Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders
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Jefferson had recapitulated the bey’s formula, as well as adding his own prayer for “safeguard” of the Muslim ruler’s life, which had a pious ring, but might also be considered in purely pragmatic terms: Anytime a North African ruler died, previous peace treaties were abrogated and needed to be renegotiated by the new Muslim sovereign. In wishing long life to Hammuda Bey, whose rule would run from 1777 to 1814, Jefferson was also praying that America would be spared further financial demands. His relationship with Hammuda and the bey’s rule would endure through both of Jefferson’s presidential terms.
On September 8, 1802, the Tunisian ruler responded to Jefferson with thanks for the receipt of “all the military and naval stores” and the “superb jewels” guaranteed by treaty. Hammuda Bey then praised the “harmony and alliance which, thank God, have been established and actually subsist between us.” This did not keep the North African ruler from requesting “a good frigate of 36 guns” from the Americans. Nor would he refrain from aiding Tripoli in its war with the United States. Nevertheless, the bey concluded, “I pray Almighty God to have you in his holy keeping.”158 The bey had adopted a key part of Jefferson’s formula for a personal benediction in his closing.
When, in the course of this correspondence with Tunis, Tripoli had declared war on the United States on May 14, 1801, Jefferson responded by ordering a U.S. naval squadron to the Mediterranean within a week. Even so, writing the Tripolitan ruler for the first time as president seven days after the declaration of war, Jefferson still expressed hope for “peace and friendship with all nations,” signing his missive, “I pray God, very great and respected friend, to have you always in his holy keeping.”159 Jefferson the Deist’s belief in a unitary God would be consonant with this assertion, even in the midst of his blockade of Tripoli’s harbor. But invoking God’s protection for an avowed enemy? It would appear that Jefferson was attempting to see whether the religious formula he had included in his response to the bey of Tunis might gain him anything in diplomacy with Tripoli. Jefferson’s letters to the ruler of Tunis in 1803 and 1804, during the war with Tripoli, a period when Tunis offered military aid to that neighboring power, continued to invoke God in his final benedictions. These expressions had become a consistent part of the president’s foreign policy.160
These letters must be understood in context. When Jefferson dispatched a letter in 1806 to the bey in the care of his ambassador, the American navy had already seized Tunisian vessels for assisting Tripoli. Despite conflict with Tunis, the need for conciliation with them was great, now that war against Tripoli was at last concluded, and the president’s solicitous words reflect the fragility of the bilateral relationship, at a time when the United States was in no position of naval or diplomatic advantage. What is perhaps most interesting was that Jefferson, whatever his innermost intent, should express repeatedly a personal belief in God to a Muslim ruler at a time when many of his own countrymen considered their president an atheist, an infidel, or even a Muslim outright. These letters dare to assert that Jefferson, at least, agreed that North Africans and Americans worshipped the same deity, and that this common belief would enhance their diplomatic relations.
A sense of fellowship infuses the correspondence, with Jefferson addressing the Tunisian ruler as “Most Illustrious and Most Magnificent Prince, the Bey of Tunis,” but also as “Great and Good Friend.” To facilitate amicable understanding, Jefferson bluntly admonished his own naval commander Rodgers in the letter, describing his threat of war and a naval blockade in Tunis as “menaces” undertaken without the president’s express “instructions” and carried out “in a manner not consisting with the respect due to your Excellency’s character, nor with the friendship which I bear you.” As proof that Rodgers had overstepped the “spirit of conciliation” that Jefferson intended to foster between the two countries, the president assured the Tunisian ruler that the commander would be reprimanded on his return to the United States.161
Jefferson then broached the ambassador’s visit, carefully balancing approbation with criticism of his conduct. He lauded Hammuda Bey for initiating the “special mission,” as “proof of that desire for the maintenance of peace between our two countries, which I have a pleasure of meeting and cherishing,” and told of how he had received the ambassador “with all the cordiality and respect which a missionary from you so justly commands.” Emphasizing a second time his desire “to preserve peace and good understanding,” Jefferson underscored that “the interests of both countries” could be “permanently established only by the practice of justice, equality, and mutual forbearance.”162
At the same time, the president did not refrain from explaining his resistance to some of Mellimelli’s demands, though softening his objections with a final complimentary flourish: “If the ambassador has pressed too strongly, and persevered too inflexibly in certain demands to which we cannot accede, I have ascribed it to a laudable zeal for the promotion of your service, and a desire to merit that favor with you, to which his talents and fidelity so justly entitle him.” Jefferson expressed hope that returning to Tunis, Mellimelli would attest to the important differences between the United States and Europe:
He will be able to inform you, on the evidence of his own observation, that the character, principles, and institutions of our Government, distinguish us essentially from the Nations of Europe. Their practices can therefore be no rule for us.163
The president here refers implicitly to the fact that his country, unlike those in Europe, is not officially Christian, and therefore without any inherent antagonism toward Islam. It was of course true only officially, as his own political experience attested. But for Jefferson, the Constitution’s Establishment Clause was not merely a measure to ward off sectarian strife, as it had been to many of the Framers. It was an affirmative American virtue, one that might well pay dividends in the conduct of foreign policy.
