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

by Denise A. Spellberg

  208. Gilreath and Wilson, Thomas Jefferson’s Library, 1.

  209. Ibid. The British had burned the nascent national library in Washington, D.C., the year before.

  210. Ibid., v–vi.

  211. E. Millicent Sowerby, ed., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress 1952–53), 5:59; Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 256–58. Jefferson’s library included many books that contained Arabic and sometimes Persian; for example, see Sowerby, Catalogue, 5:65–67. These works included the four-volume Specimina Arabica et Persica à Vieyra (#4743). Another tome contained a sixteenth-century Arabic translation of Euclid’s Elements, with commentary by the thirteenth-century mathematician Nasir al-Din al-Tusi: Euclidis elementorum libris XXII Arabice (#1594). Jefferson also owned an apocryphal Gospel in Arabic and Latin (#4744), as well as a book on the rudiments of the Arabic language (#4746) and the eight-volume Simplification des langues arabe, persanne et turque by his friend Constantin Volney (#4747). The library also contained William Jones’s Poesesos Asiaticae commentaria (#4709), an eight-volume collection of poetry in Arabic, Persian, Greek, and Hebrew. The books from his friend Samuel Henley did not arrive in Virginia from Britain until 1785, when Jefferson was away in Paris; see Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 8:11–14. For assertions that the volumes arrived much earlier, see Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 258.

  212. Arabic was not part of Jefferson’s plan for the future curriculum, despite the assertion by Hayes in “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 258. See Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2:540–45.

  213. Sowerby, Catalogue, 5:67, for Chaldean and Syriac grammars (#1651). Multiple Hebrew grammars also existed in the library.

  214. Ibid., 1:vi.

  215. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 257; Sowerby, Catalogue, 1:133, for The Revolt of Ali Bey by S. L. Kosmpolitos (#314).

  216. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 257.

  217. Sowerby, Catalogue, 4:138–42, where four tomes recounted journeys in the Levant, Persia, and Egypt. For additional works on Egypt and North Africa, see ibid., 5:152–55.

  218. Under European geography, Jefferson placed four travelogues about Turkey; see ibid., 4:135–36.

  219. Ibid., 4:135. For the prurient interest of Americans in “the seraglio,” see Allison, Crescent Obscured, 61–85. A more thorough contextualization of European women’s travels in the East is provided by Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 75–98.

  220. Sowerby, Catalogue, 1:134–37.

  221. Ibid., 1:136–37; “Tripoli: November 4, 1796, and January 3, 1797,” in Miller, Treaties, 2:371.

  222. “Tripoli: 1796–1797,” in Miller, Treaties, 2:371.

  223. First to explore this issue was Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 252.

  224. Ibid., 250–54, 259; Gilreath and Wilson, Thomas Jefferson’s Library, 58; Sowerby, Catalogue, 2:90.

  225. Gilreath and Wilson, Thomas Jefferson’s Library, 58.

  226. Sowerby, Catalogue, 2:89–102. The first Old Testament is in Greek and Hebrew, with subsequent copies of the Old and New Testament in Greek, Latin, and English. Many works contained both the Old and New Testaments.

  227. Quoted in Gilreath and Wilson, Thomas Jefferson’s Library, 3.

  228. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 253–54.

  229. Ibid., 254 (quote); Hayes, Road to Monticello, 259.

  230. Gilreath and Wilson, Thomas Jefferson’s Library, 58–59; Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 254 (quote); Hayes, Road to Monticello, 258–59.

  231. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 259.

  232. Walters, Revolutionary Deists, 258–60.

  233. Ibid., 159. See also Adams, Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels.

  234. Gilreath and Wilson, Thomas Jefferson’s Library, 59.

  235. Ibid., 60–62.

  236. “Thomas Jefferson to Augustus B. Woodward,” March 24, 1824, quoted in Sowerby, Catalogue, 2:1; Hayes, Road to Monticello, 258.

  237. Sale, trans., Koran, iii; earlier in his dedication, Sale also refers to the Prophet as the “legislator of the Arabs,” A; Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 248, 251.

  238. Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Knopf, 2003), 42, 45–46, 52.

  239. Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Life and Selected Writings, 63.

  240. Thomas Jefferson, The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson: A Repository of His Ideas on Government, ed. Gilbert Chinard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1926), 76.

  241. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:548.

  242. Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Life and Selected Writings, 46.

  243. Quoted in Ragosta, Wellspring of Liberty, 12.

  244. Ibid., 142–60.

  245. “Chesterfield Assembly, 1785,” Religious Petitions Virginia, Library of Congress.

