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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  212. Jacob, Stubbe, 155; Champion, Pillars, 110–11; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 391–92.

  213. Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 72.

  214. Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1–7.

  215. A response to Prideaux titled Mahomet No Impostor, or A Defence of Mahomet, allegedly authored by a Muslim fictively named Abdullah Mahumed Omar, is found in Daniel, Islam and the West, 288; Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 35–42.

  216. Russell, “Philosophus,” 258 n. 63.

  217. Holt, Defender of Islam, 10. For a detailed account of the first Muslims to publish this treatise and its ramifications, see Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 225–31.

  218. Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 30–59, 159–68, 243 n. 28.

  219. Russell, “Philosophus,” 258 n. 63.

  220. Milton, “Locke,” suggests that Locke was not directly involved with Shaftesbury’s plan to foment rebellion or the assassination plot against the king, but the scholar James H. Tully disagrees; see Tully, introduction to Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 9–11.

  221. Tully, introduction to Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 9–11.

  222. Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 76.

  223. Kamen, Toleration, 231.

  224. J. W. Gough, introduction to Locke, Epistola, 4–7; Marshall, John Locke, 12, 14, 17–18, 20–21; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 597–98.

  225. Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 68–69; Kamen, Toleration, 224.

  226. See Robin R. Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1665 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  227. Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 68–69. For an in-depth study of the presence of Christian converts to Islam in Britain as well as diplomatic and commercial relations with Islamic nations during this period, see Matar, Islam in Britain, 1–50, and also Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005).

  228. Zagorin, Toleration, 248. Locke did not know that Samuel Richardson, a Baptist, had advanced the same argument about Muslims much earlier in 1646 in debate with Presbyterians; see Estep, Revolution, 67.

  229. Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 68; John Locke, Two Tracts on Government, ed. and trans. Philip Abrams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 127. Bagshaw may have been implicitly referring to a legal precedent promulgated under King Charles I (r. 1625–49) that warned that it “would be a sin in us to hurt their Persons,” referring to “Turks and Infidels,” meaning Muslims and, presumably, Jews; see William Salkeld, Reports of Cases Adjudg’d in the Court of King’s Bench (London: E. Nutt and R. Gosling, 1717), 1:46.

  230. For the best account of Locke’s change of attitude about toleration, see Marshall, John Locke, 62–83; Zagorin, Toleration, 250.

  231. Quoted in Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 69.

  232. Marshall, John Locke, 62–89.

  233. Zagorin, Toleration, 251–52; Marshall, John Locke, 62–89.

  234. Zagorin, Toleration, 251–52, 255.

  235. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), x.

  236. Zagorin, Toleration, 259. Locke met Philip von Limborch (d. 1712), a follower of Arminius (d. 1609), and member of a group known in Holland as the Remonstrants. They embraced the idea of universal grace, avoided the persecution of all others, and felt it their duty to follow their own consciences “and to leave others to the judgment of God.” Russell, “Philosophus,” 249. In Rotterdam, Locke lived for two years in the house of Benjamin Furly (d. 1714), an English Quaker, who had worked with Henry Stubbe.

  237. Marshall, John Locke, 357.

  238. Zagorin, Toleration, 245.

  239. Quoted in Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 593.

  240. Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 71–73, 75.

  241. Marilyn C. Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind”: America, 1607–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 326.

  242. Salkeld, Reports of Cases, 1:46.

  243. Ibid.; Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind,” 242, 326, 330.

  244. Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 75–76; Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind,” 330.

  245. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 50. For the difference between English citizens and denizens, see Baseler, “Asylum for Mankind,” 329–30.

  246. Locke, Epistola, 135. That this mistaken precedent came from John Greaves’s text on the Ottoman Empire, see Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 76. On the connection between the mufti and the pope, see Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 220–21; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 593–617, 597 (quote).

  247. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 50.

  248. R. C. Repp, “Shaykh al-Islam,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 11 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960), 9:399–402; Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 75–76.

  249. This point was first made by Matar, “Turbanned Nations.”

  250. Richard L. Smith, Ahmad al-Mansur, Islamic Visionary (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006), 58–61, 138–40.

  251. Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law and Muslim Minorities: The Juristic Discourse on Muslim Minorities from the Second/Eighth to the Eleventh/Seventeenth Centuries,” Islamic Law and Society 1 (1994): 141–87.

  252. Nabil Matar, introduction to In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century, ed. and trans. Nabil Matar (New York: Routledge, 2003), xxv. The dispute between the Hanafi, which would become the dominant Ottoman Sunni school of law, and the Maliki or North African precedents in the premodern period are noteworthy; see Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law,” 147, 149.

  253. Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law,” 152. On legal precedents for Muslim concepts of “religious freedom” in non-Muslim lands, see Andrew F. March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 165–79.

