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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  He recounted his and John Adams’s efforts in 1786 to sue for peace with Tripoli, and how they had foundered on the fiscal “demands” of the ambassador Abd al-Rahman, which were “beyond the limits of Congress and of reason.” Even if “purchasing” peace were financially feasible—he outlined how much it might cost—there remained the danger that an expensive peace might be abrogated by the untimely death of a North African ruler.11

  Finally, he made his most direct case to “repel force for force,” the option he had privately endorsed since 1784. To do this, a navy would be required, and it was only “prudent” that it be “a force equal to the whole of that” which “opposed” the Americans. Jefferson presented the options with a veneer of impartiality, concluding that “it rests with Congress to decide between war, tribute, and ransom.”12 But his own mind had long been made up, and as president he would choose war in 1801, without requesting the support of Congress.

  Jefferson had disagreed with John Adams since 1786 about the best response to piracy, but five years later, their differences in this and other political matters would become more pronounced. When the rift became public, Islam became not only a subject for dispute but a means of personal and political insult.

  ISLAM IN AMERICAN POLITICAL RHETORIC DIVIDES JEFFERSON AND ADAMS, 1791

  Jefferson was first accused of being a Muslim as a result of words he wrote in 1791 in praise of his friend Thomas Paine’s tract The Rights of Man. The context was innocent, a note to the father of Paine’s American editor, wherein Jefferson referred to himself in the third person: “He is extremely pleased to find it will be re-printed here, and that something is to be publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us. He has no doubt our citizens will rally a second time round the standard of Common sense.”13

  Having assumed his words were private, Jefferson was soon chagrined to see them transposed into the first person and set in print as an introduction to the American edition. The expression “political heresies” particularly inflamed John Adams and his supporters, who took it as a damning reference to Adams’s recently published ideas in support of aristocracy, an element of his opposition to the French Revolution.

  As it happens, Adams had read Jefferson’s words correctly, though Jefferson never intended for Adams to read them at all, which he privately admitted in a letter to George Washington. In the same letter, he nevertheless, made his reproach more explicit, insisting anew that the theories of government in Adams’s Discourses on Davila represented “political heresies,” referring as well to Adams’s “apostacy to hereditary monarchy and nobility.”14 A day later, Jefferson wrote James Madison making the same confession. Having so assiduously avoided a public disagreement with Adams over his plan for a multinational force to fight piracy while both served as diplomats in Europe, he was appalled that his differences with his friend should now be in the open—appalled and worried, though not chastened, to judge by his letter to Madison:

  I thought no more of this and heard no more till the pamphlet appeared to my astonishment with my note at the head of it.… I had in view certainly the doctrines of Davila. I tell the writer freely that he is a heretic, but certainly never meant to step into a public newspaper with that in my mouth. I have just reason therefore to think he will be displeased.15

  For his part, Madison staunchly supported Jefferson in a letter to him, concurring that Adams’s political views warranted disparagement as attacks on “the Republican Constitutions of this Country,” and “antirepublican discourses.”16

  Adams and Jefferson’s divergent responses to Paine’s latest work issued from another point of simmering disagreement between them: the French upheaval itself. Paine had written The Rights of Man in 1791 as a rebuttal to Edmund Burke’s censorious Reflections on the Revolution in France. In Discourses on Davila the year before, Adams had couched his own disapproval of the Revolution in terms of British political traditions. But Jefferson, by contrast, heartily welcomed the events across the Channel, the overthrow of an absolutist monarchy and the advent of republicanism, in which he saw more affinities with the American Revolution, where Adams saw destructive chaos.

  By July, Jefferson realized that, awkward as it might be, he could not publicly deny his endorsement of Paine’s work: “I had written it: I could not disavow my approbation of the pamphlet, because I was fully in sentiment with it: and it would have been trifling to have disavowed merely the publication of the note, approving at the same time of the pamphlet.” He “determined therefore to be utterly silent, except so far as verbal explanations could be made.”17 As early as June, however, he’d had reason to suspect that Adams had taken up the pen against him under the pseudonym “Publicola.”18 Proxy newspaper duels ensued between supporters of Jefferson and Adams, with some believing that Jefferson had joined the fray personally under various classical pseudonyms.19 In fact, he hadn’t, and nor was Adams actually the one who had taken up “the cudgels” to attack him and Paine as Publicola. That author was in fact Adams’s twenty-four-year-old son John Quincy, who had commenced a series of letters in defense of his father on June 8 in the Boston paper the Columbian Centinel.

