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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  As when Jefferson was branded an “infidel,” attacks on Obama’s Christian self-identification were intended to undermine his appeal among the Christian majority. In both cases, the association with Islam was intended to depict the candidate as decidedly un-American. That Jefferson and Obama would both be elected nevertheless did not prevent enemies from continuing the attack well into the first term of each.

  Still, there are key differences in the two smear campaigns. First, unlike Jefferson, Barack Hussein Obama does have an actual Islamic heritage: his father, a Kenyan, and his stepfather, an Indonesian, were both Muslim. Even the name Barack Hussein is Muslim in origin: Barack, baraka in Arabic, means “blessing,” and Hussein is the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson. Obama’s stepfather would list the boy’s religion as “Islam” on a school form in Indonesia, but as Obama explained, he practiced no religion until he joined the United Church of Christ in Chicago,112 his family being, by his own account, not “folks who went to church every week.” Obama relates that he chose Christianity in part because of the centrality of the Golden Rule:

  So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead—being my brothers’ and sisters’ keeper, treating others as they would treat me.113

  Apart from but not unconnected to claims about Obama’s faith were those made about his place of birth. The evolution of what has come to be called “birtherism,” or the conspiracy theory denying that Obama was a Hawaii-born American citizen, fed the same fears of foreign infiltration as claims he was Muslim.114 Indeed, books propagating these myths would proliferate during and after the presidential campaign of 2008 and even into the following election cycle, despite the failure of any proof to materialize after nearly four years of the Obama presidency.115

  Another difference between the smearing of Jefferson and that of Obama was that in the former case there were no ramifications for actual American Muslims, whereas the treatment of Obama insulted and alienated millions of American Muslim citizens. (It was also designed to instill fear in American Jews, because for some the specter of a Muslim president cast doubt on their country’s future support for the state of Israel.) Among a substantial group of voters, the falsehood that Obama was a Muslim had assumed a frightening truth in the campaign. A month before the 2008 election, a Pew Forum poll recorded that 12 percent of Americans believed it, despite repeated media corrections to the contrary.116 It is not particularly surprising that this number correlated to those who overwhelmingly disapproved of him.

  “I can’t trust Obama,” said one woman at the Minnesota rally for Obama’s Republican opponent John McCain, on October 10, 2008. Holding the microphone the candidate had given her to ask a question, she continued, “I have read about him and he’s not, he’s not uh—he’s an Arab. He’s not—” At which point McCain reclaimed the microphone, contradicting her: “No ma’am. He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that’s what this campaign is about. He’s not [an Arab].” In response, McCain’s own supporters booed him as a “liar” and “terrorist.”117 It was a confusing moment, one in which McCain, attempting to defend his opponent, inadvertently seemed to say that being an Arab (or Muslim) was somehow at odds with being “a decent family man” or a “citizen.”118

  The inflammatory accusation that Obama was a Muslim (and that all Muslims were terrorists) also changed the Democratic candidate’s campaign strategy and self-representation. Muslims across the nation had hoped that Obama would be “a long-awaited champion of civil liberties, religious tolerance and diplomacy in foreign affairs.” But while he accepted offers to speak to Christian and Jewish organizations, Obama “ignored” invitations from American Muslim voters to address them. He even asked Congressman Ellison not to speak on his behalf at one of the nation’s oldest mosques in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, “because it might stir controversy.” In June 2008, volunteers for Obama told two American Muslim women in headscarves to move off camera, away from where they were standing behind the candidate as he spoke in Detroit. Obama later telephoned the two to apologize: “I take deepest offense and will continue to fight against discrimination against people of any religious group or background.” While some Muslims understood Obama’s avoidance of their community, others felt “betrayed.” That the candidate’s Web site referred to claims about his religion as a “smear,” seemed implicitly to affirm the idea that American Muslims were un- or anti-American, even while noting that such “rumors were offensive to American Muslims because they played into ‘fearmongering.’ ”119 Nowhere had Obama defended the idea that to be a Muslim presented no impediment to being an American citizen.

  Even after the election, anti-Islamic tactics would continue to affect how President Obama spoke to his Muslim constituents in public. His earliest official speeches in recognition of the American Muslim community were presented to Islamic audiences abroad, in Egypt, not directly to his own constituency in the United States. Not until 2009, after a year as president, would Obama declare in Cairo, “I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story.” Only while speaking to his Egyptian university audience would he allow that “since our founding American Muslims have enriched the United States.”120

  Three days after the incident at the McCain rally, the reporter Campbell Brown, then of CNN, proposed a response that finally reflected American ideals of religious pluralism and political equality. In her commentary, she answered the key question: “So What If Obama Were a Muslim or an Arab?” Brown succinctly described Obama as “an American” and “a Christian,” but then asked reproachfully, “So what if John McCain was Arab or Muslim? Would it matter? When did this become a disqualifier for higher office in our country? When did Arab or Muslim become dirty words? The equivalent of dishonorable or radical?”121

