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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  4. The classic treatment is by Ray W. Irwin, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with the Barbary Powers, 1776–1816 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1931). A more recent, thorough reading is provided by Michael L. S. Kitzen, Tripoli and the United States at War: A History of American Relations with the Barbary States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1993). A historically problematic reading regarding “terror” and piracy is offered by Joseph Wheelan, America’s First War: Jefferson’s War on Terror, 1801–1805 (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003). Whelan’s assumption is countered thoughtfully and thoroughly by Richard B. Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), and Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005). See also the popular history by A. B. C. Whipple, To the Shores of Tripoli: The Birth of the U.S. Navy and Marines (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991). For a cultural analysis, focused in part on American views of Islam, see Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). The issue of captivity in North Africa has received renewed attention of late. A helpful introduction to the cultural construction of the British encounter with Barbary may be found in Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 99–113. Accounts of American captivity narratives in North Africa may be found in Paul Baepler, ed., White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of Barbary Captivity Narratives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); see also Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 26–68; Lawrence A. Peskin, Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); 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), 19–36.

  5. Sebastian R. Prange, “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an,” Saudi Aramco World 62, no. 4 (July/August 2011): 7.

  6. For a comparison of Jefferson and Adams on religion, see Lambert, Barbary Wars, 8, 113, 117–18.

  7. I paraphrase Lambert here, with whom I concur based on Jefferson’s writing, that U.S. conflicts with North Africa “were primarily about trade, not theology, and that rather than being holy wars, they were extensions of America’s War of Independence”; see Lambert, Barbary Wars, 8. Offering a more religion-centered explanation of the conflict is Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 20–42.

  8. Lambert, Barbary Wars, 8–9.

  9. Baepler, introduction to White Slaves, African Masters, 8–58.

  10. “Adams to Jefferson,” July 3, 1786, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:139.

  11. Davis, Holy War, 15.

  12. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 125. For Qur’anic verses about captives as differentiated from slaves, see Jonathan E. Brockopp, “Captives,” Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, ed. Jane D. McAuliffe, 6 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001), 1:289–90, and Jonathan E. Brockopp, “Slaves,” Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, 5:56–60. The humanity of the slaves and their kind treatment and manumission are regarded as a way to expiate sins (Qur’an 4:36, 5:89, 58:3).

  13. Quoted in Nabil Matar, Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 114–15.

  14. Adrian Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean (New York: Riverhead, 2010), 172.

  15. James Leander Cathcart, “The Captives: Eleven Years a Prisoner in Algiers,” in Baepler, White Slaves, African Masters, 103–46; see also Jacob Rama Berman, American Arabesque: Arabs, Islam, and the 19th-Century Imaginary (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 31–69.

  16. Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary, 172; Cathcart, “Captives,” in White Slaves, African Masters, 136–39.

  17. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 24, 263, 168–69.

  18. Ibid., 16, 96–97.

  19. The connection between American captivity in North Africa and abolitionist thought in the United States was first documented by Allison, Crescent Obscured, 121–26, 223–25.

  20. Henry Wiencek, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 76–83, 245–51, 273–75.

  21. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 103; Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 19–27.

  22. Quoted in Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 2nd ed. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), 161.

  23. “From Martha Jefferson to Thomas Jefferson,” May 3, 1787, Paris, in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 40 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 11:334. Hereafter Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 89–90.

  24. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:334; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 89–90.

  25. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 89.

  26. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:334; Allison, Crescent Obscured, 89–90.

  27. “We cannot know what her father thought, since he never mentioned this episode, or Martha’s comments on it, when he wrote back to her. Nor did he mention it to anyone else,” as noted by Allison, Crescent Obscured, 90.

  28. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 163–90; Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, 24.

  29. Wiencek, Master of the Mountain, 190, who states that they never hired a lawyer to investigate proceedings that would have freed them under French law.

  30. “The Marquis de Lafayette to John Adams,” February 22, 1786, in John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850–56), 8:376–77.

  31. “Adams to Granville Sharp,” March 8, 1786, ibid., 8:387.

  32. Ibid., 8:388.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Irwin, Diplomatic Relations, 17; Phillip Chiviges Naylor, North Africa: A History from Antiquity to Present (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 121.

  35. Quoted in Irwin, Diplomatic Relations, 24–25; Kitzen, Tripoli, 9; Magali Morsy, North Africa, 1800–1900: A Survey from the Nile Valley to the Atlantic (London: Longman, 1984), 73; Naylor, North Africa, 123.

  36. Quoted in Irwin, Diplomatic Relations, 17 n. 68.

  37. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, vol. 2 of Jefferson and His Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), 27; Irwin, Diplomatic Relations, 17 n. 70. This same quotation was attributed to others, including the French king Louis XIV; see Louis B. Wright and Julia H. Macleod, The First Americans in North Africa: William Eaton’s Struggle for a Vigorous Policy Against the Barbary Pirates, 1799–1805 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), 14–15.

