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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  In his first inaugural address of 1801, Jefferson attempted to unite the country after a polarizing presidential campaign. Characteristically, he argued for the rights of the minority in a democratic system, reminding his fellow Americans 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.” While asserting that Americans had “banished from our land religious intolerance,” the president knew that the legal and social reality remained well short of the constitutional ideal.3

  In 1802, Jefferson was reminded by his ally the Baptist leader John Leland and his followers of the very real religious intolerance and political inequality they and all other non-Congregational Protestants continued to suffer in New England. Contemplating “a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions,”4 Jefferson had reason to fear that the bigotry he had fought his whole life to extirpate might never disappear from the nation. For if Protestants still faced intolerance from other Protestants, what hope for non-Protestants in America?

  Three years after his election, fears of Jefferson’s ungodly and possibly Islamic presidency persisted. In January 1803, a Walpole, New Hampshire, newspaper editor observed that “every candid friend of religion must … be convinced from Jefferson’s own writings that he is an infidel.”5 It was the third time Jefferson’s religious beliefs had been indicted by way of such an accusation. But he was adamant in his convictions, writing privately to a friend that same year, “I will never, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.”6 That code he would maintain until the end of his days.

  In 1834, eight years after Jefferson’s death, his Baptist supporter John Leland recalled the dire predictions made in the wake of Jefferson’s 1800 election but that never materialized:

  When Mr. Jefferson was elected president, the pulpits rang with alarms, and all the presses groaned with predictions, that the Bibles would all be burned, meeting houses destroyed; the marriage bond dissolved, and anarchy, infidelity and licentiousness would fill the land. These clerical warnings and editorial prophecies all failed.7

  By this time, Leland, who had also defended the rights of Muslims and all other believers, revealed that he too had been “advertised in the newspapers, through the states, as an infidel and outcast.” In response to being thus condemned with the same epithet applied to both Locke and Jefferson, Leland replied humbly, “May the Lord increase my faith and make me more holy, which will be the best refutation of the libel.”8

  Although the ideal that citizenship would one day extend to American Muslims existed in the founding discourse, the eighteenth century remained a time when ignorance and fear about Islam predominated among Protestants. Because of racism and slavery, the earliest known American Muslims were never granted equal rights. It would not be until a century later, in the wake of the Civil War, that the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship status to American-born former slaves of African descent, a population that still included practicing Muslims.9 We do not know how many of the descendants of these first American Muslims, a scattered minority under pressure to conform to Protestantism prevalent among slaves, retained their faith into the twentieth century. Most could not create sustained communities of believers or pass down their religious beliefs over generations.10

  But there were exceptions to this pattern.11 In Georgia, for example, in the 1930s, the grandson of a former Muslim slave described aspects of Islamic prayer and ritual observance practiced in his family for two generations. His descendants continued to name their children Mahomet and Fatima.12 By then, however, religion was no longer the chief impediment to the full rights of citizenship faced by Muslims in America.

  The first American citizens to be legally defined as Muslims were not born in the United States; they were immigrants from the Middle East. Since 1790, they could not lawfully be denied citizenship based on their religion. But the Naturalization Act of that year, in addition to requiring “good moral character,” limited citizenship among new arrivals to “free white persons.”13 Most Muslims, thought to be not white but either black or Asian, were excluded on that basis. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau would classify Middle Easterners from Syria, Palestine, Armenia, and Turkey as non-white “Asiatics” as late as 1910.14

  RACE, RELIGION, AND A PROTESTANT NATION: DISCRIMINATION AGAINST JEWS, CATHOLICS, AND MUSLIMS IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES

  An estimated sixty thousand Muslim immigrants arrived in the United States between 1890 and 1924.15 Most hailed from what is today Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey, but a few others came from Eastern Europe and South Asia.16 They were mostly young, uneducated male laborers, who sent money back to their dependents in their countries of origin.17 By 1870, a new Naturalization Act had overridden the 1790 act’s requirement that naturalized citizens be white, thus expanding the ranks of the qualified to include “aliens of African nativity and … persons of African descent.”18 This allowed for the immigration of Muslims from Africa in principle, but race and ethnicity would continue to be common reasons for denying citizenship to many of the first Muslim immigrants.

  The arrival of these Muslims from abroad newly tested the limits of American national identity. As Kambiz GhaneaBassiri argues in his pathbreaking history of Islam in America, Muslim immigrants arrived in the nineteenth century to find a national ideal that was still very much white and Protestant.19 And despite the influx during this same period of millions of immigrant Jews and Catholics, this ideal continued to be identified with the hope for national progress.20 As their numbers increased, each non-Protestant group would be branded as foreign and a threat to the government of the United States. Eventually, Jews and Catholics would win acceptance, but Muslims would be the last to struggle for inclusion from among the founding triad of non-Protestant outsiders.