  Brown admitted that “the media is complicit here, too,” pointedly identifying the problem: “We’ve all been too quick to accept the idea that calling someone Muslim is a slur.”122 (This was the response Congressman Ellison had hoped Obama himself might offer in the face of these accusations.)123 She recognized that millions of American Arab and Muslim citizens were “being maligned here,” and then insisted, “We can’t tolerate this ignorance—not in the media, not on the campaign trail.” Brown concluded, “Of course, he’s not an Arab. Of course, he’s not a Muslim. But honestly, it shouldn’t matter.”124

  Almost a week later in October 2008, General Colin Powell, former secretary of state under President George W. Bush, endorsed Barack Obama for president. Troubled by the accusation that Obama was a Muslim, Powell focused on the death of Kareem R. Khan, an American Muslim soldier killed in Iraq and buried in Arlington National Cemetery, to rebuke those in his party who defamed citizens because of their Islamic faith. Civic virtue in rendering the ultimate sacrifice of one’s life for one’s country, Powell reminded Americans, should be considered a testament to loyalty and citizenship, regardless of religion. On the television show Meet the Press, Powell echoed Brown’s withering question about then presidential candidate Obama: “The really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being Muslim in this country? No, that’s not America.”125

  Since the eighteenth century, many Americans have feared the possibility of a Muslim or Catholic or Jewish president, echoing the dread expressed by the Federalist William Lancaster in 1788 at what the Constitution had made possible: “But let us remember that we form a government for millions not yet in existence. I have not the art of divination. In the course of four or five hundred years, I do not know how it will work. This is most certain, that Papists may occupy that chair, and Mahometans may take it.”126

  Lancaster’s fears of a Catholic president were realized in less than his predicted four or five hundred years, when John F. Kennedy won the office in 1960. That the nation did not then succumb to some “Papist plot” should perhaps have
given those errant patriots terrified by Obama’s election some cause for comfort, but there is no indication that these anxieties have abated.

  Why not? Why did polls four years into Obama’s presidency indicate that 31 to 46 percent of Republicans still thought he was a Muslim?127 Scholars of conspiracy theory in American politics point out false claims are spread rather than debunked by repetition.128 Another view suggests that those polled did not actually believe Obama to be a Muslim, but told the pollsters they did in order to register ideological opposition.129 In this way, the reality of whether or not Obama is a Muslim has become equivalent to what the idea of a Muslim president has come to signify. Could a Muslim become president? Not a few of Obama’s detractors may still be convinced that one already has. As to whether an actual, self-described Muslim could ascend to the office, that seems far more problematic until a much larger proportion of the electorate becomes Muslim and/or more non-Muslim Americans take to heart what Jefferson proclaimed in his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom:

  [T]hat our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions … that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.130

  In the meantime, democracy may impose its own de facto religious test, where the Constitution and the several states abolished one. No successful U.S. presidential candidate need swear on anything but the Constitution, but during campaigns for the highest office, religion remains, for some, a powerful factor.

  Efforts to malign candidates through imputed associations with Islam would seem, as in the cases of Ellison and Obama, to focus exclusively on Democratic contenders for office. But that impression could not be further from the truth. Both parties have in fact been targeted, including two Republican governors who have dared to support their Muslim constituents as citizens and believers.131 Governor Rick Perry of Texas has been attacked for maintaining a productive friendship since 2000 with the Aga Khan, the progressive leader of one Ismaili Shi‘i Muslim sect. Numbering twenty million worldwide, this group includes many U.S. citizens. The Aga Khan’s relationship with Governor Perry has resulted in his funding the “Muslim Histories and Cultures Project,” which has trained Texas high school teachers at the University of Texas at Austin to implement new nonsectarian methods for teaching their students about the Islamic world.132

  Another arrangement, in 2009, between the Aga Khan and Governor Perry provided for more and better cooperation in the “fields of education, health sciences, natural disaster preparedness and recovery, culture and environment.”133 In addition, Governor Perry has been credited with supporting the passage in 2003 of the Texas Halal Law (HB-470), which regulates the accurate labeling of ritually slaughtered meat for Muslim consumers. (In practice, it does what regulated kosher designations of meat and other products already accomplish for the nation’s Jewish religious minority.) Right-wing Web sites labeled the governor of Texas “a Muslim enabler” and a supporter of Sharia, or Islamic, law.134 Both accusations would likely have made the Republican vulnerable to the conservative extreme of his own base had he not suspended his run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

  Republican governor Chris Christie of New Jersey also found himself the object of serious criticism from within his own party when he nominated the American Muslim lawyer Sohail Mohammed to the state supreme court in the spring of 2011. While in practice, Christie’s appointee had represented Muslims “detained by the FBI” after 9/11. Christie defended Mohammed’s work, saying that he had “played an integral role” in “creating trust between the Islamic community and law enforcement.” After he was sworn in to the office on July 26, 2011, the Muslim jurist was falsely accused of links to terrorism and of supporting Sharia law rather than state or federal statutes. Governor Christie responded bluntly, “This Shariah law business is crap. It’s just crazy and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.”135

