Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (17 page)

The title page of Jefferson’s Qur’an, now in the Library of Congress. (
illustration credit 3.2
)

In February 1770, five years after his purchase of the Qur’an, Thomas Jefferson wrote his friend John Page with calamitous news: “My late loss may perhaps have reached you by this time, I mean the loss of my mother’s house by fire, and in it, of every paper I had in the world, and almost every book.”
⁶
(The
Virginia Gazette
would also confirm that Jefferson “lost all his furniture, a valuable collection of books, and what is perhaps worse, his papers.”)
⁷
A true bibliophile, Jefferson lamented, “Would to God it had been the money; then had it never cost me a sigh!”
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What was worse, the loss “fell principally” on his “books of Common Law, of which [he had] but one left, at that time lent out.”
⁹
The answers to the questions of how many and which books were lost remain elusive, but for the lawyer-in-training, the books were all critical.
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There would have been additional losses too, as recorded purchases from the accounts of the
Virginia Gazette
attest, including the Acts of Parliament and British Common and Chancery law, and the works of Machiavelli and Milton.
¹¹
All these were purchased around the same time he acquired the Qur’an.

When he bought the Qur’an in 1765, Jefferson was an impassioned law student engaged in criticizing the recently passed British Stamp Act.
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The most immediate reason for wishing to study the Qur’an would have been to gain an insight into Islamic law and religion.
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These may have interested him per se—Jefferson had an immense curiosity and a cosmopolitan outlook—but he may have had a more immediate purpose, for in seeking legal precedents for local Virginia cases, he would often look to other cultures around the world.

After the fire, Jefferson made no mention of the fate of the Qur’an he had purchased five years earlier. Did it perish in the flames, or was it miraculously spared? We will never know. During the mid-1760s, Jefferson had taken detailed notes on the texts he’d read with particular interest; these notes too, however, were lost in the fire at Shadwell, his mother’s house. But if Jefferson’s Qur’an was destroyed in 1770, then what are we to make of the two volumes of Sale’s Qur’an he initialed, now at the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.?
¹⁴

There are two possibilities: The original Qur’an either survived the fire, or it was later replaced with another copy of the same edition.
¹⁵
If Jefferson did indeed buy the Qur’an twice, it would be an extraordinary testament to his desire to understand Islam. But even if he purchased
the text only once, Jefferson remains unique among America’s Founders in his desire to understand Islam on its own terms, looking directly to its most sacred source. In fact, his purchase of the Qur’an marked only the beginning of his study of Islam. After the 1770 fire, as he immediately began to reconstruct his lost library, Jefferson undertook to acquire numerous volumes about Middle Eastern languages,
¹⁶
history, and travel, and he continued doing so for the rest of his life.
¹⁷

This chapter traces how
Sale’s
introduction to the Qur’an may have influenced Jefferson’s thoughts on Islam, in particular his notes on English law and Islam in the decade following his acquisition of the Islamic sacred text. In 1776, as a Virginia legislator, he would resort to anti-Islamic rhetoric in his effort to end the establishment of Anglicanism as the state religion. His notes from the same year, however, reveal that Locke’s
A Letter Concerning Toleration
prompted his interest in the rights of Muslims.

George Sale (c. 1696–1736), a lawyer and an Anglican, described the Prophet Muhammad on the first page of his translation as “the legislator of the Arabs,” words that would have appealed to Jefferson the lawyer.
¹⁸
Since the twelfth century, Christian translators of the Qur’an had commonly defined the text not as divine revelation but as a repository of Islamic law.
Robert Ketton’s first Latin translation in 1143 was entitled
Lex Saracenorum
, or
Law of the
Saracens
.
¹⁹
The translations from the twelfth to the eighteenth century served primarily Christian polemics rather than scholarly interest in the accurate representation of Islamic beliefs.
²⁰

Ketton’s translation of the Qur’an in the twelfth century resulted from an attempt to convert Muslims, a strategy conceived after the failure of
the Crusades.
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Knowing one’s enemy, however, was a tricky business for Christian translators, who now sought to win by superiority of reason rather than force.
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They thus often willfully distorted key aspects of the Qur’an, with the political aim of representing Islam as a heresy and the Prophet as an impostor.

