DEFENDING THE RIGHTS OF MUSLIMS WHILE MISUNDERSTANDING AND CONDEMNING ISLAM AND OTHER FAITHS
Like his hero, Leland frequently misunderstood or condemned Islamic beliefs while championing equal rights for Muslims. We have seen how, in his tract on the rights of conscience, he criticizes the Prophet by contrast with a noncoercive, nonpolitical Jesus, accusing the former of spreading faith by force, a common Christian claim.128 Leland also wrongly asserts a Muslim belief in the divinity of Muhammad. Unlike Jefferson, Leland never read the Qur’an. We cannot be sure of his sources, but he presents as “an article” of the holy book the strange notion “that the world stands upon a great ox—the ox stands upon a great stone—the stone rests upon the shoulders of an angel—and the angel stands upon God knows what.”129 We do know he shared Jefferson’s reductive view of the sacred text as merely a book of law.130
Still, Leland correctly understood that all the verses of the Qur’an “by the Turks, have been considered as coming from God.”131 He also knew that the Islamic calendar began with “the flight of Mahomet,” his hijra or emigration from Mecca to Medina in 622, marking the first Islamic year. And he rightly notes elsewhere that Muslims are not allowed to drink wine, though he attributes only to the Jews a prohibition against pork.132
As we have seen, in 1801, following the example of Thomas Helwys, his seventeenth-century coreligionist, Leland made the case for Muslims to be granted religious liberty based on the Golden Rule, which he expansively reformulated: “Do unto all men as you would they should do unto you.” Indeed, he insisted they do so or “give up the name Christians.” In return, he wished the same treatment be extended to Christians in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa:
If Christians were in Turkey or Algiers, would they not wish to enjoy the liberty of their conscience without control? Would they not say, in their hearts at least, “We wish to be freed from paying the Turkish priests and supporting the Turkish religion, which is only an imposture, and that we might be respected according to our conduct, while we enjoy our religious opinions, as an inalienable right?”133
He did not know that in the Islamic world there already existed a form of toleration for Christians and Jews. But he rightly understood that non-Muslims were obliged to pay taxes in support of the Islamic faith.
Leland’s disapproval was by no means limited to Islam. Like Jefferson, he held no high opinion of either Judaism or Catholicism, though he likewise defended the rights of their respective believers. During his time in Virginia, Leland had noted that neither group was numerous enough to establish a place of worship: “There are a few Jews, but they have no synagogue, nor is there any chapel for the Papists.”134 He may have met members of both minorities but provided no details of any such encounters.
We do know he considered Jews as deicides, a standard Christian calumny, believing that “the Jews contrived [Jesus’s] death—slew him and hanged him on a tree; they meant it for an evil, but God meant it for good.”135 And that their villainy had precipitated the destruction of Jerusalem, because “they both killed the Lord Jesus and their own prophets—persecuted the apostles—pleased not God, and were contrary to all men. For their opposition to the truth, and malice prepense against the messengers of it … armies … destroyed those murderers, and burnt up their city.”136 Leland’s condemnation of the pope similarly followed a standard Protestant template, but where the defense of individual Catholics was concerned he was ready to part ways with his brethren.137
During the 1830s, rising Irish Catholic immigration to the United States stoked Protestant fears and eventually violence. In 1834, the Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher incited a Boston mob to burn down the Ursuline Convent, a Catholic girls’ school in neighboring Charlestown.
Leland would not remain silent. Acknowledging the truth that “Some men among us profess to be greatly alarmed at the spread of the Roman Catholicks,” he went on to attack anti-Catholic fearmongering throughout the country: “They say that there are six hundred thousand [Catholics] within the limits of the United States; all busy at work, like a worm under the bark of a tree, to sap our free government, and set up papal hierarchy and all the horrors of the inquisition.” To this conspiracy theory, Leland replied unequivocally that “no man who has the soul of an American, and the heart of affection for our democratic institutions, will either fear or wish to injure the papists.” Reassuringly he allowed that even if the number of Catholics were a million, it was unlikely of ever being a match either “by births or emigration” for fourteen million Protestants. Leland insisted that Catholic “freedom of religion is guaranteed to them in our constitution of government, and no benevolent man can wish to have them oppressed as they are in Ireland.” He also reminded American patriots, “The French Catholicks were great helpers to Americans in their struggles for independence, (Lafayette among the rest,) and now to deny them the hospitalities of good friends would be base ingratitude.” He stressed that if Catholics “send their missionaries among those of a different religion to make proselytes, it is doing no more than Protestants do.”138 Unlike other Baptists, Leland didn’t approve the rising popularity of missionary societies generally.139 And unlike other Protestants, he concluded that if Catholics did somehow achieve a national majority, “they must of right have the rule; for no man who has the soul of an American will deny the maxim that ‘the voice of a majority is the voice of the whole.’ ”140
NO CHRISTIAN SABBATH SHOULD BE MANDATED BY THE GOVERNMENT
“There is nothing in the starry heavens—in the atmosphere, or in the productions of the earth, that marks one day in seven to be more holy than another,” pronounced Leland after a thorough examination of Old and New Testaments. For that reason, he, who had condemned government support for federal and state chaplains, also refused to accept the government’s right to mandate Sunday as the Sabbath, or to make laws concerning worship, behavior, or the nondelivery of mail on that day:
Let a Mahometan, a Jew and a Christian stand at any spot, and dispute about the holy day: the Mahometan says Friday—the Jew is for Saturday—the Christian pleads for Sunday: not agreeing in opinion, they part at variance. The Christian takes his course eastward and travels around the world, scrupulously keeping every Sunday for holy time. The Mahometan takes a western course, and, like the Christian circumambulates the earth, rigidly observing every Friday. The Jew remains stationary, keeping every Saturday in Mosaic style. In a lapse of time the travelers return to the spot where the Jew was residing, and to their astonishment find the holy day of all was the same day. The Christian traveling east had gained a day, and the Mahometan going west had lost a day.141
In showing that the Muslim, the Jew, and the Christian would inevitably end up at the same place at the same time, Leland hoped to demonstrate how their respective faiths might coexist despite differences. But the pluralist balance would not be achieved so long as the government endorsed one day of the week above another as holy:
Shall that sect, which is most numerous and ambitious, direct the scepter of government to interpose, and force all to submit to one standard, and fine, punish, and burn non-conformists? Let each sect enjoy their own rights and freedom, in respect of the God whom they wish to adore, the days on which they would pay that adoration, and the modes of performing it.142
The sanctification of time was for religions, not the state, to effect, and for the believer to observe, uncompelled by temporal authority.
Leland seemed uniquely able to see, imagine, and feel for others not of his faith—and he was no less well equipped to challenge those who were. He could turn the tables on Protestants: “Query: Are the Protestants in France as much abused by the Papists as the Papists are in Ireland by the Protestants?”143 Or he could hold up a mirror to Christians generally—“Since Christianity became national, Christian nations have been equally cruel and bloodthirsty, and more unjust and perfidious than Turks or heathens”144—compelling them to see themselves as others saw them: “Accuse a Turk of any tri
ck, he replies, ‘What do you think that I will lie and cheat like a Christian?’ ”145
Leland’s sense of justice was graced by a perfect symmetry: “The sybils of the heathens, the alcoran of the Turks, the tradition of the Jewish rabbis, the writings of the ancient fathers, the decrees of councils, the mandates of popes, religious creeds, and legislative acts to define and enforce religion, like broken china-ware, are worth what they will fetch.”146 He was equally impatient with all faiths interfering in government and of any government interfering in faith.
LELAND AGAINST SLAVERY
In Virginia in 1789, the Baptist General Committee passed a resolution that “slavery, is a violent deprivation of the rights of nature, and is inconsistent with a republican government; and we therefore recommend it to our brethren to make use of every legal measure, to extirpate the horrid evil from the land.”147 It was Leland’s insistence that forced the approval of the resolution by his fellow Baptists, but by 1793 they would refuse to reaffirm it, deciding not to interfere in what they deemed a legislative matter.148 Now, even Baptists in the southern states, who continued to convert African American slaves to their faith, refused, with the exception of Leland, to support the abolition of slavery. Leland wrote, “Though our skins are somewhat different in color, yet I hope to meet many of you in heaven; where your melodious voices that have often enchanted my ears and warmed my heart, will be incessantly employed in praise of our common Lord.”149
Like his commitment to religious liberty, Leland’s abolitionism was absolute; in this he surpassed his hero Jefferson, who attempted to end the slave trade but never freed all of his slaves. In Leland’s eyes the treatment of African slaves, like that of Native Americans, was unequivocally and essentially unchristian:
Because the nation of Israel had a divine right grant of the land of Canaan, and order to enslave the heathen, some suppose Christians have an equal right to take away the land of the Indians, and make slaves of the negroes. Wretched religion, that pleads for cruelty and injustice.… If Christian nations were nations of Christians, these things would not be so.150
In decrying the occupation of Native American lands he echoed Roger Williams’s sentiments on the matter, unique in the seventeenth century.
Much as he considered slavery an institution “destructive of every humane and benevolent passion of the soul, and subversive to that liberty absolutely necessary to enoble the human mind,” Leland, like Jefferson, could not imagine a viable alternative: a free African American citizenry. He admitted that he found it difficult to “form any plan, even in idea, for their manumission; and to expose evil, without pointing out the way of escape” was no solution.151 In 1789, he also feared that any talk of freedom for slaves would only provoke masters to increase their abuse. He recorded an intense horror at the treatment of slaves he knew in Virginia.152
Toward the end of Leland’s life, the question of slavery remained pressing. He would refuse to endorse contemporary plans supported by Protestant missionaries to ship freed slaves to Liberia to spread Christianity. A return to Africa, Leland argued, would destroy slave families, many of whom he knew were “descended from American parents more than ten generations.”153 Thus he anticipated precisely what had happened to the former slave, the Muslim Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman. Ibrahima, who had agreed to spread Christianity and American commerce on his return to Liberia, quickly reverted to Islam, leaving a fractured family stranded on both sides of the Atlantic. The best Leland could imagine was the creation of states for freed slaves “within the limits of other states.”154 A stunted, segregated future was the most this man of such remarkable moral imagination could conceive.