  254. Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law,” 171–73.

  255. Ibid., 175; March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship, 183–89, 261–63.

  256. Quoted in Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law,” 175.

  257. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 54.

  258. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 220–21.

  259. Waldron makes this point for Muslims and Catholics, ibid., 220–22.

  260. Tully, “Note on the Text,” in Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 19. Locke’s Latin original had listed Christian groups found in Holland: “Remonstrants, Anti-remonstrants, Lutherans, Anabaptists, or Socinians.”

  261. Marshall, John Locke, 369–70.

  262. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 54. This is a facsimile of the first edition of the anonymous publication of the Latin Epistola de Tolerantia in English by William Popple.

  263. John Dunn, “The Claim to Freedom of Conscience: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Thought, Freedom of Worship?” in From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England, ed. Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 180.

  264. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 54. Locke, Epistola, 144–45.

  265. The key phrase is “ne ethicus quidem vel Mahumedanus vel Judaeus religionis causa a repulica arcendus”: see Locke, Epistola, 144 (Latin), 145 (English). I would like to thank Elizabeth Dickenson for confirming for me that the verb arcendus means “to exclude,” but that words equivalent to ius civile, or “civil rights,” are nowhere mentioned in Locke’s original Latin.

  266. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 54. Locke, Epistola, 144-45. Locke appro
ved Popple’s English translation, which “is not a literal translation”; see J. W. Gough, “William Popple’s Translation,” in Locke, Epistola, 43–50.

  267. Quoted in Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 77.

  268. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 54.

  269. Jack Turner, “John Locke, Christian Mission, and Colonial America,” Modern Intellectual History 8 (2011): 291–92.

  270. Matar, Islam in Britain, 21–49.

  271. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 56. If checked against the Latin original, Gough’s English translation from the Latin is faithful to the original word Maumetanus, or “Mahometan,” rather than the English translation’s “Turk,” and, more important, Locke’s key use of Islamismum, or “Islam,” rather than the English translation’s “Mahumetanism”; see Locke, Epistola, 148–49. Locke also uses Alcoranum for Qur’an in signifying the holy scripture in which Muslims believe; see Locke, Epistola.

  272. Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 74; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 614–15.

  273. Marshall, John Locke, 370–76.

  274. J. W. Gough, introduction to Locke, Epistola, 32.

  275. John Locke, A Second Letter Concerning Toleration: To the Author of the Argument of the Letter concerning Toleration, briefly considered and answered, in Four Letters on Toleration by John Locke (London: Ward, Lock and Tyler, 1876), 40.

  276. Ibid.

  277. Locke, A Third Letter Concerning Toleration, in Four Letters on Toleration by John Locke, 154.

  278. Ibid., 157.

  279. Ibid., 198.

  280. Ibid., 203. Locke’s “sociological relativism” is referred to by Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 73.

  281. Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 74; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 615.

  282. Locke, A Third Letter Concerning Toleration, 203.

  283. Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 595, 617.

  284. Locke, A Third Letter Concerning Toleration, 204.

  285. Locke, A Fourth Letter Concerning Toleration, in Four Letters on Toleration by John Locke, 387.

  286. Ibid., 389.

  287. Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 58–59.

  288. Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 74.

  289. Champion, Pillars, 111. Richard H. Popkin, “The Deist Challenge,” in From Persecution to Toleration, ed. Grell, Israel, and Tyacke, 209.

  290. Marshall, John Locke, 320, 415, 419.

  291. Ibid., 413–15.

  292. Ibid., 460.

  293. For accounts of this controversy, see ibid., 441–51; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 391–95.

  294. Quoted in Champion, Pillars, 111; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 391.

  295. Quoted in Champion, Pillars, 112; Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 391.

  296. Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 69; Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld Press, 2009), 8–9.

  3. WHAT JEFFERSON LEARNED—AND DIDN’T—FROM HIS QUR’AN: HIS NEGATIVE VIEWS OF ISLAM, AND THEIR POLITICAL USES, CONTRASTED WITH HIS SUPPORT FOR MUSLIM CIVIL RIGHTS, 1765–86

  1. Paul P. Hoffman, ed., Virginia Gazette Daybooks, 1750–1752 and 1764–1766, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library Microfilm Publications, 1967), Segment 2, folio 202. The text is described as “Sali’s [sic] Koran” that was “interspersed among his purchases of law books in 1764 and 1765” by Frank L. Dewey, Thomas Jefferson, Lawyer (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 14. See also James Gilreath and Douglas L. Wilson, eds., Thomas Jefferson’s Library: A Catalog with the Entries in His Own Order (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1989), 58; Kevin J. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” Early American Literature 39, no. 2 (2004): 247; Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9, 130, 201, 258–59, 316; E. Millicent Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1952–53) 2:90, catalog #1457.