Jefferson’s view of mutuality in foreign policy was as simple as this: “The law of our connection with other nations is to do justice and receive it, to ask and to yield nothing unequal.” His understanding of maritime relations was already to be found in his treaty with Tripoli, drafted the previous year, but he reiterated it: “We hold particularly that nature having placed the ocean as a common highway for the intercourse of nations, all have equal right to use it, and in the maintenance of that right we calculate neither expence nor danger.”164 This was the basis for Jefferson’s naval action against Tripoli and Tunis, and he assumed, with great optimism, that Hammuda Bey would approve “the correctness of these principles” because of his “known justice and high understanding.”165 In preparing the way for a new U.S. consul’s arrival in Tunis, Jefferson also expressed hope that “our former Treaty will continue to be the law of our observance, that commerce between our two nations will be cherished, and that all our relations shall be founded on principles of equality and reciprocity.”166
In the penultimate paragraph of his letter, Jefferson defended the seizure of the Tunisian ships that had been aiding America’s enemy Tripoli: “A nation is surely authorized, by the common reason of mankind, to restrain all persons from passing the circumvallation by which it beleaguers its enemy, whether by land or sea, and to treat the individuals as transgressors who attempt it by fraud or force.” However, he concluded by allowing that “our war with Tripoli being over, we can relax with safety its rigorous rights.” As a new “proof of friendship,” Jefferson not only “waived” the “right acquired to us by hostile act” to keep as prizes those Tunisian ships but also “substituted” a vessel “more worthy of your acceptance,” a newer ship in place of the seized one that had suffered “unavoidable decay.”167
Finally, thanking the Tunisian ruler for his “tokens of friendship,” the gifts he had sent to Washington, Jefferson expressed his desire to reciprocate with presents “from our country.” His last sentence appealed not just to common national interests, but to a mutual belief in the same divinity: “with these [gifts] my prayers that
God will have you, great and good friend, in his holy keeping.”168 It was a startling benediction for an American president, to suggest that both men were equals before a shared God, but this formula was the same one Jefferson had included consistently since 1801. The president wrote this line again in 1806, not in haste but deliberately and twice in his own hand for the first draft and again in his final version of the letter.169 These exact words also graced the more ornately scripted official copy dispatched with the ambassador, which remains to this day in the Tunisian National Archives.170
It must of course be remembered that the president never expected the sentiments in his private missives to Tunis or Tripoli to be made public. Indeed, at the time he “never allowed his private letters regarding religion to be published.”171 And it is likely that Jefferson had little hope that his appeal to ideals of “justice, equality, and mutual forbearance”172 would result in actual diplomatic advantage. But if somehow, realpolitik notwithstanding, his words could nudge relations with Tunis closer toward “principles of equality and reciprocity,” the status quo of American weakness and mercantile vulnerability might be marginally improved. At the same time, it is worth noting that Jefferson had long truly believed the principle first enunciated in Adams’s treaty, that “the Government of the United States of America, has in itself no character of enmity against the Laws, Religion or Tranquility of Musselmen.”173 Indeed, since his first exposure in the 1760s to a British legal precedent about the toleration of Muslims, he rejected the idea that any “enmity” had ever existed between “Turks” and Englishmen due to a “difference between our religion and theirs.”174
In pressing this point, Jefferson may have consulted his own copy of the Qur’an to support his religious assertions in North African diplomatic correspondence. A Qur’anic passage that commands Muslims not to argue with “People of the Scripture” (Jews and Christians) extols the very commonality that Jefferson invoked: “We believe in that which hath been revealed unto us and revealed unto you; our God and your God is One, and unto Him we surrender” (Qur’an 29:46).175 There is certainly the distinct possibility that Jefferson would have used his knowledge of such verses to manipulate and cajole his adversaries to whatever extent he could. Nevertheless, it must at the same time be allowed that these inclinations are entirely compatible with Jefferson’s own religious evolution, as reflected in other private letters of this time; his embrace of Deist and, finally, Unitarian ideas is in full harmony with the Muslim belief in a single, shared deity.
