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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  Notes

  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1. For the early Ottoman and European trade in this luxury, which actually began in the sixteenth century, see Ariel Salzmann, “The Age of Tulips: Confluence and Conflict in Early Modern Consumer Culture (1550–1730),” in Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922, ed. Donald Quataert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 84, 87, 89; Mike Dash, Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused (New York: Crown, 1999), 34, 224. Although tulips were propagated in England as early as 1582 and may have crossed into their North American colonies in the seventeenth century, the flowers also became transatlantic at the same time with the arrival of the Pennsylvania Dutch, who counted the three petals of the tulip as symbols of the Trinity. The Ottomans also imbued the tulip with powerful but very different Islamic religious symbolism.

  2. Edwin M. Betts and Hazelhurst Bolton Perkins, Thomas Jefferson’s Flower Garden at Monticello, revised by Peter J. Hatch, 3rd ed. (Monticello, VA: Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 2000), 25–26.

  3. Damien Cave and Anne Barnard, “Minister Wavers on Plans to Burn Koran,” New York Times, September 9, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/us/10obama.html?pagewanted=all; Enayat Najafizada and Rod Nordland, “Afghans Avenge Florida Koran Burning, Killing 12,” New York Times, April 1, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/asia/02afghanistan.html?…all. It is worth noting that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the minister Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center based in Florida as an anti-Muslim hate group; see Robert Steinback, “The Anti-Muslim Inner Circle,” Intelligence Report, no. 142 (Summer 2011), Southern Poverty Law Center.

  INTRODUCTION: IMAGINING THE MUSLIM AS CITIZEN AT THE FOUNDING OF THE UNITED STATES

  1. For a study that finds that American magazines included a range of attitudes toward Muslims, including “naïve curiosity, obsessive exoticism, geopolitical calculation, gentle condescension, and unabashed bigotry,” see Robert Battistini, “Glimpses of the Other Before Orientalism: The Muslim World in Early American Periodicals, 1785–1800,” Early American Studies 8, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 446–74, quote on 447.

  2. The first person to connect Jefferson with Locke’s interest in Muslim civil rights is the distinguished historian and head of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, James H. Hutson, “The Founding Fathers and Islam,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 61, no. 5 (2002): 1, http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0205/tolerance.html. The first analysis of Jefferson’s focus on the Qur’an as an extension of his interest in history and religion, without reference to Locke, may be found in the pathbreaking article and subsequent book by Kevin J. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” Early American Literature 39, no. 2 (2004): 247–61; and Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9, 130, 201, 258, 259, 316.

  3. Naomi Cohen describes Jews and Muslims as “linked” with “other perceived deviants whose enjoyment of political rights made a mockery of the dominant religion”; see Naomi Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13, 16–17, 24–26, quote on 24; Gerard V. Bradley, “The No Religious Test Clause and the Constitution of Religious Liberty: ‘A Machine That Has Gone of Itself,’ ” Case Western Reserve Law Review 37 (1986–87): 702; Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 15.

  4. Bret E. Carroll, Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 2000), 90–95; Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, 7 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909), 5:2637; Morton Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 13.

  5. Carroll, Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion, 90–95.

  6. “George Washington to the Members of the Volunteer Association and Other Inhabitants of the Kingdom of Ireland Who Have Lately Arrived in the City of New York,” December 2, 1783, in The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 39 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938), 27:254.

  7. In 1790, Washington wrote to Jewish congregations in Savannah, Newport, Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, and Richmond; see Paul F. Boller Jr., George Washington and Religion (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 152–62; for the actual missives, see 184–88; Carroll, Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion, 52.

  8. “George Washington to Tench Tilghman,” March 24, 1784, in Writings of George Washington, 27:367. (I have corrected Washington’s original spelling of “Athiests.”)

  9. For a study of American views of the Islamic world as “a remarkably useful rhetorical device,” see the important analysis of Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 35–59, quote on 59. A specialized form of American “Orientalism” is defined by Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–114. Edward Said first recognized “the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point” for his study of European views of the Middle East, even though America’s foreign policy there at that time did not conform to the model of emerging European military superiority, which Said describes as “the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority.” America in the eighteenth century inherited key European ideas about Islam and the Middle East that could be termed Orientalist, but the United States was not yet in a position of political or scholarly dominance in defining the area. Instead, the United States remained less militarily powerful than the Islamic world but still vulnerable to negative European precedents about the area; see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), quotes on 3, 42. Others who have nodded to Said’s powerful precedent include Thomas S. Kidd, “ ‘Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?’ Early American Uses of Islam,” Church History 72, no. 4 (December 2003): 767–78; Thomas S. Kidd, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 12. Scholars of American literature and culture have repeatedly drawn upon Said’s precedent, but with caveats; for example, see Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 3; Battistini, “Glimpses of the Other before Orientalism,” 447, 468–69; Fuad Shaban, Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought (Durham, NC: Acorn Press, 1991), 199–205; Marwan M. Obeidat, American Literature and Orientalism (Berlin: K. Schwarz, 1998); Jennifer Costello Brezina, “A Nation in Chains: Barbary Captives and American Identity,” in Captivating Subjects: Writing, Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason Haslam and Julia M. Wright (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 201–19.