JOHN LELAND AND MUSLIM RIGHTS AS AN AMERICAN IDEAL
Leland, like Jefferson, composed his own epitaph: “Here lies the body of John Leland, who labored [sixty-seven years] to promote piety, and vindicate the civil and religious rights of all men.”155 The monument over his grave in Cheshire, Massachusetts, is framed majestically by the Berkshire Mountains but seldom visited. Ultimately, most of his fellow Baptists condemned Leland’s most cherished convictions: the absolute wall of separation between government and religion; his antimissionary and antisabbatarian stands; his abolitionism. These views his fellow Baptists denigrated as evidence of his “eccentricity.”156 But for his unwavering support of the equal rights of Muslims, Catholics, and Jews his own denomination labeled him an “embarrassment.”157
In his repeated articulations of the ideal American government, Leland sought in principle and in practice “to vindicate the civil and religious rights of all men,” not just of his fellow Protestants. That he never omitted to mention in his pleas for justice the rights of Muslims, who were not yet known to live in America, suggests the tenacity and absolutism of his principles. But it also reflects a certain fruition and ripening of ideas that had formed in extremely rarefied circles of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European Christian thought, not to attain legal codification before coming to the United States. While Locke believed Muslims should be tolerated and Jefferson defended their civil rights, enshrining them in state law, it was in the person of John Leland that profound religious sentiment came to the defense of religious freedom for all Americans. An untutored but effective communicator in person and on paper, Leland, though never using the word, demanded what would later be termed secular government, precisely for the sake of his faith and individual freedom.158
To reach this conclusion, Leland drew upon his own persecution to articulate a compelling new form of American evangelical empathy that embraced the political equality of Muslims as well as Catholics and Jews at a time when all three groups were despised in the United States. Leland’s devout Baptist evangelical faith supported uniquely American ideals of a religiously plural society long before this vision became a reality.
AFTERWORD
Why Can’t a Muslim Be President?
Eighteenth-Century Ideals of the Muslim Citizen and Their Significance in the Twenty-First Century
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.… And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.
—Jefferson’s first inaugural address, March 4, 1801
And I should like to assure you, my Islamic friends, that under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts, this Center, this place of worship, is just as welcome as could be a similar edifice of any other religion. Indeed, America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your own conscience.
The concept is indeed part of America, and without that concept we would be something else than what we are.
—President Dwight Eisenhower’s speech
at the opening of the Islamic Center Mosque,
Washington, D.C., June 28, 1957
TO MANY of his political opponents, Thomas Jefferson may have been our first Muslim president. That a Muslim might legally have attained the office in the eighteenth century was not out of the question, insofar as the U.S. Constitution affirmed the possibility in theory. Jefferson was no practitioner, and his views of Islam, while mostly negative, remained mixed, based on his positive appreciation for the faith’s central tenet of absolute monotheism. Nevertheless, he had been defamed and denigrated as a Muslim since 1791—especially during the vicious presidential campaign of 1800—as an infidel and atheist.
The accusation that Jefferson was a Muslim placed him, unknowingly, in the same category as his intellectual hero John Locke, who was charged with professing “the faith of a Turk,”1 and even George Sale, the British translator of his Qur�
��an, derided as “half a Musulman.”2 These three (and others before them) became, as this book documents, victims of a long-standing tradition of anti-Islamic defamation perpetrated in the name of Christianity. The provocations were various. Sale had refused to sanction violence toward Muslims and had not vilified the Prophet Muhammad as thoroughly as his fellow Anglican Protestants would have wished. Political opponents condemned both Locke and Jefferson for advocating religious toleration, including civil rights for Muslims, as well as embracing Deism and Unitarianism.
The same charge made against Jefferson in the campaign of 1800 would be used in the twenty-first century against American citizens—some actually Muslim, some not—seeking national political office. In either case, the tactic is part of a strategy attempting to discredit legitimate candidates, whether for Congress or the presidency, by casting them as un-American and even anti-American. As in Jefferson’s case, each candidate labeled a Muslim, whether accurately or not, would prevail when the votes were counted. Yet such defamations have persisted as political weapons. In fact, they have evolved into a broader campaign by a well-funded few to disenfranchise American Muslim citizens, denying them the civil rights granted them by the Founders.
This afterword briefly explores the practical life of Muslim civil rights as defended in theory by Jefferson and others—a defense that set the parameters of religious freedom and civic inclusion for all non-Protestants. Today, as in the eighteenth century, the civil rights of American Muslims symbolize the universality of religious pluralism in the United States. Thus challenges to Muslim civil rights continue to represent threats to the rights of all Americans. How the nation responds to these threats against this signal religious minority will determine whether or not founding ideals of inclusion will survive in practice or succumb to rank fear, prejudice, and discrimination.
Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders Page 34