  38. “John Adams to Secretary Jay,” February 17, 1786, Adams, Works, 8:372.

  39. Matar, Britain and Barbary, 113.

  40. Irwin, Diplomatic Relations, 204.

  41. Matar, Britain and Barbary, 113.

  42. Quoted in Karoline P. Cook, “Forbidden Crossings: Morisco Emigration to Spanish America, 1492–1650” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008), 96.

  43. Wright and Macleod, First Americans, 14.

  44. Matar, Britain and Barbary, 113.

  45. Lambert, Barbary Wars, 31.

  46. Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary, 29–30.

  47. Ibid., 31–103.

  48. Ibid., 28–29.

  49. Lambert, Barbary Wars, 30.

  50. Naylor, North Africa, 123.

  51. Matar, Britain and Barbary, 116–32.

  52. Davis, Holy War, vii.

  53. Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), quote on 23.

  54. Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary, quote on 30.

  55. Naylor, North Africa, 131.

  56. Allison, Crescent Obscu
red, 4–8.

  57. “Thomas Jefferson to John Page,” Paris, August 20, 1785, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 8:418.

  58. Gary Edward Wilson, “American Prisoners in the Barbary Nations, 1784–1816” (PhD diss., North Texas State University, 1979), 314.

  59. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 10:426.

  60. Ibid., 8:418.

  61. Ibid., 8:419.

  62. Thomas Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 59; Merrill D. Peterson, Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 292.

  63. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 8:347–48.

  64. Ibid., 8:348, 353.

  65. Claimed sightings of North African vessels were recorded for the West Indies in the Massachusetts Centinel, April 29, 1786, and the presence of malevolent Algerians in the United States was featured in the Pennsylvania Gazette, April 5, 1786; the Connecticut Gazette, April 7, 1786; and the Maryland Gazette, April 13, 1786; see Wilson, “American Prisoners,” 72.

  66. Allison, Crescent Obscured, 3–7.

  67. “Moor,” Oxford English Dictionary, 13 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 6:645.

  68. Kitzen, Tripoli, 1; Baepler, introduction to White Slaves, African Masters, 2–3.

  69. Hans Wehr, ed., A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, trans. Milton Cowan (Urbana, IL: Spoken Language Services, 1994), 62.

  70. “Barbary,” Oxford English Dictionary, 1:665.

  71. Thomas Jefferson, “Fourth Annual Message,” November 8, 1804, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 1801–1806, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, 10 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), 8:328.

  72. Jefferson described the Greek and Ottoman Turkish conflict this way: “This is only to substitute one set of Barbarians for another.” Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 8:418.

  73. Ibid., 8:352.

  74. “Treaty with Morocco, 1786,” Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 10:425.

  75. “Adams to Jefferson,” February 21, 1786, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:123.

  76. “Adams to Jefferson,” June 6, 1786, Adams, Works, 8:400.

  77. “Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe,” November 11, 1784, Paris, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 7:512; Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Knopf, 2003), 40.

  78. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 7:511.

  79. Ibid., 7:511–12.

  80. Ibid., 2:437–40.

  81. “Adams to Jefferson,” February 17, 1786, London, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:121.

  82. “Adams to John Jay,” February 17, 1786, Adams, Works, 8:372.

  83. “Adams to Jefferson,” Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:122.

  84. Ibid., 1:121.

  85. Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Life and Selected Writings, 62.

  86. “Adams to Jefferson,” Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:121.

  87. Ibid.

  88. John Foss, “A Journal of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss,” in Baepler, White Slaves, African Masters, 89.

  89. “Adams to Jefferson,” Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:121.

  90. Ibid.; Adams, Works, 8:373.

  91. “To Samuel Henley with a List of Books,” March 3, 1785, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 8:14 n. 1; Kevin J. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” Early American Literature 39, no. 2 (2004): 258; E. Millicent Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1952–53), 5:44.

  92. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 8:11–13; Sowerby, Catalogue, 5:44.

  93. “Adams to Jefferson,” Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:121; Irwin, Diplomatic Relations, 17.

  94. “Adams to Jefferson,” Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:121.

  95. Ibid. The interview is also detailed in Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 257; Kevin J. Hayes, The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 309.

  96. “Adams to Jefferson,” Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:121.

  97. Ibid.; Hayes, Road to Monticello, 309–17.

  98. “Adams to Jefferson,” Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:121.

  99. Ibid., 1:121–22.

  100. Adams, Works, 8:373. While Tunis was omitted in Adams’s letter to Jefferson, it was present in his other communication to the secretary of state, along with Morocco.

  101. “Adams to Jefferson,” Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:122.

  102. Ibid.

  103. Ibid., 1:123.

  104. Ibid., 1:122.

  105. Adams, Works, 8:373. For a darker version of the first meeting with the ambassador from Tripoli, mistakenly dated 1785 instead of 1786, which presumes that Adams “was outraged by the impertinence that ‘Abd al-Rahman, the agent of a powerful but primitive kingdom, displayed toward the enlightened United States” despite Adams’s multiple positive observations to the contrary about the ambassador’s credentials and personality, see Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, 26.