Sale’s translation was commissioned by the
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, a British Anglican Protestant group dedicated to “missionary and educational goals.”
²³
As the group also had an anti-Catholic bent,
²⁴
Sale inextricably linked Catholicism with Islam, a
connection previously expounded in the Whig treatise
Cato’s Letters
.
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Sale’s immediate goal was to remind his Christian readers that Islam was a false religion, but he also intended his work to help convert Muslims to Protestant Christianity, which, like preceding translators of the Qur’an, Sale believed to be their only hope of salvation.
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But Sale also seemed determined to present his translation as a rigorously scholarly work, referring to it as “an impartial version.”
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He acknowledged a debt to earlier Christian translations, but did not neglect to criticize their mistakes. Having, for instance, made a careful study of the seventeenth-century Latin translation by the Catholic priest
Ludovico Maracci (d. 1700), who worked from several manuscripts in the Vatican,
²⁸
Sale rejected many of what he termed Maracci’s “impertinent” interpretations, claiming that “Protestants alone are able to attack the Koran with success.”
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The first English translation of the Qur’an was published almost a century before Sale’s appeared in 1734.
Alexander Ross’s dubious effort of 1649 was translated not from the original Arabic but from a French edition published two years earlier by the diplomat André du Ryer.
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And yet Ross’s work was deemed explosive: Even before publication, his publisher was imprisoned and all copies were seized. After Ross’s testimony at a hearing before the Council of State, the charges were dropped. When the book was finally published on May 7, 1649,
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a cautionary disclaimer was added. The Qur’an, it declared, may be “dangerous and scandalous” to a few weak Christians, but true believers would not be “swayed from their faith.”
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Ross’s translation was also the first to cross the Atlantic, read by colonists such as Cotton Mather, who branded the Prophet the Antichrist.
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When Sale’s Qur’an appeared in the American colonies, it was deemed the most informative and accurate translation then available, which indeed it was, for Sale had attempted to correct some of the most egregious distortions about Islam, out of a sincere desire for accuracy.
³⁴
Sale also critiqued Ross’s translation as “utterly unacquainted with the Arabic, and no great matter of French,” filled with “fresh mistakes.”
³⁵
(Not that Sale was immune to mistakes, as when he identified the tribe of Khazraj in Medina as Jewish rather than Arab.)
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Sale appended footnotes to earlier translations of the Qur’an, which he’d read closely, and referred to Muslim as well as Christian commentaries on the sacred text.
³⁷
He’d studied the prophetic precedents, or
hadith
, compiled by the Sunni scholar al-Bukhari (d. 870), as well
as the medieval Qur’anic commentary, or
tafsir
, of al-Zamakhshari (d. 1144). Sale also drew from the Latin translations of Islamic history by Dr. Edward Pococke.
³⁸

An enormous success throughout Europe, Sale’s translation was reprinted four times during the eighteenth century, and was translated into German, French, Russian, and Dutch.
³⁹
It would remain the best available English version of the Qur’an into the nineteenth century.
⁴⁰