JEFFERSON THE UNITARIAN AND HIS CONTACT WITH JOSEPH PRIESTLEY
In 1793, Jefferson bought An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, published nine years earlier by the British Unitarian Joseph Priestley (d. 1804); it would have a profound influence on his religious views.176 Priestley’s book, which denied the Trinity and emphasized the humanity of Jesus,177 won the author disdain in Britain, and though he despised Islam, his enemies nevertheless taunted him in 1792 with a play on the Muslim creedal statement: “The real creed of the Unitarian is—There is one God and Priestley is his prophet.”178 The year before, Jefferson had been attacked in just the same way by John Quincy Adams for his support of the Deist Thomas Paine: “There is but one Goddess of Liberty, and Common Sense is her prophet.”179
The Unitarian Priestley and the Deist Jefferson had, within a year of each other, been similarly condemned as Muslims. It was not the first time for Priestley. Two years before, he acknowledged, without irony, that “my opponents, who consider me already as half a Mahometan, will not suppose that I can have any objection to the society of persons of that religion.”180 As with Jefferson, a negative view of Islam on Priestley’s part did not diminish his respect for its adherents, and Priestley would describe himself as the real acquaintance of members of the three non-Protestant faiths most despised by the British majority: Catholics, Jews, and Muslims.181 As a legislator Jefferson had defended the rights of each, going so far as to meet with Muslims in person and to engage them in his private correspondence. But he would not be persecuted to the extent Priestley was.
Almost as objectionable in Britain as Priestley’s Unitarianism was his support for the French Revolution. Together, these positions marked him as a traitor and precipitated a riot, which destroyed his house in Birmingham, including his library and laboratory.182 Three years later he would leave Britain, at Jefferson’s urging, settling with his family in Pennsylvania. There in 1797, Jefferson and Priestley met for the first time.183 A friendship was born, and it flourished until Priestley died in 1804. Jefferson would aver that “Priestley’s learned writings on” Unitarianism “are, or should be, in every hand.”184
By 1801, the year Jefferson first wrote to Tunis, he had developed a serious interest in Unitarianism, entering into frequent and lengthy correspondence with Priestley’s fellow Unitarian thinkers, an exchange that would continue to the end of the president’s life.185 In 1820, writing to Jared Sparks, he would link his belief in Jesus as a purely human moral exemplar to his vision of a unitary God. He affirmed these convictions as Unitarian but also ultimately universal. Indeed, they built upon his long-standing Deism, which extols Jesus as a human prophet, as Islam does. In fact, Jefferson declared, “The religion of Jesus is founded on the Unity of God.”186
His private abandonment of the Trinity was of course a repudiation of the Anglican faith into which he’d been born, and not long before, if made public, it would have cost him dearly—though not as dearly as Servetus, who in sixteenth-century Geneva had been condemned to the pyre—but Jefferson could not have forgotten that in Virginia, before passage of his legislation establishing religious freedom in 1786, those who denied the Trinity suffered imprisonment.187 In another letter in 1822, Jefferson described that persecution as the “hocus-pocus phantasm of a God … with one body and three heads,” which “had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs.” In this same letter, Jefferson declared that true Christianity had been grounded in absolute monotheism at its inception: “No historical fact is better established, than that the doctrine of one God, pure and uncompounded, was that of the early ages of Christianity.”188
This idea he derived from the seventeenth-century English forerunners of Unitarianism, the Socinians, who first espoused a return to what they deemed an original pristine Christianity,189 considering all else, as Jefferson did, “corruptions of his religion.” “Thinking men of all nations,” Jefferson concluded, “rallied readily to the doctrine of one only god,” a sentiment allowing for the beliefs of Muslims and Jews, as well as Christians.190
