, the Amazons, and the Jews.114 Jefferson then chose only one Islamic precedent, despite the fact that Von Pufendorf cites many others:115 “Among the Turks is a kind of marriage called Kabin, where parties agree on the fixt time of separation, securing to the woman a sum of money on dismission.”116 The Persian term kabin had two distinct Ottoman legal applications, depending on location.117 Von Pufendorf correctly defines one form, a temporary marriage that was in practice in European Balkan territories of the empire. That variant is generally known by the Arabic legal term mut‘a, or a marriage “contracted for a fixed period” that remunerates the woman at its end with an “indemnity payable to a divorced wife where no mahr or dowry has been stipulated.”118 In Anatolian regions of the Ottoman Empire, however, the same term referred instead to the dowry or “marriage portion contracted to be paid by the husband to his wife if he divorces her without sufficient cause.”119 So, for example, on becoming the legal wife of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman (r. 1520–66), Hürrem (d. 1558), the favorite concubine, known in Western history as Roxelana, received the kabin of five thousand ducats as dowry.120

  Again, Jefferson apparently did not consult Sale’s excursus on Islamic law. Had he done so, he would have found the following, a more helpful and accurate description of a Muslim woman’s grounds for divorce:

  [Y]et the women are not allowed to separate themselves from their husbands, unless it be for ill usage, want of proper maintenance, neglect of conjugal duty, impotency, or some cause of equal import; but then she generally loses her dowry, which she does not, if divorced by her husband.121

  Indeed, under Islamic law, Kitty Eustace would have had a claim to dissolve her marriage based on her husband’s alleged “impotency.” Sale had described exactly what Jefferson had been looking for.

  ANOTHER BURNED LIBRARY: JEFFERSON ABSORBS VOLTAIRE’S NEGATIVE VIEWS OF THE QUR’AN AND ISLAM, 1775

  Jefferson’s notes around 1775 about law and history in his Legal Commonplace Book included entries about Islam based on Voltaire’s observations.122 As detailed in chapter 1, Voltaire’s mostly ahistorical play demonized the Prophet as a violent and lascivious religious impostor. This harshly negative view of Voltaire’s would be unchanged when he later attempted a world history.

  Jefferson, who attended the theater in Williamsburg, never bought or saw Voltaire’s play, but he encountered a similarly unforgiving vision of Muhammad in the philosophe’s 1756 Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, or, as translated for the 1759 London edition, An Essay on the Universal History, Manners, and Spirit of Nations.123 Jefferson cited vol- ume 14 of the original French edition, his notes beginning briefly in English before switching to French.124 He took few notes on the disparaging portrait of the Prophet himself.125

  He likewise ignored Voltaire’s footnote praising Sale as “wise and judicious.”126 Instead, Jefferson focused on Voltaire’s description of the reign of Umar ibn al-Khattab (r. 634–44), the second caliph and the Prophet’s political successor, whose conquests pushed the borders of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula to Egypt in the west and Iran in the east. Jefferson also recorded Voltaire’s account of the fall of Iran and the demise of Zoroastrianism, the pre-Islamic faith of the country.127 Most of the Zoroastrian population, known in the eighteenth century as Parsis, relocated to remote reaches of Iran and India, which prompted Voltaire to group them with the Jews, describing both groups as “ignorant, scorned, and in their poverty close”; he claimed that the Zoroastrians in diaspora, like the Jews, were “so long dispersed without allying themselves with other nations.”128

  A second paragraph Jefferson copied from Voltaire concerned Umar’s conquest of Egypt. Here Voltaire falsely claimed that the Muslims “burned the famous library of Alexandria, monument to the understanding and the errors of men, begun by Ptolemy.”129 Probably the library was destroyed much earlier than 642 CE, when the Islamic siege of Alexandria was lifted by truce; the true arsonists, according to scholars versed in Greek, Latin, and Arabic sources, were either Caesar’s legions in 48 BCE or Coptic Christians battling Hellenistic pagans in the fourth century CE. The popular myth of the library’s destruction by Muslims would nevertheless persist into the twentieth century.130

  Although he did not refer to the anecdote, Voltaire’s supposition was based upon a curious command falsely attributed to the caliph Umar, and cited five hundred years after the fact; he supposedly ordered the library destroyed because its “books of wisdom” concerning philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and law challenged “the Book of God”—the Qur’an.131 What must Jefferson, the bibliophile, who’d lost his own library to fire in 1770, have thought of a religion that Voltaire presented as demanding the burning of books?

