Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders
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Jefferson apparently did not recall George Sale’s introduction to the Qur’an in which he mentions the four Sunni schools of Islamic law and the Muslim jurist al-Shafi‘i, who had “reduced that science into a method.”197 Indeed he seems never to have been aware of the extrascriptural sources of Islamic law, including the Prophet’s utterances and example, scholarly consensus, and human reason.198 Likewise unbeknownst to Jefferson, by the eighteenth century, Muslims had been analyzing the Qur’an with the aid of a number of other sources for more than a millennium. But such historical particulars would have mattered less to Jefferson than the intellectual imperative to question all faiths, including Islam. What he objected to among Muslims he also faulted among both Jews and Christians: the dangers of a literal adherence to revealed truth.
Twenty-three years earlier, Jefferson had urged his nephew to make a logical examination of all assumed truths in religion: “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.” This rational, even scientific approach he extended to the Bible, by which he meant the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, as well as the New. Jefferson believed that each book frequently failed his rationalist test. Of the Old Testament, he wrote:
But those facts in the Bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from God. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong, as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change in the laws of nature, in the case he related.199
He could not believe, for example, that Joshua could make the sun stand still.200
Respecting the New Testament, Jefferson urged his nephew to consider “the opposite pretensions” of key Christian doctrines regarding Jesus’s divinity, virgin birth, and whether he “ascended bodily into heaven.” He also advised the lad not to fear if his analysis “ends in a belief that there is no God.” Jefferson already lived by the words of his final exhortation: “Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.”201 It was therefore necessary to read “all the histories of Christ,” because even Christians should not simply rely on one sacred book. In requiring of a reasonable man such a skeptical outlook, then, the Qur’an was no different than the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament.
Jefferson’s 1821 autobiography describes events witnessed at the outset of the French Revolution in 1789 by way of a final, negative analogy to Islam. On July 13, the day before the storming of the Bastille, Jefferson notes what amounted to a coup in the replacement of the king’s key ministers. He blames the unscrupulous new advisors for the precipitation of violence that would provoke the Revolution. The weak king was now “completely in the hands” of men who, wrote Jefferson, “had been noted through their lives, for the Turkish despotism of their characters.”202 It was by now a rather timeworn image of political repression in the form of the Ottoman Empire that Jefferson used to condemn French royal officials he believed cared nothing for justice—or what his friend Lafayette had just proclaimed as “The Rights of Man.”203
A similar stereotyping is evident in an 1822 letter to a professor of medicine at Harvard, wherein Jefferson offers a critique of Calvinism by way of Islam. He rejects as “demoralizing dogmas” five propositions he attributes to Calvin, of which the fourth is particularly relevant to his view of Islam: “4. That reason in religion is of unlawful use.”204 The suggestion that Calvin made reason “unlawful” to use in religion is the very same criticism of Islam he had derived from Voltaire. In the categories of “impious dogmatists” and “false shepherds,” Jefferson places the Protestant reformer Calvin, together with the early father of the church Athanasius, comparing their distance from true Christianity to that of the Prophet: “They are mere usurpers of the Christian name, teaching a counter-religion made up of the deliria of crazy imaginations, as foreign from Christianity as is that of Mahomet.”205
Here, Jefferson’s views of Islam appear particularly derogatory; with no redeeming affinity with Unitarianism, it is reduced to something like a Christian heresy. What is perhaps more remarkable, however, is that even privately Jefferson should so freely compare something so “foreign” to the theology subscribed by most of his Protestant countrymen. In attributing the “deliria of crazy imaginations,” to both Athanasius and Calvin, Jefferson implicitly invokes the standard charge of Christian theologians—and most Americans—that the Prophet was subject to fits of either epilepsy or madness. Yet his intent is to malign not the Prophet but the originators of faulty Christian dogma in a style of doctrinal denigration well established in earlier battles between Catholics and Protestants as among various forms of Protestantism.206 For all Jefferson had suffered from scurrilous claims that he was a Muslim, he would, since the Virginia debates of the 1770s, never cease to find easy recourse to such rhetoric. However forward-looking he may have been about individual Muslim rights, and sympathetic to Islam’s largest theological claim, in his general view of the faith, he remained rather tenaciously a man of his times. The final placement of his Qur’an in the library that he would term “a blueprint of his own mind” does, however, point the way, belatedly, to a more generous vision of Islam.207
THE ISLAMIC WORLD IN JEFFERSON’S LIBRARY, 1783–1823
In 1815, President Madison definitively ended North African piracy in the Mediterranean and Jefferson sold his treasured 6,700-volume library, then the country’s largest private collection, to the U.S. government for $23,950. Jefferson had doubled the size of his holdings by frequenting London and Paris booksellers, where he purchased most of his volumes on the Middle East.208 Among his books, which would become the nucleus of America’s national library (what is now the Library of Congress), was his copy of the Qur’an.209
Inspired by categories drawn from the philosopher Francis Bacon, the unusual complexity of the catalog remained uniquely Jefferson’s. He divided it into three sections: Memory, Philosophy, and Fine Arts.210 Arabic, along with other languages, he placed under Fine Arts; history under Memory. Religion, the division in which he placed the Qur’an, he considered as a subcategory of Philosophy.
