Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (15 page)

In 1685, as Locke began
A Letter Concerning Toleration
, the issue of religious toleration continued as a pressing public concern.
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He became close friends with men of various Christian denominations deemed heretical, and listened to their arguments in favor of toleration.
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The same year, Locke watched as French Protestants, or Huguenots, fled their country for Holland after King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had previously provided them some protection from Catholic persecution.
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Important works on toleration by Huguenot refugees, such as
Pierre Bayle (d. 1706), with whom Locke met in 1687 or 1688, also came to his attention.
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While preserving Bagshaw’s 1660 justification for the toleration of Muslims and Jews, Locke also noted Bayle’s assertion that “Pagans, Jews and Turks have a right to it,” meaning religious toleration, a statement that predated that of Locke, who developed his own more expansive plea to include Christian dissenters and non-Christians.
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Accepting that a handful of Muslims were probably already lodged
in London for diplomatic or trade purposes, Locke did not consider the practice of Islam a barrier to residence or rights in his country.
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Under English law, “aliens” including Muslims were divided into “friends” and “enemies,”
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but a mid-seventeenth-century ruling designated resident Muslims as friends, thus obviating any “enmity” toward “Turks” or “Infidels.”
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But while religious persecution of Muslims was forbidden, as aliens they were still denied full citizenship.
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Locke’s advocacy of equal “civil rights” for Muslims rejected their designation as “denizens,” a subcategory for non-English and non-Christian alien
residents.
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With one key qualification, Locke proposed that Muslims be granted the same legal rights to religious toleration and, presumably, citizenship that he also insisted upon for Christian dissenters.

Locke’s proposal carefully disqualified all those who would hold primary allegiance to “another Prince,” a foreign Muslim ruler, and would thus be deemed enemy aliens in England.
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In particular, Locke worried about adherence to Islamic law as a sign of allegiance to the Ottoman sultan, though as
John Marshall suggests in his magisterial study of Locke, his concerns would have included only a “small” number of Muslims.
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Locke wrote:

Locke revealed some basic misconceptions by referring to the mufti of Constantinople. He probably meant instead the position of
shaykh al-Islam
, also known as the
chief mufti of Istanbul, whose role in the Ottoman Empire had evolved by the seventeenth century to allow him to render verdicts in consultation with the sultan on policy issues, such as war and peace.
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But far from being subject to the sultan, this legal expert often was consulted about the ruler’s depositions. In any case, the function of the chief mufti was not to demand religious and political allegiance from Muslims outside the Ottoman sphere.
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Nor would all Muslims with dealings in England in the seventeenth century owe allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. Moroccans, for example, had first established trade relations with England under Ahmad al-Mansur (d. 1603), who was never subject to the Ottomans; neither were those Moroccan rulers who founded the Alawi dynasty in 1664.
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As for rulers in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, while they had acknowledged Ottoman rule in the sixteenth century, during the seventeenth century as they became more autonomous, that allegiance became increasingly nominal.

Whether Muslims could properly reside outside Muslim lands had
been vigorously debated by Islamic legal scholars, beginning in the eighth century. Although theoretically the world might be divided between the land of Islam (where the Sharia, or Islamic law, prevailed) and the land of war or unbelief, in practice Muslim minorities continued to live in non-Muslim territory for a variety of historical reasons. Among the four schools of Sunni law, no consensus on the issue was reached between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries.
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The exception to this diversity of legal opinion was the Maliki school, which predominated in North Africa, where memories of warfare with Catholic Spain and Portugal and the expulsion of Muslims in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remained fresh, resulting in doctrinaire insistence on residence only in Islamic lands, though exceptions were made for specific contexts of war or peace, and living in a non-Muslim country for the purpose of trade, for example, was allowed.
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The Islamic judgment about residing outside of Islamic dominion often hinged on whether Muslims could safely practice their faith, something that Locke would guarantee later in his treatise.
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The question divided Sunni and Shi‘i Muslim jurists.
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Locke might have been interested to know, although he probably did not, that Sunni scholars presumed that non-Muslim authorities would offer an
aman
, or “safe conduct” guarantee, to a Muslim resident.
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As part of what would have been deemed reciprocity for tolerance of Christians in Islamic realms, it was generally accepted that a Muslim living outside of the Islamic world “may not commit acts of treachery, betrayal, deceit or fraud, and may not violate the honor or property of non-Muslims.”
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By this arrangement, Muslims could abide by the local Christian ruler’s authority in civil if not religious matters. Here in essence is exactly what Locke would demand as a precondition for Muslim citizenship and elevation from resident alien status: “But those whose Doctrine is peaceable, and whose Manners are pure and blameless, ought to be on equal Terms with their Fellow-Subjects.”
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Locke’s concern about the divided allegiance of Muslims in England is perhaps a reflection of his more immediate anxieties about Catholics, whom he distrusted for their allegiance to the pope.
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By contrast, these concerns were based on history as well as paranoia. (Accusations in 1678 of a “Popish Plot” to assassinate the king and institute Catholicism, though spurious, were not forgotten.) There was no real parallel between a Catholic’s obedience to the pope and the individual Muslim’s
relationship to the Ottoman sultan. Locke would eventually determine that Catholics who disavowed allegiance to the pope should also qualify for full civil rights, but he would remain wary of them.
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Catholics would continue to represent an imminent rather than a theoretical threat to Anglican Protestant government.