  7. BEYOND TOLERATION: JOHN LELAND, BAPTIST ADVOCATE FOR THE RIGHTS OF MUSLIMS, 1776–1841

  1. The chapter epigraph is drawn from John Leland, “Virginia Chronicle,” 1790, in The Writings of the Late Elder John Leland, Including Some Events in His Life, Written by Himself, ed. L. F. Greene (New York: G. W. Wood, 1845), 118. John Leland’s works in this edition have recently been republished in an exact reproduction in the public domain; see John Leland, The Writings of the Late Elder John Leland, Including Some Events in His Life, Written by Himself, ed. L. F. Greene (LaVergne, TN: Nabu Public Domain Reprints, 2011). Hereafter cited as Writings. The most thorough view of John Leland’s life remains L. H. Butterfield, “Elder John Leland, Jeffersonian Itinerant,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 62, no. 2 (1952): 155–242. This has been republished as a separate volume: L. H. Butterfield, Elder John Leland: Jeffersonian Itinerant (New York: Arno, 1980). My references to Butterfield’s article are as Butterfield, “John Leland.”

  Leland has figured lately in popular histories of church-state relations, with special appearances in the presentation of a huge cheese to Jefferson in Washington, D.C.; see Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America (New York: Random House, 2008), ix–x, 125–26, 134, 171–73. The alliance between Leland and Jefferson is emphasized by Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 4–6, 8. However, this chapter clearly refutes Kidd’s assertion that the evangelical Baptist John Leland “united around public religious principles … to articulate the basis of American rights”; see Kidd, God of Liberty, 253–54. Kidd’s views of Leland in relation to Islam in his earlier work advance only the Baptist’s condemnation of the Prophet, without mentioning a single instance of his insistence on religious pluralism, specifically his advocacy for the rights of Muslims in his vision of the new nation; see Thomas S. Kidd, “ ‘Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?’ Early American Uses of Islam,” Church History 72, no. 4 (December 2003): 787, and 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), 18.

  Debates about Leland’s standing among Baptists continue; see Richard Curry Huff, “How High the ‘Wall’? A Comparison of the Church-State Separation Positions of Thomas Jefferson and John Leland” (PhD diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 2003), 320–22, 412–24. Huff criticizes Leland as a theological problem for Baptists because of his absolute separation of all religion from government—in contrast to what he perceives as Jefferson’s more “godly” vision of the country. In contrast, some contemporary Baptists laud Leland’s insistence on absolute separation of religion from the state as a definitive Baptist principle; see William R. Estep, Revolution Within the Revolution: The First Amendment in Historical Context,
1612–1789 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1990), xi, xvii, 159–75. The local impact of John Leland in Virginia and his absorption of church-state separation there has been studied by Andrew M. Manis, “Regionalism and Baptist Perspectives on Separation of Church and State,” American Baptist Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1983): 218. Parallels with Jefferson and Madison’s political thought have been considered by Martha Eleam Boland, “Render unto Caesar: The Political Thought of John Leland” (PhD diss., New Orleans Baptist Seminary, 1998), 86, 139–47.

  2. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 157.

  3. Ibid.; Huff, “How High the ‘Wall’?,” 274–394; Boland, “Render unto Caesar,” 84–148.

  4. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 157; William G. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1883: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 2:933.

  5. Quoted in Thomas E. Buckley, Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776–1787 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), 18.

  6. The point is made by Butterfield, “John Leland,” 174, and Buckley, Church and State, 18.

  7. Leland, Writings, 188.

  8. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 2:933.

  9. Huff, “How High the ‘Wall’?,” 5, 389–415.

  10. Leland, Writings, 107; McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 931. Leland’s quotation clearly undermines any support by him for “religion in public life”; see Kidd, God of Liberty, 254. John A. Ragosta, Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia’s Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 12, 137–38, 150, places Leland directly within the movement of Virginia dissenters who wished not for a Christian nation but for absolute separation of religion from government.

  11. Leland, Writings, 279.

  12. Ibid., 278.

  13. Ibid., 410. He wrote about this in 1810.

  14. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 160. The sermons were by Philip Doddridge, Rise and Progress of the Soul, a sixth edition published in Boston in 1749.

  15. Leland, Writings, 10. Leland recalled that his local minister told his father to send him to college to become a minister, while the doctor “was equally solicitous to make me a physician,” and his own inclination was “to be a lawyer.” However, his father refused all these possibilities because, Leland said, he “designed me to live with him, to support his declining years.”

  16. Quoted in Butterfield, “John Leland,” 164.

  17. Thomas Helwys, The Mistery of Iniquity (London: Kingsgate Press, 1935), 69; Estep, Revolution, 50–53.

  18. Quoted from “A Brief Confession or Declaration of Faith” (London, 1660), in Edward Bean Underhill, ed., Confessions of Faith, and other Public Documents Illustrative of the History of the Baptist Churches of England in the Seventeenth Century (London: Haddon Brothers, 1854), 118.

  19. Leland, Writings, 241; Huff, “How High the ‘Wall’?,” 259. Leland doubtless read his contemporary Isaac Backus’s History of the Baptists in New England, which described Roger Williams’s travails, but Backus stopped short of repeating Williams’s universal claims for the religious freedom and civil protection of Muslims and Jews in his ideal state.

  20. Leland, Writings, 241.

  21. McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 2:929.

  22. Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, ed. Samuel L. Caldwell, vol. 3 of The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 142.