  2. The original Gazette entry has after his name the word “Note,” which appears but indicates no further information.

  3. George Sale, trans., The Koran, commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed, Translated into English from the Original Arabic; with Explanatory Notes, taken from the Most Approved Commentators, to which is prefixed a Preliminary Discourse, 2 vols. (London: L. Hawes, W. Clarke, R. Collins, and T. Wilcox, 1764), Rare Books and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress. I will refer to Jefferson’s first volume of the Qur’an through xvi as Sale, “To the Reader,” or “Preliminary Discourse,” or “To the Right Honourable John Lord Carteret (Dedication),” Koran (1764). All other references to “To the Reader” or “Preliminary Discourse” refer to the 1734 first-edition facsimile of a Harvard manuscript in one volume, George Sale, trans., The Koran (New York: Garland, 1984), cited hereafter as Sale, “To the Reader,” or “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1734). There are no substantial differences between the two editions, except that Jefferson’s version is in two volumes rather than the initial one.

  4. Arnoud Vrolijk, “Sale, George (b. in or after 1696–d. 1736),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 58 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 48:685–87. Vrolijk asserts that 1746 was the second edition in opposition to 1764, as stated by Sebastian R. Prange, “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an,” Saudi Aramco World 62, no. 4 (July/August 2011): 5. Four editions are mentioned, without dates, by Hartmut Bobzin, “Translations of the Qur’an,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, ed. Jane D. McAuliffe, 6 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006), 5:348.

  5. My thanks for this important reference belong to two University of Texas at Austin graduate students: Sharon Silzell, whose own research interest in the Qur’an alerted me to the importance of this reference, which she heard about from her graduate colleague Ben Breen. He located the citation while researching for Professors James Sidbury of Rice University and Cassandra Pybus of the University of Sydney. I am grateful to the latter two historians for allowing me to cite this document, headed “Property Taken from Dr. James Bryden by the British Troops, ’81,” Library of Virginia, among a box of uncataloged documents referred to as “the British Depredations” of Goochland County, Virginia, 1782, call number BC 114 7038.

  6. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Page,” February 21, 1770, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al., 40 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 1:548. Hereafter cited as Papers of Thomas Jefferson.

  7. Dewey, Thomas Jefferson, 154 n. 25.

  8. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:35.

  9. Dewey, Thomas Jefferson, 154 n. 2; Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:35.

  10. Although Jefferson may have lost between three hundred and five hundred volumes, this letter to Page may have been “an exaggeration,” according to Hayes, Road to Monticello, 2–3, 8; quote on 2–3.

  11. Hoffman, Virginia Gazette Daybooks, Segment 2, folios 7, 11, 12, 13, 28, 159, 175.

  12. Prange, “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an,” 4. Jefferson’s study of religion and law are paramount in the explanation for his interest in the Qur’an; see Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 247, 252; Hayes, Road to Monticello, 9.

  13. An emphasis on Jefferson’s interest in Islamic law is offered by Azizah Y. al-Hibri, “Islamic and American Constitutional Law: Borrowing Possibilities or a History of Borrowing?” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 1, no. 3 (1999): 499–500.

  14. Jefferson initialed volume 1, page 113, of the Qur’an, Rare Books and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, with a “T” and “I” rather than a “T” and “J.” On the commonality of Jefferson’s use of his initials in his books, see Hayes, Road to Monticello, 6–8.

&nb
sp; 15. The first person to assert that “most likely Jefferson owned two copies of the Qur’an” because of the Shadwell fire was al-Hibri, “Islamic and American Constitutional Law,” 498 n. 30.

  16. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 251, 257–58.

  17. Edwin S. Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 18–19. I would like to commend the generosity of the late Shearer Davis (Dave) Bowman, a historian and colleague who recommended this work when he kindly shared his brief overview of Jefferson’s views of Christianity with me.

  18. Sale, “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1764), 1:A; Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 247–48, 251–52; Hayes, Road to Monticello, 9.

  19. Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld Press, 2009), 1–2. For a more in-depth assessment of medieval translations of the Qur’an, see Thomas E. Burman, Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

  20. For the best account of translation as a “political act,” see Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, ix–xii, 1–80; Bobzin, “Translations of the Qur’an,” 5:340, 344–49.

  21. Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 1–2; Bobzin, “Translations of the Qur’an,” 5:344–45; Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 19, 22, 24–25, 37, 75. Sale’s translation is described “as best expressing in English the meaning traditionally understood in Islam” by Daniel, Islam and the West, 14.

  22. Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 1.

  23. Ibid., 22 (quote).

  24. Ibid.

  25. 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.