  Voltaire’s belief in the myth about the destruction of the library inspired a further misrepresentation, which Jefferson also recorded in his notes: “The Saracens wanted no science except the Alcoran.”132 This was a peculiar assertion for Voltaire, who knew better: Only four pages later, he included a partial list of Islamic scientific, medical, and mathematical achievements that had enhanced European understanding in the late medieval period. He admitted that algebra was “one of their inventions”133 and that “chemistry and medicine were cultivated by the Arabs,” adding for good measure that chemistry was initially unknown to Europeans.134 Voltaire then praised the Muslims’ preservation of ancient medical remedies from the schools of Hippocrates and Galen, which survived via Latin translations from Arabic, though he failed to mention significant advances in diagnostics, surgery, and pharmacology transmitted from the Arabs to Christian Europe.

  Voltaire might have explained that the works of Aristotle were also directly inherited by the Arabs, who added their own extensive commentaries. This allowed the medieval Spanish Muslim jurist and philosopher Ibn Rushd, known in Western Europe as Averroes (d. 1198), to explore the tension between reason and revelation, the very problem Jefferson would address in his own analysis of Christianity. In fact, Ibn Rushd’s detailed annotations of Aristotle, translated in Spain from Arabic into Latin in the thirteenth century, fired the progress of empiricism and rationalism at universities in Paris and Bologna. Medieval Islamic scholarship would thus contribute to European Renaissance debates, without which Jefferson’s rationalist philosophy could not have come into being.

  By 1788, in a letter written from Paris, Jefferson would acknowledge the importance of Arabic manuscripts as a repository of classical learning, writing with excitement about a discovery in Sicily as a possible source of the historian Livy’s lost volumes. Jefferson was determined to procure the texts upon their translation from Arabic into Italian.135 But in 1775, he would note only one of the major Islamic contributions to European culture cited by Voltaire, where he observes that the numerals in use in Europe were adopted from those of the Arabs, who borrowed them from India.136 Still, it is Voltaire’s depiction of Islam as an enemy of science that made the stronger impression on Jefferson: As late as 1785, commenting on the possibility of the Turks being driven “out of Europe” in support of the Greeks regaining control of “their own country,” Jefferson describes the Ottomans as “a set of Barbarians with whom an opposition to all science is an article of religion.”137

  Voltaire’s condemnation of Islam contained another element of lasting impact on Jefferson. In his final clause regarding the
Qur’an, Voltaire charged Muslims with forced religious conversion after military conquest, claiming that they “already showed that their genius would be to extend [the Qur’an] over all.”138 It was merely a rote assertion of the old anti-Islamic polemic that the faith was spread by the sword alone. Islam did not become the dominant religion of the Middle East overnight, or by sheer force. Most historians now believe that conversion of the mainly Christian and Zoroastrian populations took centuries, spurred by a host of economic, social, and religious factors unique to each denomination and region.139 But in the Atlantic culture of the eighteenth century, the narrative of violent conquest was accepted as fact.

  JEFFERSON’S ATTEMPT AT ENDING THE ANGLICAN ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION IN VIRGINIA THROUGH REFERENCE TO ISLAM, NOVEMBER 1776

  After writing the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776, Jefferson returned to Virginia in the autumn to draft new laws for the Commonwealth concerning the separation of religion and government.140 It was, apart from much else, a critical year for his thinking on Islam. For in attempting to end the establishment of Anglicanism, which discriminated against other religions and Protestant sects, Jefferson would draw upon precedents in Voltaire and various British political tracts depicting Islam as a coercive force inimical to scientific inquiry.