  At the turn of the century, the stigma of being a Muslim immigrant in the United States prompted some aspirants to citizenship to change their names. For example, in 1903 Mohammed Asa Abu-Howah be- came A. Joseph Howar.21 Many Jews did likewise, lest their names announce their religion.22 Non-Protestant arrivals from Eastern and Southern Europe also changed their names for similar reasons. Muslims, however, faced discrimination based on race, not just religion. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to end legalized “discrimination and segregation of any kind on the ground of race, color, religion or national origin,”23 but before its passage, most Muslim immigrants, whether from Africa, Asia, or Europe, were at pains to insist that they were “white.”24 Most Americans would not have been prepared to see them that way, and religion certainly figured into their perceptions. In 1915, for instance, a federal judge would rule immigrants of Syrian origin to be officially “white,” largely because most arrivals from Syria were Christian.25 The ruling therefore offered no useful precedent for Muslims of other ethnicities. And Americans would continue to view Muslims as “not-quite-black, not-quite-white, not-quite American.”26

  Even when religion was not the explicit focus of immigration policy, Arab ethnicity remained problematic. In 1942, one judge denied citizenship to a Yemeni Arab immigrant because, he argued, “Arabs are not white persons within the meaning of the act.” (The jurist here referred to the superseded 1790 Naturalization Act, deliberately ignoring the 1870 revision, which included persons of African descent.) Occasionally, the same label would not provoke condemnation: In 1944, for instance, a judge in Michigan granted an Arab from Arabia citizenship based on a quite accurate appreciation of the historical presence of Muslims in Europe and their contributions to Western civilization. That judge wrote, “The names of Avicenna and Averroes, the sciences of algebra and medicine, the population and the architecture of Spain and Sicily, the very words of the English language remind us as they would have reminded the Founding Fathers of the action and i
nteraction of Arabic and non-Arabic element of our culture.”27 Such sentiments, however, were not representative of how most American Protestants saw Islamic history. Even Jefferson’s expansive reading on the subject did not lead him to such conclusions, thanks to the distortions in most of his European sources.

  Nativism would periodically flare with great intensity against Jews and Catholics, based on charges that would later be directed against Muslims. Beginning in the 1920s, extremist Protestant hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan promoted violent resistance to the citizenship of immigrant Jews and Catholics, as well as African Americans. The Klan’s slogan spoke to an ideal far from dead in America: “Native, white, Protestant supremacy.”28 In 1926, an imperial wizard of the KKK argued that Catholics were “incapable of American patriotism and democracy” because their church was “separatist, anti-democratic, and run by foreigners.”29 The charge that Catholics were eternal “aliens,” who owed allegiance to a foreign power, was hardly changed from the eighteenth century, with slogans such as “Rome shall not rule America.”30 The difference now, however, was that the American Catholic population had expanded from twenty-five thousand at the time of the founding to twelve million by 1900, to become the largest religious denomination in the country.31

  Also in 1926, the same KKK leader published the forged anti-Semitic libel The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which stoked American Protestant fears of “a Jewish plot to take over the world.”32 This tract had been preceded by the arrival of two million Jewish immigrants by 1920, a massive increase from the original two thousand resident in 1776.33 Resistance to the political equality of Catholics as well as Jews could also be found at the highest levels of American business and government. Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, despite eventually employing many immigrant Muslims, supported the Protocols and published a steady stream of anti-Semitic propaganda.34 In 1942, President Roosevelt would confide to his sole Jewish cabinet member (only the second in U.S. history) and to a Catholic member of his government, “You know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.”35 As Kevin Schultz documents, “discrimination in employment, housing, and social fraternization” against Jews and more generalized discrimination against Catholics in “civic and political affairs” persisted into the mid-twentieth century in the United States.36 These prejudices have still not been eradicated, though the derogatory political discourse they fed had mostly disappeared from the mainstream by the 1970s.

  In order to refute the national ideal of Protestant supremacy, groups of Protestants, Jews, and Catholics came together in the 1920s. As Schultz’s important history reveals, organizations such as the National Conference of Christians and Jews promoted a religiously plural ideal of a “tri-faith America,” in which Catholics and Jews would be equal to Protestants.37 From this egalitarian vision issued the new phrase “Judeo-Christian,”38 which, although it can be dated to 1899, did not enter usage in the United States until the 1930s, becoming a commonplace of popular expression in the 1950s.39 It remains a common but largely unexamined characterization of the nation’s religious identity.40