  23. In two instances, Leland did refer to “Mahometans,” but the majority of his references are to “Turks.”

  24. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 172–73; Buckley, Church and State, 12–16. For the role of Baptists in pre-Revolutionary Virginia, see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 161–80.

  25. Leland, Writings, 27; Ragosta, Wellspring of Liberty, 29.

  26. Leland, Writings, 255; Kidd, God of Liberty, 157.

  27. James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, ed. Robert A. Rutland and William M. E. Rachal et al., 17 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 8:298–304. Hereafter cited as Papers of James Madison.

  28. “From Richard Henry Lee to James Madison,” November 26, 1784, Papers of James Madison, 8:149; Buckley, Church and State, 101–2, 116, 174.

  29. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 181; Robert B. Semple, A History of the Rise and Progress of Baptists in Virginia (Philadelphia: American Baptist Society, 1894), 207.

  30. “James Gordon, Jr., to James Madison,” February 17, 1788, Papers of James Madison, 8:516.

  31. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 169.

  32. Leland, Writings, 27, 38; Huff, “How High the ‘Wall’?,” 237–73.

  33. Papers of James Madison, 8:516.

  34. “Joseph Spencer to James Madison,” February 28, 1788, Papers of James Madison, 2:541. Leland’s comments, and an enclosure to Madison, are reprinted in Documentary History of the Constitution and the United States, 1786–1870, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Department of State, 1905), 4:526–29. The relationship between Leland and Madison, with a focus on Leland “as a Baptist preacher, not just a private citizen,” is recounted in detail by Mark S. Scarberry, “John Leland and James Madison: Religious Influence on the Ratification of the Constitution and on the Proposal of the Bill of Rights,” Penn State Law Review 113, no. 3 (April 2009): 733–800, quote on 797.

  35. Robert M. Calhoon, “John Leland,” in American National Biography, ed. John Garraty and Mark Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 13:466.

  36. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 188–92. Scarberry is more positive about the meeting than Butterfield: “John Leland and James Madison,” 769–75; Kidd, God of Liberty, 222–24. The plaque is near Orange, Virginia, at the intersection of Highway 20 and Clifton Road (County Route 628) in Leland-Madison Monumental Park. The inscription reads, “Courageous leader of the Baptist Doctrine. Ardent advocate of the principles of democracy. Vindicator of separation of church and state.” http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?MarkerID=4697.

  37. “To James Madison, Sr., from James Madison,” July 1, 1788, Papers of James Madison, 11:185.

  38. “Madison’s Election to the First Federal Congress, Editorial Note,” October 1788–February 1789, Papers of James Madison, 11:302–4; Kidd, God of Liberty, 221–23; Ragosta, Wellspring of Liberty, 167–68.

  39. “John Leland to James Madison,” February 15, 1789, Papers of James Madison, 11:442–43.

  40. Leland, Writings, 53.

  41. George Washington, Writings of George Washington, ed. Jared Sparks (Boston: Ferdinand Andrews, 1840), 12:155.

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

  43. Leland, Writings, 10. For a profile of the Baptists of Leland’s native Worcester County, see John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713–1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 61, 158–72.

  44. Ibid., 18.

  45. John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1850–56), 2:397–400; Butterfield, “John Leland,” 165–67.

  46. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 165.

  47. Ibid., 165–67; McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1:512–30.

  48. Adams, Works, 2:398.

  49. Ibid., 2:399.

  50. Butterfield, “John Leland,” 202–3.

  51. M. Louise Greene, The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 372–74; Huff, “How High the ‘Wall’?,” 331–56.

  52. Leland, Writings, 190.

  53. Ibid., 177–92; Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Ser
mons of the American Founding Era, 1730–1805 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 1080; Greene, Religious Liberty, 374–77.

  54. Leland, Writings, 187.

  55. Ibid., 189.

  56. Ibid., 118.

  57. Ibid., 187.

  58. Ibid.; Kidd, “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?,” 787; Kidd, American Christians and Islam, 18.

  59. Leland, Writings, 179.

  60. Ibid.

  61. Ibid., 181.

  62. Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 40 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 2:546–47. Hereafter cited as Papers of Thomas Jefferson.

  63. Papers of James Madison, 8:299.

  64. Leland, Writings, 181.

  65. John Locke, Epistola de Tolerantia: A Letter on Toleration, ed. Raymond Klibansky, trans. J. W. Gough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 91.

  66. Papers of James Madison, 8:301.

  67. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 255.

  68. Leland, Writings, 182.

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

  70. Leland, Writings, 182.

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

  72. Leland, Writings, 184.

  73. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 2:545–46.

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

  75. Leland, Writings, 184. Leland is accused of “plagiarism” by Edwin Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 202–3: In contrast, “When Jefferson, quoting from John Leland …” Actually, the reverse is true; see Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 281; Kidd, God of Liberty, 176–77; Ragosta, Wellspring of Liberty, 146.

  76. Leland, Writings, 185.

  77. Ibid., 191.