Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (13 page)

In Williams’s ideal, religiously plural society, passengers might even refuse to come to prayers.
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In a swipe at Puritan Massachusetts, he described his model as “the true picture of a commonwealth,” a society whose “weal and woe” is common to all.

In reality, no Muslims, Jews, or Catholics applied to join Williams’s experiment in religious liberty and pluralism. In 1656 or 1658, a few Jews from Spain and Portugal arrived in Newport, only to leave before a second group arrived in 1678.
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But they lived outside of Williams’s Providence jurisdiction. There is thus no way to know whether the political equality for those non-Christians who figured so consistently in his writings ever would have worked in practice.
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Still, it seems likely that at the very least he would have offered the adherents of Islam safe harbor in Providence. He had despised, debated, and vilified the beliefs of the Quakers by comparing them to Muslims, and yet in practice, Williams had continued to offer Quakers a protected place in his colony.

Two years after Williams framed his vision of a multireligious ship of state, thirty-one residents of the Dutch territory of Flushing, in New Amsterdam (now Long Island, New York), would advocate a similar tolerated protection for both Christians and non-Christians. They had never read Roger Williams, but as Williams himself was well aware, the Dutch had their own history of religious toleration. Freedom of conscience had been guaranteed by Article 13 of the Dutch Union of Utrecht in 1579.
¹⁴⁴
Yet how applicable was this precedent across the Atlantic? That would become clear when the principle of freedom of conscience was threatened in 1657.

Like the Puritans of Massachusetts, Dutch authorities feared the spread of Protestant sects outside their tradition, most particularly Baptists and Quakers.
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Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director-general of the territory, “commanded” that “no conventicles or meetings shall be kept in this Province” other than those of the Dutch Reformed Church.
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By Dutch law, a “conventicle” was defined as a public gathering for worship that included many families, and it was a legal practice for the state’s Dutch Reformed Church, but not for other religions in Holland.
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While not abrogating the guarantee of liberty of conscience, Stuyvesant did threaten to curtail freedom of public worship for those outside the state church. But this distinction between individual religious belief and public practice was not acceptable to some in Stuyvesant’s colony.
¹⁴⁸

Thirty-one residents of Flushing and Jamaica signed what would later be known as the
Flushing Remonstrance, astutely characterized by Neil Kamil as “seventeenth-century ‘multiculturalism’ … extending even to the Jews and Islam.”
¹⁴⁹
The signatories charged Stuyvesant with interfering in matters of conscience and refused to participate in what they deemed the persecution of Quakers and Baptists. As an alternative, they promoted a form of “Christian
inclusiveness
,” which now had precedents in Rhode Island, England, and the European continent:
¹⁵⁰

In addition to proclaiming the individuality of faith, the signatories made the point that the state was without power to mediate for human salvation: “who shall pleade for us in the case of Conscience betwixt god and our owne soules the power of this world can neither attack us neither excuse us for if god justifye who can Condemn and if god Condemn there is none can justifye.”
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Referring to the standard in their native Holland for a freedom of conscience that included Muslims (termed “Turkes and Egiptians”) and Jews, they asserted:

Such protestations, however, did not stop Director-General Stuyvesant from arresting a notable Quaker named
John Bowne, imprisoning him, and, ultimately, banishing him from Dutch territory, just as he would arrest and banish
Tobias Feake, the first to sign the Remonstrance.
¹⁵⁴

In 1663, Roger Williams was forced by competing claims to apply for a new charter for his Providence colony, finally receiving one from Charles II (r. 1660–85). In it the king confirmed the individual’s right to freedom of religious practice:

Williams joyfully declared, “Our Charter excels all in New England or the world as to the souls of men.”
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An exact echo of this promise of freedom of conscience “in matters of religious concernment” would appear in 1664 in New Jersey’s charter and again in 1665 in the charter for the two Carolinas.
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But Williams rejoiced too soon. His treatises on religious persecution failed to persuade the English Parliament to extend his vision of toleration to Muslims or Jews.
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Failing to become a legal precedent, his precocious idea about extending liberty of conscience to Muslims would have no direct influence on Thomas Jefferson or other pivotal figures of the American Revolutionary era more than one hundred years later.
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Even his books, which remained rare in Massachusetts, would not be accessible to most Americans. Not until the nineteenth century would any work of his be republished in the United States.
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Nevertheless, many of Williams’s key ideas appear to resurface in John Locke’s pivotal
A Letter Concerning Toleration
(1689), though a direct connection is difficult to prove.
¹⁶¹
Locke (1632–1704) was only twelve when Roger Williams’s
Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution for Cause of Conscience
was published in London, but forty-five years later he would reach remarkably similar conclusions concerning the toleration of Muslims.
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Locke, a great borrower, never credited Roger Williams as a source, possibly because he had other, closer sources of inspiration.
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And while both men supported the religious liberty of Muslims and their civil toleration in a Christian polity, they approached the issue differently.
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In his letter, Locke emphasized a new theory of inalienable natural rights, derived from reason, in contrast to Williams’s exclusively theological claim.
¹⁶⁵
Locke’s ideas about toleration evolved over time; indeed, they reversed direction from intolerance early in his career toward toleration as a state policy in his later thought. His references to Muslims, however, remained constant, despite his change of mind on the broader, more pressing issue of the toleration of Christian heretics, or dissenters, from the Anglican Church. As with Williams, his views would force him to write about religious toleration in exile. Ultimately, Locke would first promote “civil rights” for Muslims, moving beyond Williams, but he would not divorce this idea completely from the precedents of the Gospels. He maintained that it was a Christian duty to tolerate most others in a predominantly Anglican Protestant state.
¹⁶⁶