  106. “John Adams to Secretary Jay,” February 20, 1786, Works, 8:374.

  107. Ibid., 8:377.

  108. For more on the presence of Jews in Tripoli, see Harvey E. Goldberg, Jewish Life in Muslim Libya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

  109. Wright and Macleod, First Americans, 32, 42–43.

  110. “Adams to Jefferson,” June 6, 1786, London, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:134.

  111. Adams, Works, 8:374.

  112. Ibid., 8:377.

  113. Ibid., 8:374.

  114. Ibid., 8:375.

  115. Ibid.

  116. Ibid.

  117. Ibid., 8:376.

  118. Ibid.

  119. Ibid.

  120. Ibid., 8:377.

  121. Ibid., 8:378.

  122. Ibid., 8:379.

  123. “Thomas Jefferson to John Jay,” March 12, 1786, in The Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States of America (Washington, DC: Blair and Rives, 1837), 3:4–5.

  124. Parker, Uncle Sam, 41–42; Irwin, Diplomatic Relations, 40–42.

  125. “American Commissioners to John Jay,” March 28, 1786, London, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 9:357.

  126. Ibid., 9:358.

  127. Ibid.; Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, 27–32, 51–52.

  128. The exchange rates then and now are provided by Parker, Uncle Sam, 42.

  129. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 9:358.

  130. Ibid.

  131. This interaction is interpreted differently by Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 256–57; Hayes, Road to Monticello, 315–16.

  132. Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955), 100–101.

  133. Ella Landau-Tasseroin, “Jihad,” Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, 3:41.

  134. Ibid., 3:36.

  135. Patricia Crone, “War,” Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, 5:456. Other verses about being wronged include Qur’an 22:39 and punishing wrongdoers, Qur’an 9:13–14. All translations are from Muhammad M. Pickthall, trans., The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an: Text and Explanatory Translation (New York: Muslim World League, 1977), 526.

  136. “Richard O’Brien to Thomas Jefferson,” June 8, 1786, in Naval Documents Related to the United States Wars with the Barbary Powers: Naval Operations Including Diplomatic Background from 1785 Through 1801, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939), 1:3.

  137. Pickthall, trans., Qur’an, 29.

  138. Ibid., 33.

  139. Ibid., 29.

  140. Ibid., 176. Earl Waugh, Peace as Seen in the Qur’an (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1986), 12, 42.

  141. Pickthall, trans., Qur’an, 87.

  142. Ibid., 272.

  143. Khadduri, War and Peace, 217–18.

  144. Crone, “War,” Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, 5:455.

  145. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 9:359.

  146. Naval Documents, 1:3; Lambert, Barb
ary Wars, 118; Kitzen, Tripoli, 13.

  147. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 9:358.

  148. Khadduri, War and Peace, 119.

  149. Andrew Rippin, “Devil,” Encyclopedia of the Qur’an, 1:526.

  150. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 9:358.

  151. Ibid., 9:359.

  152. For the assumption that Jefferson viewed North Africa as “the repository of despotism, depravity, and backwardness,” which the Founder never articulated this way, see Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, 26–27, 32.

  153. Quoted in Lambert, Barbary Wars, 118.

  154. Parker, Uncle Sam, 42.

  155. “Jefferson to Adams,” July 11, 1785, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 1:142.

  156. Ibid.

  157. Ibid., 1:143.

  158. Ibid.

  159. Irwin, Diplomatic Relations, 48.

  160. “Jefferson’s Proposed Concert of Powers against the Barbary States: Editorial Note,” Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 10:560–61.

  161. Ibid., 10:562–63.

  162. Ibid., 10:564.

  163. Jefferson, “Proposed Convention against the Barbary States,” before July 4, 1786, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 10:567.

  164. Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Life and Selected Writings, 63–67.

  165. Kitzen, Tripoli, 11.

  166. Wilson, “American Prisoners,” 320.

  167. Irwin, Diplomatic Relations, 27–28.

  168. Ibid., 38 n. 2.

  169. Ibid., 11.

  170. Ibid., 45.

  171. Quoted ibid., 45 n. 41.

  172. Ibid., 44; Kitzen, Tripoli, 13.

  173. Bubonic and pneumonic plague outbreaks were common in eighteenth-century North Africa; see H. G. Barnby, The Prisoners of Algiers: An Account of the Forgotten American-Algerian War, 1785–1787 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 86.

  174. Some contemporary writers insist that Jefferson bought his Qur’an in response to the issue of North African piracy. This seems unlikely given that this diplomatic problem for Jefferson dates from eleven years after his 1765 purchase of the book, not his 1786 interview with the ambassador from Tripoli. For an example of this assumption, see Samuel Blumenfeld, “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an,” New American, September 1, 2010, and Christopher Hitchens, “Jefferson’s Qur’an,” Slate, January 9, 2007.

  175. 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, 1:113; Hayes, Road to Monticello, 6–7.