Jefferson purchased six volumes in the Arabic language, with a few in Farsi and Turkish, all of these texts including translations into Latin or some other European language. Kevin Hayes has suggested that Jefferson used these books to further his study of Arabic, but if that is true there is no evidence of any actual familiarity with the tongue.211 It is clear, however, that in his earlier planning for the curriculum to be taught at his alma mater, the College of William and Mary, Jefferson did not include Arabic.212 Among the languages he classified as “Oriental,” he urged students to study Hebrew, Chaldean, and Syriac, all standard in the study of biblical exegesis, and all represented by grammars in his library.213
Jefferson’s collection of Egyptian and Ottoman history214 included a book about the revolt of Ali Bey in Egypt,215 Rycaut’s history of the Ottoman Empire, and a chronicle of the great Muslim conqueror Timur Lenk, or Tamerlane (d. 1405).216 The histories of Syria, Arabia, and Iran are not represented, but he included European travelers’ tales of these places as a division of Philosophy, under which he placed geography.217 These travelers’ accounts of the Islamic world ranged across three continental categories: Europe, Asia, and Africa.218 There was, for example, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s (d. 1762) report of her stay in Istanbul as a British diplomat’s wife, wherein she challenges the then common erotically charged fantasies of European men concerning Muslim women, many of them written by male authors who, unlike Montagu, had never met a Turkish woman.219
Not surprisingly, eight volumes were of North African history, the largest concentration in Jefferson’s collection on the Middle East. Half were general regional histories, written by European diplomats; the remaining four texts were more focused on piracy and the plight of European captives.220 The
single American account, written by William Ray and published in 1808, depicted the captivity of the U.S. frigate Philadelphia’s crew during Jefferson’s undeclared war against Tripoli.221 The president had received the book as a gift from the author, who sent it with fawning compliments, also soliciting a presidential donation of one hundred dollars. Jefferson refused, directing Secretary Madison to secure the author some remuneration.222
SALE’S QUR’AN IN JEFFERSON’S LIBRARY
Jefferson’s ultimate placement of the Qur’an in his library exemplifies his understanding of Islam in relation to other world religions.223 In the catalog’s seventeenth chapter on Religion,224 the Qur’an was the fourth book, after three on polytheism (Greek, Zoroastrian Iranian, and Roman deities), and just before several copies of the Old Testament.225 These Old Testaments were followed by volumes containing both the Old and New Testaments and an even greater number containing versions of the New Testament alone.226
Jefferson described the order of his catalog as “sometimes analytical, sometimes chronological & sometimes a combination of both.”227 The placement of the Qur’an certainly defies chronology. According to Islamic tradition, the revelations it comprises occurred between 610 and 632 CE, while a single definitive, written Arabic version was not codified until the mid-seventh century. This means that the Qur’an dates historically to a time millennia after the polytheist deities of the ancient world, but also long after both the Old and New Testaments.228
One explanation of Jefferson’s choice for his Qur’an’s position suggests that Jefferson’s Religion section was predicated on a notion of “progress”229 and that in his view Islam was “an improvement over the pagan religions yet fell short of the belief system Christianity represented.”230 But could Jefferson plausibly have considered Islam “at a halfway point between paganism and Christianity”?231 Certainly his express view of certain essential tenets of Christian orthodoxy would suggest otherwise.
Jefferson had a less than ideal view of both the New Testament and the Christian faith. That is why, beginning in 1804, while he was still president, and resuming in 1819–20, he privately undertook to create by excision his own version of the New Testament Gospels.232 Omitting all miracles, the virgin birth of Jesus, his divinity, and his resurrection, this version would be known after his death as the Jefferson Bible.233 It was his own private edition of the New Testament he endorsed, not those numerous other volumes on his shelves. Perhaps for this reason the version of the Gospels he created stayed among his private papers, never placed among his library collection.
A further complication in the theory of theological progress: In the midst of his numerous versions of the New Testament, one finds two volumes of Old Testament scripture, one of the prophet Isaiah and the other the Psalms of David, which at the very least represent an interruption in a supposed Christian teleology.234 Then, following more New Testaments and their concordances, Jefferson placed a number of exclusively Christian works, focusing on matters ranging from martyrdom to heresy and theological schisms, and also includes a critique of Calvinism, an account of the Moravian sect, another on Anabaptism, a meditation on “toleration and religious liberty,” and one on the subject of suicide.235
What seems to emerge in this section on Religion is less a chronological or thematic order than a degeneration of Christianity into faction and persecution, the opposite of what Jefferson considered religious or civil progress. If he had placed his Qur’an after the New Testaments in strict chronological order, he would have left his only Islamic work stranded between Christian scripture and a host of subsequent elaborations and studies.