But Jefferson also allowed room for those who disagreed with his views on the Trinity:
I write with freedom, because while I claim a right to believe in one God, if so my reason tells me, I yield as freely to others that believe in three. Both religions, I find, make honest men, and that is the only point society has any right to look to.191
His life’s work would ultimately prove his interest in religion to be less theological than political and legal. His aim as a statesman was not the definition of transcendent truth but the foundation of a more civil, pluralist society at home and peaceful relations for America abroad. Still, his own ecumenism was not boundless.
Having, via Deist and then Unitarian reflection, come to believe in a unitary (rather than triune) God, Jefferson was able sincerely to claim a theological outlook with which the Muslim sovereign in Tunis could concur. He had certainly paid for this conviction, having been branded an infidel by his own countrymen, and his private letters to American and British Unitarians reflect a steadiness of innate belief whatever more expedient reasons he may also have had for expressing his spiritual sentiments to Hammuda Bey. Jefferson’s impulse to share his beliefs with the bey of Tunis seems not unlike the wishes of seventeenth-century Unitarians in England to meet the Moroccan ambassador and affirm their shared view of God.192 Against all other Protestant Christians at the time, these early Unitarians argued that “Islam was not a mis
shapen mirror image of Christianity, but an object of commendation.”193 It is quite possible, then, that Jefferson similarly found in the Tunisian ruler’s religion at least one basic belief to commend. This of course did not negate the general disdain he had always felt for the faith of Islam—and every other organized religion, including Christianity.
JEFFERSON’S FINAL NEGATIVE VIEWS OF THE QUR’AN AND THE PROPHET, 1809–22
It would be wrong to suggest that personal belief in monotheism led Jefferson to anything like consistent admiration for the precepts of the Qur’an or the example of the Prophet. Indeed, not long after his letters to Tunis and his embrace of Unitarianism, from 1809 to 1822 he continued to write about the sacred book and the Prophet in quite disparaging terms.
In 1809, in an unsent draft of a letter to a Baptist minister, Jefferson describes the “bitter schisms of Nazarenes, Socinians, Arians, Athanasians in former times, and now of Trinitarians, Unitarians, Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers &c.” He then adds a peculiar—and false—comparison to schisms in Islam: “Among the Mahometans we are told that thousands fell victims to the dispute whether the first or second toe of Mahomet was longest; and what blood, how many human lives have the words ‘this do in remembrance of me’ cost the Christian world!”194 By way of this possibly fanciful analogy did Jefferson decry religious persecution as a universal problem.
The next year, in 1810, Jefferson refers to the Qur’an in a discussion of William Blackstone’s Commentaries, the foundational British legal compendium published in 1765, the same year in which Jefferson had purchased his Qur’an.195 While acknowledging the Qur’an as the source of Islamic law, Jefferson takes to task both American lawyers, whom he describes as “us,” and “Mahometans,” an implicit “them,” for the same blinkered practice of relying on only one book as the fount of all law: “I have long lamented with you the depreciation of law science. The opinion seems to be that Blackstone is to us what the Alcoran is to Mahometans, that everything which is necessary is in him, and what is not in him is not necessary.”196 He might have asserted more parochially that “Blackstone is to us lawyers what the Bible is to Christians,” but such a division between lawyer and Christian might have offended the letter’s recipient, a judge who was certainly both.