  As a practical matter, the “Judeo-Christian” rubric excluded Muslims despite their explicit mention in the eighteenth-century founding discourse, though in 1953 only one member of the National Conference of Christians and Jews recognized this inconsistency: “And so American popular prejudice against the peoples of the Middle East, among others, based as it largely is on false concepts of their religious beliefs and institutions, is now a serious factor in American foreign policy, as anti-Catholicism was a generation ago.”41 Nor did all Americans embrace the phraseology. For one thing, it was not historical, insofar as no eighteenth-century Founder, including supporters of the most expansive religious pluralism like Jefferson and Washington, had ever used it. Others found it misleading for other reasons. In 1971, Arthur Cohen rejected the term as “myth”: “We can learn much from the history of Jewish-Christian relations, but one thing we cannot make of it is a discourse of community, fellowship, and understanding.”42 Preferring perhaps not to dwell on past divisions, in the 1980s American Muslim scholar and activist Isma‘il Raji al-Faruqi suggested the country be described as “Judeo-Christian-Islamic,” a nod to unifying features of the three Abrahamic faiths.43 More recently, the historian Richard W. Bulliet renewed an objection to papering over Jewish/Gentile animosities: “No one with the least knowledge of the past two thousand years of relations between Christians and Jews can possibly miss the irony of linking in a single term two faith communities that decidedly did not get along during most of that period.” In fact, he has advanced a new “case” for what he calls an “Islamo-Christian civilization,” arguing that far from a “clash,” the encounter of these two civilizations has been one of important convergences.44

  The “Judeo-Christian” rubric embraced by Protestant Americans as a counter to discrimination against Jews and Catholics in the twentieth century inadvertently became the basis for discrimination against Muslims in the twenty-first century, overwriting the founding “Protestant promise” of universal religious and political equality.45 In part, this happened because the American Muslim population before World War II was relatively small, with a few Arab arrivals in New York and Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s, the majority settling in Dearborn and Detroit, Michigan, and finding jobs on the Ford automotive assembly line.46 Still, the immigration quota system of the 1920s ensured that Middle Eastern immigration was minimal.

  Not until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965 would preferences for arrivals from Europe be lifted, allowing significant numbers of Muslims from the Middle East and South Asia to enter the country and seek citizenship.47 In contrast to the earliest Muslim immigrants, these new arrivals were often professionals or students, who chose the United States as an alternative to repressive political and economic conditions in their countries of origin. The American Muslim population has grown rapidly ever since, through the last forty years of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, helping to create what Diana Eck, a scholar of religious pluralism, describes as “the world’s most religiously diverse nation.” Also included in the new wave of immigrants have been Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Zoroastrians, none of whom fit under the Judeo-Christian rubric.48

  How many American Muslim citizens now reside in the United States? Scholars and pollsters disagree, with estimates ranging from two to eight million.49 A Pew Research poll of August 2011 put the total at just under three million out of a total U.S. population of just over three hundred million.50 (Since the U.S. Census cannot ask Americans about their religion, claims about the number of American Muslims remain unverifiable.) What is clear, despite these divergent estimates, is that no American Muslim monolith exists: American Muslims represent the most ethnically, racially, and theologically diverse Islamic community in the world. American Muslim citizens hail from seventy-seven countries of origin.51 Sixty-three percent were born abroad, with 37 percent indigenous to the United States. For those in the former category, the Middle East and North Africa were originally home to 26 percent, with Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan accounting for another 26 percent of the population. The remaining 11 percent among the foreign-born come from sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and other places.52

  Of the 37 percent indigenous American Muslims, the largest group, 40 percent, are African Americans whose families at some point “reverted” to what they perceived as their original African faith. Many opted for Islam in response to the racism and slavery associated with the Christian past.53 But the ranks of American Muslim converts are racially diverse: 18 percent are white, 10 percent are Asian, 10 percent are Hispanic, and 21 percent claim to be of mixed racial origin.54 Hispanic converts, like African Americans, also identify Islam as their ancestral faith in Spain prior to the fifteenth century.55 As to varieties of Islam, 65 percent of American Muslims identify as Sunnis, with 11 percent professing Shi‘ism, and
another 24 percent refusing classification as either. Many American Muslims also embrace the mystical strain of Sufism, which may explain a certain degree of nonsectarianism.56 In any case, Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the country.57 Among the high number of foreign-born Muslims, 81 percent have won U.S. citizenship.58

  AMERICAN MUSLIM CITIZENS AND CIVIL RIGHTS BEFORE AND AFTER 9/11

  Resistance to the founding ideal of citizenship for Muslims is not new, but Muslim citizenship is no longer merely a theoretical concept. Consequently, the nature of resistance to it has evolved. Anti-Muslim hate groups, members of major and fringe political parties, and certain extreme conservative elements among Protestants and Jews have all been party to defaming American Muslims and denying their religious and political equality. Many of these movements were galvanized by the events of September 11, 2001, when nineteen foreign extremists rationalized their violence in the name of Islam and perpetrated deadly terrorist attacks against the United States. On that day, some Americans expressed a willingness to indict all American Muslims en masse as potential co-conspirators in terrorism. For their part, American Muslims refused to equate their faith with acts of terrorism against their own country.