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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  152. Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Life and Selected Writings, 24.

  153. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:547.

  154. Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Life and Selected Writings, 40.

  155. S. Gerald Sandler, “Lockean Ideas in Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (1960): 113.

  156. J. G. A. Pocock, “Religious Freedom and the Desacralization of Politics: From the English Civil Wars to the Virginia Statute,” in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History, ed. Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 61.

  157. Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God, 13–16.

  158. Champion, Pillars, 111–32; P. M. Holt, “The Treatment of Arab History by Prideaux, Ockley, and Sale,” in Historians of the Middle East, ed. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 292; Kidd, “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?,” 767.

  159. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:529. The phrase is Boyd’s.

  160. Ibid., 1:539.

  161. Ibid., 1:535.

  162. “Jefferson’s Outline of Argument in Support of His Resolutions,” in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:535–39.

  163. Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., “The Political Theology of Thomas Jefferson,” in Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 89.

  164. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:536. The second line inside brackets is the author’s translation.

  165. Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, in Life and Selected Writings, 255.

  166. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:536. The second line in brackets is author’s translation.

  167. Ibid., 1:537.

  168. Ibid., 1:538.

  169. Ibid. Jefferson made reference to the pivotal impact of the Reformation: “Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the Reformation, the corruptions of Christianity could not have been purged away.” Clearly, Jefferson believed that Islam had had no such turning point in its religious history. See Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, in Life and Selected Writings, 255.

  170. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:538.

  171. Alberto A. Martínez, Science Secrets: The Truth About Darwin’s Finches, Einstein’s Wife, and Other Myths (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 36–37, 39–41, 43–45; Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, in Life and Selected Writings, 255.

  172. Al-Hibri, “Islamic and American Constitutional Law,” 501 n. 50.

  173. This assumption was first made by Hayes, but not regarding Jefferson’s legislation; Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 250; Sowerby, Catalogue, 3:133, catalog #2738. Jefferson also owned Gordon’s Independent Whig, subtitled or a defense of primitive Christianity, and of our ecclesiastical establishment, against the exorbitant claims and encroachments of fanatical and disaffected clergymen, Sowerby, Catalogue, 3:133, catalog #2739.

  174. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University; repr. 1992); 35–36, 44–52; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 47, 52–53.

  175. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 250.

  176. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 63–64 n. 8; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 47.

  177. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, “Cato’s Letters: Letter 66, Arbitrary Government proved incompatible with true Religion, whether Natural or Revealed,” in Sacred Rights, 59.

  178. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 47, 52–53, 56.

  179. For the idea that Jefferson surpassed Locke, but without regard to Muslims, see John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and “Early Enlightenment” Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 697.

  180. Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian, vol. 1 of Jefferson and His Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 274–84.

  181. Nabil Matar, “John Locke and the ‘Turbanned Nations,’ ” Journal of Islamic Studies 2, no. 1 (1991): 72.

  182. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:544; Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893), 2:92 n. 1, says that this phrase about the date is inscribed in Jefferson’s own hand, but Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:528, contradicts this.

  183. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:548.

  184. James Hutson first made this connection between Jefferson and Locke in “The Founding Fathers and Islam,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 61, no. 5 (2002): 1, http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0205/tolerance.html.

  185. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:550, below note N. The editor, Julian P. Boyd, states that Jefferson was using volume 2 of a 1714 edition of Locke’s Works published in London, but that volume does not exist in Jefferson’s library. See Sowerby, Catalogue, 2:44, catalog #1338. Sowerby states that a 1791 edition of Locke’s work on toleration did not make it into the Library of Congress because it “was either not delivered or disappeared at an early date.”

  186. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), ed. James H. Tully (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 54. Hereafter, Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Curiously, Jefferson’s spelling of the word for Muslim was not the original English 1689 “Mahumetan.” Instead, Jefferson’s version has been rendered by three American editors of his papers in three different ways: “Mahomedan,” “Mahometan,” and in the official collection, “Mahamedan.” These discrepancies arise in part from the difficulty of deciphering the original handwriting, which certainly includes a final “d,” but presents the more difficult challenge of deciphering the last three vowels. I think it more likely that Jefferson intended to follow Popple’s original 1689 spelling “Mahumetan,” and rendered it as “Mahumedan,” but this remains conjecture, a fourth variant spelling at a time when precision in orthography for the term was not consistent. There is no doubt, however, that the word he transcribed from Locke, whatever the spelling, continued to mean “Muslim” in eighteenth-century usage.