  10. Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 16–20; Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 52, 198.

  11. There is evidence of similar ideas of toleration even earlier, in the late fifteenth century; see chapter 2 in Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 53.

  12. Mary V. Thompson, “Mount Vernon,” in Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History, ed. Edward E. Curtis IV, 2 vols. (New York: Facts on File, 2010), 2:392.

  13. Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 166; Michael A. G
omez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 66.

  14. The only historical reference to “six” Muslims who served in the American Revolutionary War may be found on a Web site that includes several chronological errors about Muslims in the eighteenth century. It provides only five names. One such was the slave Peter Salem, who was freed for his participation in the battle of Bunker Hill in Boston. He is assumed to be Muslim based on his surname, which might not reflect Islamic heritage even though salam is the word in Arabic for peace. “Salem” as a surname might instead refer to Salem, Massachusetts, an important seacoast town north of Boston. This speculation has not been found in other academic treatments; see “Collections of Stories of American Muslims: Presenting America’s Islamic Heritage, the 1700s,” http://www.muslimsinamerica.org. For the unverifiable assertion that Crispus Attucks, shot by the British in 1770 during the Boston Massacre, had Native American, black, and Muslim roots, see Jerald F. Dirks, Muslims in American History: A Forgotten Legacy (Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 2006), 206.

  15. Gomez, Black Crescent, 3–184. For the earliest compendium of these encounters, see Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook (New York: Garland, 1984). In Spanish New World territories, Muslims outwardly professing to be Christians and known as Moriscos were present earlier than the seventeenth century; see Karoline P. Cook, “Forbidden Crossings: Morisco Emigration to Spanish America, 1492–1650” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008).

  16. Quoted in Marilyn C. Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”: America, 1607–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 330–31, quote on 331; Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 152.

  17. A contemporary observer, Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire, after meeting with the Tunisian ambassador wrote that he described himself as “a Turk,” and observed of this man that “his complexion is about as dark as that of a Molatto [mulatto],” whereas others in the ambassador’s entourage were “large black men”; see William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States, 1803–1807, ed. Everett Somerville Brown (New York: Macmillan, 1923), quotes on 358–59.

  18. This is emphasized as a general American perspective by Allison, Crescent Obscured, 35–60. The idea that Jefferson’s view of the North African pirates was directly linked to his negative view of Islam, an argument more reflective of John Adams’s opinion, is asserted by Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 17–70. Jefferson did not focus on the religion of Islam as the main North African foreign policy problem, which is a position correctly asserted but not documented in a brief article by Sebastian R. Prange, “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an,” Saudi Aramco World 62, no. 4 (July/August 2011): 7.

  19. Quoted in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6.

  20. John Esposito, What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 228, 172 (quote).

  21. For a breakthrough survey of the experience of American Muslims, see Jane Smith, Islam in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). A second edition of this work appeared in 2009. The most expansive history of Muslims in America and their agency, with a focus on “living Muslims in colonial and antebellum America,” is by GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America, quote on 13. A recent attempt to analyze the concept of citizenship in Western political theory and Islamic law may be found in Andrew F. March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). March offers a cogent analysis of the issue that does not include American historical precedents. For a very different view of Islamic law and the place of the Qur’an in recent American political discourse, see Kathleen M. Moore, The Unfamiliar Abode: Islamic Law in the United States and Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 81–101.

  22. Important works that find evidence for this assertion include Allison, Crescent Obscured, xv–xviii, 35–59, 61–106; Marr, Cultural Roots, 1–114; Kidd, “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?,” 766–90, and more recently, Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 11–36; Shaban, Islam and the Arabs in Early American Thought, 1–81; Obeidat, American Literature and Orientalism, 3–40. Slightly more mixed views of Muslims in literary sources about North Africa are presented by Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms; Paul Baepler, introduction to White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1–51; Costello Brezina, “A Nation in Chains,” 201–19; Jacob Rama Berman, “The Barbarous Voice of Democracy: American Captivity in Barbary and the Multicultural Specter,” American Literature 79 (March 2007): 1–27; James Lewis, “Savages of the Seas: Barbary Captivity Tales and Images of Muslims in the Early Republic,” Journal of American Culture 13 (Summer 1990): 75–84; Battistini, “Glimpses of the Other before Orientalism,” 446–74. New work on European and American captives may be found in Lawrence A. Peskin, Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 137–214; and Ann Thompson, Barbary and Enlightenment: European Attitudes toward the Maghreb in the 18th Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 11–92. Counterevidence for entirely negative and/or oppositional sets of cultural premises about Islam is offered in sobering economic terms by Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 3–13. For more complicated British views of Islam and Muslims before 1750, see Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 99–113.