In England, “the Age of Arabick,” to use G. A. Russell’s evocative phrase, began during John Locke’s lifetime as a thinker and writer,
and Locke’s education included exposure to Arabic and Islam as well as scholars of Islamic history.
¹⁶⁷
A chair in Arabic was established at
Oxford University in 1636, when Locke was four years old.
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Underlying this new interest in the language was a combination of theological, diplomatic, and commercial developments. Protestants who wished to study the Hebrew Bible found Arabic, also a Semitic language, philologically helpful. In 1580 Elizabeth I had licensed the Turkey Company, which a decade later became the Levant Company, to do business in the Ottoman Empire.
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More immediate contacts resulted from the rise of North African pirates in the Atlantic and Mediterranean from Elizabethan times to the mid-eighteenth century. The threat to English shipping necessitated constant attempts at negotiating treaties and ransoming English captives, for which Arabic was needed.
¹⁷⁰

Locke probably first studied Arabic in 1647 at Westminster, his secondary school, where his headmaster emphasized the language, having become convinced at Oxford of its importance.
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At Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1652, while he also studied history, astronomy, and mathematics, Locke probably attended twice-weekly Hebrew and Arabic instruction,
¹⁷²
delivered by Dr.
Edward Pococke, who held the chair in both languages.
¹⁷³
While there is no evidence that he ever used the language in his research, it is known that Locke developed close friendships with those who taught and translated Arabic, and by 1660 Dr. Pococke was one of them, a professor “he most revered.”
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Locke would later also tutor Pococke’s son, also named Edward.

Under his father’s supervision, the younger Pococke translated
Hayy ibn Yaqzan
, a medieval Arabic philosophical text by Ibn Tufayl, a native of Granada, who served at the court of a North African dynasty.
¹⁷⁵
The work, known as
Philosophus Autodidactus
in Latin, was an allegorical tale whose hero, alone on an island from infancy, demonstrates that his innate powers of observation and reason are sufficient to master all knowledge.
¹⁷⁶
The Arabic title in English stresses instead the relationship of the protagonist, Hayy (“Alive”), to his mind and soul’s realization of God.

Pococke’s Latin translation created a sensation in Europe, where it was repeatedly reprinted, influencing many European thinkers, including the English Quaker George Keith.
¹⁷⁷
Translated later into English, the text inspired Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel
Robinson Crusoe
.
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By 1721, the impact of the Islamic text would be noted across the Atlantic in Massachusetts, where the Puritan
Cotton Mather took time off from his vilification of the Prophet as Antichrist to praise this medieval Muslim philosopher’s idea that reason and revelation could be reconciled in natural philosophy.
¹⁷⁹

Locke may also have drawn inspiration for empirical philosophy in his
Essay on Human Understanding
from Pococke’s translation first published in 1671, the very year in which Locke began his
Essay
, which was published in 1690.
¹⁸⁰
Indeed, Locke’s concept of the human mind as a blank slate, capable of acquiring all knowledge though empirical observation, is tantalizingly similar to ideas expressed in the medieval Islamic philosopher’s allegory, even if Locke left no direct evidence of the influence of this work on his thought.
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As to Locke’s ideas on religious toleration, those exemplified by Hayy, who refuses to use coercion to rescue others from religious error and accepts the existence of other faiths, also bear comparison.
¹⁸²
But Locke had begun to read about toleration directly more than a decade earlier in the work of the English author
Henry Stubbe.
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Locke’s first documented interest in religious toleration was prompted by a 1659 treatise by Henry Stubbe (1632–1676), a fellow student of Arabic at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford.
¹⁸⁴
Stubbe’s
An Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause, or a Discourse concerning the Rise and Extent of the Power of the Civil Magistrate in reference to Spiritual Affairs
sought to define the proper limit of political authority regarding religion and outlined a history of religious toleration. After reading the book, Locke wrote the author full of praise for the “strength and vigor” of his style, suggesting that Stubbe expand his history of toleration to include Holland, France, and Poland.
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As to Stubbe’s belief that government authorities should not meddle in religion, and that individual faith was a matter better left between the believer and God, Locke, while not explicitly disagreeing, did not share these ideas at the time.
¹⁸⁶
He did, however, warn Stubbe that toleration for Catholics was a mistake, believing their loyalty to the pope made their civil allegiance suspect. The disagreement did not prevent him from signing his letter to Stubbe, “your Admirer.”
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