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

  188. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:548.

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

  190. Jack Turner, “John Locke, Christian Mission, and Colonial America,” Modern Intellectual History 8 (2011): 267–71.

  191. Ibid., 270, 291–92. The odd reference to “a faith in Mahomet, Foe, or any other except Christ” caused the editor Boyd, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:550, 551 n. 5, to consider the reference “enigmatic.” The word “Foe” is also found in Bolingbroke but not in Locke: “the Mahometans and worshippers of Foe,” in Jefferson, Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, 25.

  192. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:559.

  193. Ibid., 1:559 note. The importance of this legislation for non-Protestants is noted by Buckley, “The Political Theology of Thomas Jefferson,” in Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 91.

  194. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:558.

  195. Ibid., 1:599 note, second column, second paragraph.

  196. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 52.

  197. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:558–59.

  198. Robert M. Healey, “Jefferson on Judaism and the Jews: ‘Divided We Stand, United We Fall,’ ” American Jewish History 73 (1984): 360.

  199. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:558–59.

  200. Ibid., 1:558.

  201. Bret E. Carroll, The Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 2000), 52; Morton Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 6; Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776, 3 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 1:330–42, who emphasizes that although a few Jews passed through Virginia on business, “no established community would rise in Richmond until the 1780s.” John Leland, a Baptist evangelical preacher, observed that by 1790 there was “no synagog
ue” for Jews in Virginia; see John Leland, The Writings of the late Elder John Leland: Including Some Events in His Life, ed. L. F. Greene (New York: G. W. Wood, 1845), 121. Naomi W. Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 26. Cohen believes that for Jefferson and his contemporaries the word “Jew” signified neither neighbor nor acquaintance but, “like Turk, Mohammedan, atheist, or Deist, a genus distinct from the familiar Christian American.” It is true that Jefferson’s inclusive assertion did not refer to Jews—or Muslims—that he knew.

  202. Healey, “Jefferson on Judaism,” 363, 365.

  203. “Letter to William Short,” August 4, 1820, in Memoir Correspondence, and Miscellanies, from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1830), 4:327.

  204. Healey, “Jefferson on Judaism,” 360–61 n. 11.

  205. Quoted ibid., 361.

  206. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:548.

  207. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 51.

  208. John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 697.

  209. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:551 n. 2.

  210. Ibid. Jefferson considered the crime a misdemeanor, not treason.

  211. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2:589.

  212. Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, in Life and Selected Writings, 254.

  213. Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 280–87; Hayes, Road to Monticello, 259.

  214. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:548.

  215. Ibid., 1:551 n. 2.

  216. Sebastian Castellio, Concerning Heretics: Whether They Are to Be Persecuted and How They Are to Be Treated: A Collection of the Opinions of Learned Men Both Ancient and Modern, trans. Roland H. Bainton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 9.

  217. Sowerby, Catalogue, 2:101, catalog #1485, the Latin New Testament; 2:89, catalog #1454, Châteillon’s collection of pagan oracles, including those of Apollo and Zoroaster; and 2:130, catalog #1547, Castaliones dialogi sacri, Bible stories for the young.

  218. Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 339.

  219. “Thomas Jefferson to John Adams,” April 11, 1823, in Life and Selected Writings, 644.

  220. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush,” January 16, 1811, ibid., 558.

  221. Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God, 2–22.

  222. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:547.

  223. Ibid., 2:545.

  224. Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, in Life and Selected Writings, 255–56.

  225. Ibid., 256.

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

  227. Locke, Epistola de Tolerantia: A Letter on Toleration, ed. Raymond Klibansky, trans. J. W. Gough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 145.

  228. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:548.

  229. Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, in Life and Selected Writings, 255.

  230. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2:545–47; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 282–95; “Thomas Jefferson, epitaph, no date,” in The Thomas Jefferson Papers Series 1. General Correspondence, 1651–1827, Library of Congress, image 1135, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib024905.

  231. For the succinct outline of these ideas, see Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan, introduction to Virginia Statute, vii.

  232. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:545.

  233. Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 37.

  234. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:547.

  235. Ibid., 2:545.

  236. Peterson, introduction to Virginia Statute, vii.

  237. Sandler, “Lockean Ideas,” 114; Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), 31.

  238. Sandler, “Lockean Ideas,” 114; Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2:545–46.

  239. The first to suggest that Jefferson had Muslims “in mind” when he first proposed his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom was Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 258–59.

  240. Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 141.

  241. Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 157–58.