  In contrast, other Republicans, including Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich during their bids for the 2012 presidential nomination, have supported the notion that Islamic law is the new great threat to the nation.136 Indeed, Gingrich declared that only an American Muslim candidate who “denounced” Sharia law could ever win his support for the presidency.137 In taking this stand, these politicians expressed little understanding of Islamic law, having been briefed by the same small cadre of interconnected anti-Muslim groups.138 But even some who support the anti-Sharia cause allow that “for all its fervor, the movement is arguably directed at a problem more imagined than real. Even its leaders concede that American Muslims are not coalescing en masse to advance Islamic law.”139

  ANTI-SHARIA AND ANTI-MOSQUE INITIATIVES AS ATTEMPTS TO DENY ALL AMERICAN MUSLIMS THEIR CIVIL RIGHTS

  When anti-Islamic attacks against Congressman Ellison and President Obama failed, key components of the conspiracy theory directed against them were expanded to sow fear and undermine the civil rights and citizenship of all American Muslims. Those committed to resisting Sharia law espouse a view of American identity that, contrary to the founding discourse, is exclusively Judeo-Christian or even exclusively Christian, denying the legitimacy of American Muslim citizenship and political rights. According to Islamic legal expert Anver Emon, “more than any particular Muslim man or woman,” for these anti-Muslim activists Sharia “represents the enemy within, the terror threat.”140

  Those American Muslims who might follow aspects of Sharia law—and these applications vary widely among believers—do so in their daily prayers, precepts for marriage, divorce, wills, and international commercial transactions. But these commitments do not remotely amount to a collective effort to seize political power in the United States and impose Sharia law on all its citizens. Nevertheless, in seventeen states, laws or amendments to state constitutions now target Sharia law and/or “foreign law” as illegal.141 As reporters have discovered, this “movement” did not begin as a spontaneous, grassroots political priority; it was manufactured and dispersed by a handful of activists.142

  In 2006, anti-Muslim activist David Yerushalmi created the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), a nonprofit that denounces Sharia law. His “expertise” in Islamic law is not based on any formal academic training. In fact, Yerushalmi has been denounced by the Jewish civil rights organization the Anti-Defamation League as well as by the U.S. Catholic bishops for his bigoted views of Muslims and African Americans.143 He is the author of the model for many of these anti-Sharia bills, which in some instances repeat the wording of his legislative template exactly.144 In 2009, with the help of Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the conservative Center for Security Policy, Yerushalmi funneled many of his anti-Sharia ideas through the Tea Party movement. Not surprisingly, Gaffney had once promoted the idea that President Obama “might secretly be Muslim.” The Gaffney-Yerushalmi connection helps explain how Republican legislatures and primary candidates were briefed to adopt a position on a subject about which they knew nothing of substance. For this service, Yerushalmi received $153,000 in consulting fees from the Center for Security Policy.145

  Yerushalmi also served as legal counsel for the 2010 report Shariah: The Threat to America, a manifesto promoted by Gaffney’s right-wing Center for Security Policy.146 Running to over two hundred pages, the report was produced by a team headed by two retired generals, William G. “Jerry” Boykin and Harry Edward Soyster. After 9/11, Boykin, then a senior Pentagon official, “described the fight against terrorism as a Christian battle against Satan.” President George W. Bush publicly rebuked Boykin for that statement, affirming that the United States was not at war “with Islam but with violent fanatics.” After Boykin’s retirement in 2007, he became a speaker popular among extreme conservative Christians. Even before helping to author the report o
n Sharia, he stated that Islam “should not be protected under the First Amendment.” In 2012, Boykin’s anti-Muslim views resulted in West Point’s withdrawal of an invitation for him to address cadets at a prayer breakfast. Speaking anonymously, one cadet noted that the invitation had at first been extended to Boykin despite his anti-Islamic remarks: “I know Muslim cadets here, and they are great, outstanding citizens, and this ex-general is saying they shouldn’t enjoy the same rights.”147

  The Center for Security Policy report describes Sharia as “a serious threat” to the United States, while simultaneously admitting that “there may not be a single ‘true’ Islam” practiced by over one billion Muslims worldwide.148 Neither does the manifesto deny the claims of “hopeful pundits” who may be “correct in claiming that shariah adherent Islam is not the preponderant Muslim ideology” in the United States.149 It does, however, propose that all Muslims are liars,150 an assertion based on the deliberate misinterpretation of the term taqiyya, which the authors translate as “lying,” but which is better known in Islamic history as “dissimulation,” or concealment of one’s religious convictions, when threatened with “danger or death.” In very few instances have members of the Sunni Muslim majority employed this tactic, though dissimulation has historically served the Shi‘i minority, as well as Sufi mystics threatened with persecution by fellow believers. It was in any case never conceived as a way to mislead non-Muslims, nor to have Muslims apply it as such.151 Both Gaffney and Yerushalmi, the latter the center’s self-styled Islamic legal expert, have been designated as members of “the anti-Muslim inner circle” identified in 2011 by the Southern Poverty Law Center.152