  23. Allison, Crescent Obscured, xvii, 3–106; Marr, Cultural Roots, 1–81. For echoes of both Allison and Marr’s definition of American views of North Africa as “a kind of inverse mirror of their own democracy, probity, and enlightenment,” see Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, quote on 32.

  24. For a survey of cultural views of Islam, American domestic political rhetoric and, most in depth, an analysis of the Barbary Wars and their “legacy,” see Allison, Crescent Obscured, xiii–59; Marr, Cultural Roots, 1–114. A focus on inter-Protestant uses of Islam and early American sermons in provided by Kidd, “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?,” and Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 10–11, 18.

  25. Quoted in Esposito, What Everyone Needs to Know, 1st ed., 172.

  26. James Hutson wrote a two-page argument in 2002 that Jefferson and other Founders intended to include Muslims “in their vision of the future republic”; see “The Founding Fathers and Islam.” Jefferson, Washington, and Madison are identified as supporting pluralism, which is attributed to “their ethnic backgrounds” by Akbar Ahmed, Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010), 58–61.

  27. Those who study Jews and Catholics in founding discourse sometimes refer to Muslims in relation to sources that link the three groups, but either dismiss these references without historical context or see Muslims as ways of making Jews and Catholics even farther from normative Protestants. Arthur Hertzberg casts references to Muslims in relations to Jews as “outlandish”; see Hertzberg, The Jews in America, 15. Morton Borden makes multiple references to Muslims in his important study of Jews, but never explains them; see Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels, 14, 16, 33. Naomi W. Cohen, like Hertzberg, sees Muslims as markers that place Jews beyond Christian norms; see Cohen, Jews in Christian America, 24–25. Gerard V. Bradley refers to Muslims as “totally behind the horizon of civility”; see Bradley, “The No Religious Test Clause,” 702. References to Muslims appear in works on the relationship of religion to the state in the founding era but without explanation in Leonard Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment (Chapel Hill: Un
iversity of North Carolina Press, 1994), 10, 47, 55, 59, 68, and Michael McConnell, “The Origins and Historical Understanding of the Free Exercise of Religion,” Harvard Law Review 103 (1990): 1473 n. 323.

  28. For the best history of this twentieth-century struggle for both Jews and Catholics, see Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  29. Perhaps the first to note the continued exclusion of Muslims from “a tripartite pluralism” of “Protestants, Catholics, and Jews” in the twentieth century was the historian William G. McLoughlin, Soul Liberty: The Baptists’ Struggle in New England, 1630–1833 (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press/University Press of New England, 1991), xi. For a study of the concept of Muslims as “not fully American,” see Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Not Quite American: The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004).

  30. Some scholars, myself included, have used Edward Said’s model of Orientalism to characterize Muslims as quintessential Others in eighteenth-century American thought, part of an unending binary of “Them” and “Us” that Said would have recognized in the American context. But my intent in this study is not to define or indicate new or old forms of Orientalism in America, but rather to document the more elusive opposition to these negative visions. For earlier work with an emphasis on Orientalism, see D. A. Spellberg, “Islam on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Voltaire’s Mahomet Crosses the Atlantic,” in Views from the Edge: Essays in Honor of Richard W. Bulliet, ed. Neguin Yavari, Lawrence G. Potter, and Jean-Marc Ran Oppenheim (New York: Columbia University Press for the Middle East Institute, 2004), 245–60, and Denise A. Spellberg, “Islam in America: Adventures in Neo-Orientalism,” Review of Middle East Studies 43, no. 1 (Summer 2009): 25–35. Neither Said nor American specialists have ever documented what might be termed an anti-Orientalist pattern. A unique attempt to argue a form of philo-Islamic belief for England with a brief suggestion of its transfer to the early American Republic may be found in Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 1–29, 243 n. 28. Until now, historians of early America have not focused on correcting or explaining the distorted images of anti-Islamic materials. The result has been unquestioning acceptance of anti-Islamic references without attention to concocted distortions, errors, and caricatures. Emphasis on this negative data has inadvertently resulted in the acceptance of these distortions as normative. This type of analysis does not provide insight into what Muslims actually believed or why these misrepresentations became particularly problematic for Americans. Most important, historians of Islam in early America have not focused on exceptions to the predominant anti-Islamic rule of completely negative representations.