  242. Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Life and Selected Writings, 45.

  243. Ibid., 45–46. In Jefferson’s hand, “words Jesus Christ.”

  244. Sandler, “Lockean Ideas,” 111–12.

  245. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:544; Sandler, “Lockean Ideas,” 112.

  246. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2:545.

  247. Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Life and Selected Writings, 46; I differ in my reading of Locke and Jefferson from the thoughtful work of Garry Willis, Head and Heart: American Christianities (New York: Penguin, 2007), 175–97.

  248. This connection in Jefferson’s thought was first observed by James H. Hutson, “The Founding Fathers and Islam,” Library of Congress Information Bulletin 61, no. 5 (2002): 1; Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 259; Ragosta, Wellspring of Liberty, 145–46; Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York: Random House, 2012), 123–24. Dismissing the bill as pertaining only to “religious freedom” is Allison, Crescent Obscured, 5–7.

  249. Quoted in Buckley, Church and State, 157–58 n. 45. Buckley provides the most detailed account of the context of this amendment. However, in direct opposition to Jefferson and Madison, Buckley states that “it is not readily apparent how, in fact, the inclusion of these words [Jesus Christ] would have in any way affected the latitude of the enabling clause.” Wills, Head and Heart, 196, misses Madison’s support for the excision of “Jesus Christ.”

  250. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2:546–47.

  251. Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke’s Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 201; Turner, “John Locke, Christian Mission, and Colonial America,” 279–80.

  252. Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 143–200; Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–94.

  253. Carroll, Routledge Historical Atlas, 52, 102.

  254. Gomez, Black Crescent, 166.

  255. Ibid.; Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 66.

  256. Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 48.

  257. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 21.

  258. Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, with Commentary and Relevant Extracts from Other Writings, ed. Edwin Morris Betts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 5.

  259. Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Life and Selected Writings, 26.

  260. Jefferson, Farm Book, 5–31, 39, 42–43, 49–60, 114, 128–31, 134–37, 139–40, 142–52, 154–56, 158–62, 164–69, 172, 174–76. He lists his hogs on 173, between his lists of slaves on 172 and 174–75.

  261. Mary V. Thompson, “Mount Vernon,” Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History, ed. Edward E. Curtis IV, 2 vols. (New York: Facts on File, 2010) 2:392–93.

  262. Gomez, Black Crescent, 149, 152–53, 155, 159.

  263. Thompson, “Mount Vernon,” 2:392–93.

  264. Gomez, Black Crescent, 146–48.

  265. Thompson, “Mount Vernon,” 2:392–93.

  266. “George Washington to Tench Tilghman,” March 24, 1784, in 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), 27:367.

  267. Henry Wien
cek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 274–75, quote on 275, where Wiencek opines the choice of Jefferson as “the moral standard of the Founders’ era, not Washington.” Thompson, “Mount Vernon,” 2:393, notes that Washington freed 123 of his slaves, with others who had belonged to Martha Washington’s first husband remaining enslaved. For an earlier critique of Jefferson’s view of slavery and treatment of slaves, see Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 2nd ed. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), 153–54, 189, who notes that all of those slaves freed were Hemingses, part of Jefferson’s family.

  268. The possible presence of Muslims on Jefferson’s plantation was first noted by al-Hibri, “Islamic and American Constitutional Law,” 502.

  269. See Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 272; Wiencek, Master of the Mountain, 191, refers to six childbirths only.

  270. Elizabeth Hemings (d. 1807) was the daughter of a “full-blooded African” woman whose name remains unknown. Elizabeth was the mother of Sarah (Sally) Hemings (d. 1835). Their great-grandmother’s African religion and ethnicity remain a mystery, according to Annette Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, 47–52.

  271. Wiencek, Master of the Mountain, 228; Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders, 154. Jefferson never freed Sally, although those slaves freed on his death were Hemingses, their children.

  4. JEFFERSON VERSUS JOHN ADAMS: THE PROBLEM OF NORTH AFRICAN PIRACY AND THEIR NEGOTIATIONS WITH A MUSLIM AMBASSADOR IN LONDON, 1784–88

  1. “John Adams to Thomas Jefferson,” February 21, 1786, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 1:123. I have regularized capitalization in all of these exchanges. Hereafter cited as Adams-Jefferson Letters.

  2. Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (New York: Meredith Corporation, 1969), 64–65.

  3. Robert C. Davis, Holy War and Human Bondage: Tales of Christian-Muslim Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009), vii–36.