In Locke’s 1689
A Letter Concerning Toleration
his pivotal statement about Muslim civil rights followed immediately after his defense of Christian dissenters of various sects. Among them,
Socinians (later Unitarians) were included in his original Latin text published in Holland, but not the English translation of the same year.
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Socinians were of course also present in England, and their views were well known to Locke. He certainly would have approved the first, anonymous edition of the English translation. Locke’s first English translator,
William Popple, a supporter of religious toleration, was an avowed Socinian. Popple may have omitted Socinians knowing that they (and he) would continue to be denied religious and political rights because of their rejection of the Trinity, even after the 1689 Act of Toleration granting protection to all Protestants who embraced the triune divinity.
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Popple doubtless appreciated how dangerous the mention of his own outlawed beliefs remained. Also excluded in the act were Roman Catholics, atheists, and, implicitly, Muslims and Jews. The English Socinian’s translation of Locke was destined for enormous popularity and longevity on both sides of the Atlantic:

It was at this critical juncture in his defense of Christian dissenters in England, that Locke now demanded the same civil equality
for Muslims and Jews:
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Inverting the logic of Bagshaw’s 1660 precedent, which argued for extending Muslim and Jewish prerogatives to Christian dissenters, Locke now argued that if all Christians deserved civil rights, so too did non-Christians, a case he made only
after
his earlier qualification about the potential for Muslim foreign loyalties. There is a further emendation
of Locke’s original Latin text: Popple’s addition of the phrase “Civil Rights.” A more literal translation of Locke’s Latin would read “neither Pagan nor Mahometan nor Jew should be excluded from the commonwealth because of his religion.”
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But Locke approved this change and went on to defend the concept of “civil rights” for Muslims and Jews in three subsequent English letters.
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Locke’s was not “the first favorable pronouncement about the status of Muslims in Christian England”—Helwys and Williams had preceded him in that—but it was the earliest, most resonant attempt to make the case as part of a political rather than purely religious argument.
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Nevertheless, Locke’s ultimate argument that Muslims ought not to be excluded from “the civil rights of the commonwealth” still rested on his assertion, “The Gospel commands no such thing.” And so Locke promoted a reasoned, Christian argument for the toleration of non-Christians in “a Christian Commonwealth.”
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Locke’s toleration, after all, was also motivated by a desire to spread Protestant Christianity, his toleration being a form of mission, one that reached out not only to Jews and Muslims but also to “pagan” Native Americans and African slaves throughout the colonial Americas, specifically in seventeenth-century Virginia and the Carolinas.
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(He could not have known that some of those African slaves were not actually pagans, meaning polytheists, but Muslims from West Africa.)

In 1689, Locke also made a break with European precedents that linked Christian heretics to Muslims and Jews. He declared both Islam and Judaism to be unique religions, not heresies. This critical distinction would save Muslims and Jews from persecution in England by Anglican authorities as heretics, as well as safeguarding former Christians, including the few English seafarers who, captured by North African pirates, had converted to Islam in order to gain their freedom:
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Despite this seeming equanimity, the distinction makes clear enough that Locke held no high opinion of Islam and indeed his understanding of the faith was significantly errant.
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In 1690, a year after the appearance of
A Letter Concerning Toleration
in London, Locke was attacked in print by Jonas
Proast, an Anglican clergyman of All Souls College, Oxford.
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(Locke’s authorship, while officially anonymous, quickly became known.) Proast argued that although extreme violence should be avoided, the use of “moderate” force and other penalties were acceptable in the treatment of Muslims, Jews, and Christian dissenters.
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Locke responded quickly in his
Second Letter on Toleration
, attempting to refute Proast’s rejection of the inclusion of Muslims and Jews as citizens. In defense of Muslim and Jewish civil rights, Locke would never waver, answering with “the largeness of the toleration” he proposed.
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While allowing that “we pray every day for their conversion,” he reaffirmed that this end would not be achieved by their exclusion, either by “driving them” away or “persecuting them when they are among us.” For the first time, Locke defined toleration as the opposite of religious persecution: “Force, you allow, is improper to convert men to any religion. Toleration is but the removing of that force.”
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Locke continued this line of argument on legal grounds in his
Third Letter
in 1692:
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