Voltaire, who owned Sale’s Qur’an and praised it as “wise and judicious,” would claim that the translator had spent twenty-five years in Arabia to complete the work.
⁴¹
In fact, Sale had never left England, and learned Arabic from two Arab Christians in London, Salomon Negri of Damascus and Carolus Dadichi of Aleppo. The two had themselves already produced an
Arabic translation of the New Testament, intended for distribution to the Arab Christian communities along the Mediterranean, in the parts of the Ottoman Empire within reach of the British Levant Company—and Anglican attempts at the conversion of indigenous Christians there.
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The first volume of Sale’s 1764 edition contained a two-hundred-page “Preliminary Discourse” on the history of Islam. What Jefferson may have learned from the “Preliminary Discourse” remains critical because Sale, despite his missionary objectives, had collected a substantial amount of relevant, accurate information on Islamic history, ritual practice, and law. Sale sought to approach the conversion of Muslims in much the same manner as that of the Jews: with well-informed reason. To that end, he proposed four rules for the mission that was presumably to take place in the Middle East rather than in London. First, he argued that one must “avoid compulsion,” with a grudging admission that Islamic political dominance made the point moot anyway: “though it [compulsion] be not in our power to employ at present, I hope will not be made use of when it is.”
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Sale did not mention that the Qur’an states categorically that “there is no compulsion in religion” (Qur’an 2:256), substituting the word “violence” in his translation of the verse: “Let there be no violence in religion.” In a footnote, however, Sale adds incorrectly that this principle lasted only during the Prophet’s lifetime, when he protected Medinan pagans and Jews from forced conversion to Islam.
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Secondly, Sale urged would-be missionaries to “avoid arguments against common sense,” adding that Muslims particularly resisted “worshipping
images,” and “the doctrine of transubstantiation,” or the mystical transformation of the host into the flesh and blood of Jesus. Thirdly, he urged that “ill words” should be avoided with Muslims.
⁴⁵
Finally, he directed Christian missionaries “not to quit any article of the Christian faith to gain” the conversion of the Muslims.
⁴⁶
In this vein he criticized the Unitarians, previously known as Socinians, who had emphasized Islam and Christianity’s essential similarity as monotheisms in their heretical denial of Jesus’s divinity and the Trinity:
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“it is absolutely necessary to undeceive those who, from the ignorant or unfair translations which have appeared, have entertained too favorable an opinion of the original, and also to enable us effectually to expose the impostures.”
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Sale, then, was as determined to save the Unitarians from being misled by the “ignorant” translations casting Islam in a positive light as he was to redeem Islam’s own followers.
⁴⁹

Nevertheless, under the inevitable influence of treatises by Christian dissenters, Deists, and Unitarians, who endorsed Islam as a religion and as a philosophy,
⁵⁰
Sale’s treatment of the Prophet and Islam was ultimately more sympathetic than those of previous European translators, and he himself would eventually suffer from charges of pro-Islamic bias.
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Even while condemning the heresy of such heterodox sects and their view of Islam as an uncorrupted monotheism, Sale was perhaps softened a bit, at least on the margins, by familiarity with their work. Consider their emphasis on
Muhammad’s role as a legislator, which had gathered traction among some Anglicans as well as Christian dissenters since the seventeenth century.
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Sale echoes their speculation as to whether Muhammad “deserves not equal respect, though not with Moses or Jesus Christ, whose laws came really from heaven, yet with Minos or Numa,”
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who were legislators in ancient Greece and Rome.
⁵⁴

Sale, for example, also criticizes
Prideaux, the Anglican dean of Norwich and the author of
The True Nature of Imposture
(1697), the anti-Islamic and anti-Deist polemic immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic.
⁵⁵
Conceding that Prideaux “has given the most probable account” of the Prophet as an impostor, Sale deftly attacks his sources as “Christian writers, who generally mix such ridiculous fables with what they deliver, that they deserve not much credit.”
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He also allows that Muhammad “gave the Arabs the best religion he could, as well as the best laws.”
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Apart from Henry Stubbe’s unpublished vindication of Islam of 1671, Sale’s objectivity is unexampled in his time,
reflecting his preoccupation with fairness.
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He also avoids “all reproachful language,” a habit he claims as a rule in his personal moral code.
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Sale explained, “I have not, in speaking of Mohammed or his Koran, allowed myself to use those opprobrious appellations, and unmannerly expressions, which seem to be the strongest arguments of several who have written against them.”
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