  In his first letter, John Quincy took immediate issue with Jefferson’s phrase “political heresies,” casting the words as an un-American absurdity. He laced his counterattack with religious references linking Jefferson’s political views to the twin Protestant nightmares of Catholicism and Islam, imputing to Jefferson quasi-papal “infallibility” and referring to Paine’s book as canon law. As Publicola, he wrote:

  I confess, Sir, I am somewhat at a loss to determine, what this very respectable gentleman means by political heresies. Does he consider this pamphlet of Mr. Paine’s as a canonical book of political scripture? As containing the true doctrine of popular infallibility, from which it would be heretical to depart in one single point?20

  He went on to compare Jefferson’s endorsement of Paine’s political philosophy to the violent incitements the younger Adams attributed to the Prophet Muhammad:

  The expressions, indeed, imply more; they seem, like the Arabian prophet, to call upon all true believers in the Islam of democracy, to draw their swords, and, in the fervour of their devotion, to compel their countrymen to cry out, “There is but one Goddess of Liberty, and Common Sense is her prophet.”21

  Negative caricatures of the Prophet had been circulating in America since the seventeenth century, and now the man who would become the sixth president was tarring the man who would soon be the third as the same sort of political rabble-rouser, an implication neatly distilled in John Quincy’s parody of the shahada, the Islamic creedal statement (“There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet”). Jefferson’s political assertions were derided as a new American religion—“the Islam of democracy”—whose prophet was Thomas Paine. And since both Jefferson and Paine were known to be Deists, the association with Islam would not have seemed strained, conforming to a hundred-year-old pattern of scurrilous political rhetoric in England.22

  The younger Adams represented the very charge of “heresy” as an assault on the intellectual freedom of all Americans, reminding his readers that “the citizens of these States were possessed of a full and entire freedom of opinion upon all subjects, civil as well as religious; they have not yet established any infallible criterion of orthodoxy, either in church or state: their principles in theory, and their habits in practice, are equally averse to that slavery of the mind, which adopts, without examination, any sentiment that has the sanction of a venerable name.”23 By associating them with Islam, Publicola implied that Jefferson’s beliefs were not only un-American but anti-American. Thus did he carry anti-Islamic rhetoric to a new level in American political discourse. It was the first but not the last time Jefferson’s political opponents would so defame him.

  When on July 17 Jefferson finally wrote to John Adams, explaining that he was “thunderstruck” to see his private note about Paine in print, he attributed the public f
uror not to his own words but to Publicola’s answer:

  Soon after came hosts of other writers defending the pamphlet and attacking you by name as the writer of Publicola. Thus were our names thrown on the public stage as public antagonists. That you and I differ in our ideas of the best form of government is well known to us both: but we have differed as friends do, respecting the purity of each other’s motives, and confining our difference of opinion to private conversation.24

  He concluded with a confession that “nothing was further from my intention or expectation than to have had either my own or your name brought before the public on this occasion,” adding that his explanation of the events was “required” because of the importance of the “friendship and confidence which has so long existed between us.”25

  Adams responded “with great pleasure” twelve days later, though he complained that his friend’s words were “generally considered as a direct and open personal attack upon me, by countenancing the false interpretation of my Writings as favouring the Introduction of hereditary Monarchy and Aristocracy into this Country.”26 But he minced no words expressing injury: “The Question every where was, What Heresies are intended by the Secretary of State?” Adams described how papers in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia had picked up the story, with his local political enemies making much of the dispute. In Publicola’s defense, Adams allowed the author had “thought [him] innocent” and “came forward,” disingenuously attributing to the writer, whom he knew to be his own son, that he only “followed his own Judgment, Information and discretion, without any assistance from me.”27 By this time, Jefferson too had been informed of Publicola’s true identity, a fact John Adams would never admit to his friend.

  By the end of August, Jefferson would still take no responsibility for the trouble caused by his “political heresies” comment, insisting instead that “not a word on the subject would ever have been said had not a writer, under the name of Publicola, at length undertaken to attack Mr. Paine’s principles,” which Jefferson persisted in calling “the principles of the citizens of the U.S.” (an indirect repetition of his original attack on Adams).28 For his part, Adams had earlier discounted Publicola as the source of the controversy, noting that “an unprincipled Libeller in the New Haven Gazette” had attacked him—and these lies had been repeated in numerous northeastern newspapers.29 But Jefferson wryly dismissed the “Libeller’s” importance with his own reference to Islam: “You speak of the execrable paragraph in the Connecticut paper. This it is true appeared before Publicola. But it had no more relation to Paine’s pamphlet and my note, than to the Alcoran. I am satisfied the writer of it had never seen either.”30

  It was an attempt to denigrate Adams’s critic, but also perhaps a not-so-subtle dig at John Quincy Adams. One historian has suggested that Jefferson used the reference to the Islamic holy book merely as “an analogy for irrelevance” and a reflection of what was “alien to his experience.”31 But Jefferson knew the Qur’an well, having owned a copy of it for more than a quarter century, and it seems likelier his reference to it was simply meant to suggest the ignorance of Adams’s critic.

  With neither man much exerting himself to make amends, or even to tell the truth, serious and lasting damage was done to the friendship of Jefferson and Adams, and that damage is reflected in the vehemence of their later political battles.32 With the appearance of references to Islam, the acrimony had escalated to a point of no return in character assassination. Ironically, Thomas Paine, whose writing had provoked the rift, held his own distorted view of Islam, one that both John Adams and John Quincy Adams might have endorsed, even as they condemned much else that the author wrote.

  JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, JOHN ADAMS, AND THOMAS PAINE ON ISLAM, THE PROPHET, AND MUSLIM RIGHTS

  Since Humphrey Prideaux’s 1697 polemic had arrived from England, American readers had been primed for the sort of negative stereotypes of the Prophet that John Quincy Adams presented.33 During the Revolutionary War, some might also have seen Voltaire’s play tying Muhammad to religious fanaticism and violence.34 Many others naturally considered him and Islamic regimes to be the antithesis of American religious and political liberties, as depicted in Cato’s Letters.35 John Quincy Adams would therefore have well understood the magnitude of his calumny, and the enmity behind it would not have been lost on Jefferson, despite his own views of Islam.

  Did the elder Adams concur in his son’s dark view of Islam? Not in 1776, when in Thoughts on Government he cast the faith in a considerably more positive light. In promoting “virtue” as the end of government, Adams listed a range of non-Christian exemplars, including the Prophet, whom he identified as one of the “sober inquirers after truth,” all of whom, “ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue. Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, Mahomet, not to mention authorities really sacred, have agreed in this.”36

  By 1790, however, the elder Adams was envisioning Muhammad as a violent impostor and Islam as a source of despotic governments, views he included in Discourses on Davila, the tract to which Jefferson had objected. There, he warned of “anarchy” and “fanaticism” as “the blessings” “of the first mad despot, who with the enthusiasm of another Mahomet, will endeavor to obtain them.”37 It was a view that would survive even this rupture with his friend: Long after their relations had been mended, in July 1816, John Adams wrote to Jefferson describing Napoleon as “a Military Fanatic like Achilles, Alexander, Caesar, Mahomet.”38

  Almost forty years after his attack on Jefferson, in the wake of his presidency (1825–29), John Quincy Adams would continue to deride Islam and the Prophet in an unsigned essay attributed to him.39 In 1827–28, he described the ongoing conflict between the Ottoman Empire and Russia this way: “The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God.” Once again he depicted the Prophet as violent, resorting to the very same distortions with which he had disparaged Jefferson: “but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.”40 It is worth noting that John Quincy Adams also frequently denigrated American Jews as “aliens” and the purveyors of unique “tricks.”41

  Despite his own experience as the object of anti-Islamic slurs, Jefferson also believed and repeated the stereotype of a repressive religion, views his friend Thomas Paine also espoused in Common Sense, wherein he described the Prophet in relation to the evils of monarchy, founded on “some superstitious tale, conveniently timed, Mahomet like, to cram hereditary rights down the throats of the vulgar.”42 Such a view did not, however, prevent his endorsement in his Rights of Man of religious freedom for Muslims in the context of praising the 1789 French Constitution’s “universal rights of conscience.” Anything less was inadequate, as Paine deemed both “Toleration and Intolerance” to be “despotisms,” whereby the state could interfere with the individual’s religious freedom.43

  Paine challenged his readers to respond to a bill he invented, entitled “AN ACT to tolerate or grant liberty to the Almighty to receive the worship of a Jew or a Turk,” or “to prohibit the Almighty from receiving it.” The point of this rhetorical coup was clear: “There would be an uproar” at such unthinkable “blasphemy.” In proposing that these rights be granted to God, Paine sought to expose what he considered the preposterousness of Protestants determining control over the proper bounds of toleration for non-Christians. “The presumption of toleration in religious matters” he boldly charged, “would then present itself unmasked: worshipper and worshipped cannot be separated.” When humans undertook to judge the beliefs of others, they did so heedless of the truth that “no earthly power can determine between you.”44 A few years later, declaring in The Age of Reason his Deist belief “in one God, and no more,” Paine would simultaneously reject national establishments of Judaism, Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Islam, and
Protestantism as so many tyrannies.45 For now, however, he was content to assert that human governments should have no say in matters of conscience.

  ADAMS’S TREATY WITH TRIPOLI, 1797

  On June 10, 1797, President John Adams fulfilled his long-held ambition of signing a treaty of peace and friendship with Tripoli, eleven years after he and Jefferson failed to make one with the ambassador Abd al-Rahman in London. The treaty’s Article 11 unequivocally asserted that America’s government was neither officially Christian nor inherently anti-Islamic:

  As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.46

  Adams left no public comments on the treaty, nor did Jefferson as his vice president. And there is no debate preserved regarding its ratification. The final vote on June 7, 1797, was twenty-three out of thirty-five in the U.S. Senate in favor, but no votes against were registered.47 Nevertheless, the assertion that the country had “no character of enmity against” Muslim beliefs was certainly a marked departure from prevailing anti-Islamic views. Article 11 attempted to excise officially any religious basis for conflict between the United States and Tripoli. To do this, both Christianity and Islam were overtly dismissed as grounds for war, a strategic move that distinguished the United States from the several Christian powers of Europe so long embroiled in what they described as a religious conflict with Islamic states.