Instead, placing the Qur’an next to numerous volumes of the Hebrew Bible, Jefferson appears to recognize an affinity between the Jewish and Muslim varieties of monotheism and that of the Deism and Unitarianism he would espouse, all these traditions similarly rejecting the Trinity of normative Christianity. Underscoring this linkage is the unassailable fact that he also continued to view both the Qur’an and the Old Testament as repositories of religious law, a category not applicable to the Gospels. Indeed in 1824 Jefferson wrote that “in my Catalogue, considering Ethics, as well as Religion, as supplements to law, in the government of man, I had placed them in that sequence.”236 It is important to recall that when Jefferson purchased his Qur’an in 1765, he was still a student of the law; Sale’s description of the Prophet as the “lawgiver of the Arabians” in his introduction to the reader would surely have made an impression.237
JEFFERSONIAN PARADOXES: POSITIVE VIEWS OF ISLAM, PROBLEMS WITH PIRATES, AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN MUSLIM CITIZENS, 1821
With seven key exceptions, Jefferson never had a positive thing to say about Islam, either in public or in private. He twice publicly endorsed his government’s tactful respect for “the Laws, Religion or Tranquility of Mussulmen,” in the Tripoli treaties, once as vice president in 1797, and again as president in 1806. He privately affirmed a much more pointed approval of the faith in one letter to Tripoli and in four to Tunis, the last in 1806, wherein he assured his “great and good friend” of the mutuality of their beliefs in a single supreme being. Jefferson’s kind words for Hammuda Bey’s faith may have been purely an expression of diplomatic politesse, or even desperation, but considered alongside his final placement of the Qur’an, they suggest something more akin to respect for a monotheism that would have seemed to him theologically closer to the faith into which he had grown than the one into which he’d been born.
In contrast, his negative associations of Islam with fanaticism and tyranny, which continued throughout his life, may reflect his appropriation of a commonplace transatlantic political language, one that he also applied to gain his political ends. Jefferson’s ambiguities in political thought about equality, race, and slavery have been noted by other historians.238 These paradoxes blinded him to the possible presence of American Muslims in the United States. His perceptions of Islam in his political life remain, at the very least, ambiguous, even enigmatic. Only in the later evolution of his private religious beliefs does Jefferson’s diplomatic appreciation for Islam’s central tenet seem sincere.
In the autobiography written five years before his death in 1821, Jefferson, reviewing his conduct of foreign policy, still refused to indict Islam as the motivation behind the predations of those he called “the Barbary cruisers.” And in this perspective too, he appears consistent. North African enemies remained, in his estimation, simply “lawless pirates,” a generic designation for a universal problem.239 Despite having gone to war against Tripoli, he would not inscribe “enmity” in his treaty of peace, preferring to reaffirm his nation’s previous approbation of “the Laws, Religion or Tranquility” of Muslims. Insisting that not all the followers of Islam were enemies, he would never present their faith as a barrier to peaceful diplomatic relations.
Whatever his ambivalence about Islam, Jefferson’s position on Mus- lim rights and potential for citizenship remained consistent from his days as a law student in the 1760s until the end of his life. Having first concurred with a seventeenth-century English legal case that had ruled as “groundless” the categorization of “Turks and Infidels” as “enemies for life,” he held fast to the possibility of their eventual inclusion in the American experiment.240 In fact, in his thinking about American citizenship, Jefferson subscribed an even more expansive and, at the time, unusual idea, borrowed from John Locke in 1776: “neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.”241
The experience of engaging in military action against Tripoli might well have given Jefferson occasion to reconsider his lofty notions, and to ask whether all Muslims were not in fact foreign and potential enemies. But looking back in 1821 upon his efforts to advance his Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786, he would proudly recall how the omission of the words “Jesus Christ” from the legislation affirmed his lifelong intent “to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, t
he Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.”242 These words affirm Jefferson’s belief in the free exercise of religion in America, and the principle of American civic inclusion irrespective of faith.
Yet Jefferson’s insistence on the universality of his bill’s inclusive nature, confirmed by the excision of any reference to Christianity, had also been a cause taken up by numerous, often nameless Protestant dissenters in Virginia since the Revolution. There, Presbyterians and Baptists, who had suffered the most persecution under the state’s Anglican establishment of religion, supported Jefferson and Madison with their “remarkably robust notion of religious liberty.” This position, according to John A. Ragosta, also meant that these same Protestant dissenters “emphatically rejected the notion of a ‘Christian nation’ on both religious and political grounds.”243 Without the groundswell of this faith-based dissenting support, neither Jefferson nor Madison would have been able to realize their legislative goals in Virginia.244
But the dissenting Virginian ideal of a non-Christian nation that would also support religious pluralism for non-Protestants would meet with resistance throughout the country. In New England, state establishments of Congregational Protestantism persisted beyond the ratification of the Constitution and its First Amendment, leaving all other Protestants and all non-Protestants subject to state regulation of their faith and taxes. In 1785, Protestant dissenters in Virginia insisted that their government be separate from any interference in religious matters—and in this protection they included non-Protestants: “Let Jews, Mehomitans, and Christians of every Denomination find their advantage in living under your laws. Religion is of god to man the Civil Law is of you to your people.”245 This absolute separation of government from religion, in the interest of protecting any religion, including Judaism and Islam, would be forcefully articulated by John Leland, one of Jefferson’s and Madison’s key Baptist allies in Virginia.