Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (18 page)

And so while offering a standard disclaimer—“for how criminal soever Mohammad may have been in imposing a false religion on mankind”—Sale allows that “the praises due to [Muhammad’s] real virtues ought not to be denied him.”
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These the translator enumerates as “piety, veracity, justice, liberality, clemency, humility, and abstinence,” and especially charity and selflessness. As to the
polygamy for which the Prophet was commonly vilified, Sale asserts that it was not only “frequently practiced in Arabia” in Muhammad’s time, but was common even among the Jews of the Old Testament, implying that the Prophet might have thought the custom “the more just and reasonable, as he found [it] practiced or approved by the professors of a religion, which was confessedly of divine origin.”
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Thus Sale underscores the Prophet’s belief in God’s revelations to the Jews.

As to the standard Christian anti-Islamic polemical claim, that Islam spread by violence, Sale is again a voice of moderation. While he does not explicitly mention any instance of Islamic tolerance,
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he declares that “they are greatly deceived who imagine it [‘the law of Mohammed’] to have been propagated by the sword alone.”
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He does admit, in the sixth chapter of his “Preliminary Discourse,” that the Qur’an promised rewards in the next life for those who fought “infidels,” but he refuses to portray Islam as the only monotheism that has incited war, reminding his readers that both Jews and Christians have warred in the name of faith, never having “been ignorant of the force of enthusiastic heroism, or omitted to spirit up their respective partisans by the like arguments and promises.”
⁶⁵

Perhaps finding it easier to condemn Catholics than Christians generally, Sale cites
the Crusades in his only usage of the phrase “holy war.”
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And while pointing out that both Judaism and Islam presumed a “divine commission” to “destroy enemies of their religion,” he finds it “very strange” that Christians in particular should “teach and practice a doctrine so opposite to the temper and whole tenour of the gospel.” In conclusion, Sale allows that Christians have “shewn a more violent spirit of intolerance” than either Jews or Muslims.
⁶⁷

But more than his judicious descriptions of
Muhammad, Sale’s great accomplishment was his grasp of the most crucial parts of a central Islamic tenet:

Sale properly identifies Muhammad’s role in Islam as the seal of all previous prophets, sent by the God of Abraham to correct and renew what humans had inevitably corrupted. Like Deists and Unitarians before him,
⁶⁹
he emphasizes the connectedness in Islam of the great prophets, from Adam to Moses to Jesus and, finally, Muhammad.
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Sale furthermore acknowledges Muhammad’s acceptance of the divine authority of the Pentateuch, Psalms, and the Gospels, though wrongly pointing out that parts of the Bible, as well as the Apocrypha, appear in the Qur’an, contrary to Muslim belief in the Qur’an as God’s literal words to the Prophet.
⁷¹

Sale takes particular pains to delineate the weaknesses of Christianity in the seventh century, when the Prophet had promulgated Islam, by way of a rationale for the success of the Islamic conquests in the Christian Middle East.
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As an explanation for Christian defeat, Sale accuses Middle Eastern Christians of various heresies, including worshipping the Virgin Mary, which charge served also to implicate more generally Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, who venerate Mary. The
sanctification of Mary, he points out, led to the idea that both she and Christ were coequal with the Father, a view expressed in the fact that seventh-century Christians sometimes called Mary “the complement of the Trinity.”
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It was such error, the Anglican asserts, that enabled Muhammad to attack the Trinity itself:
⁷⁴
“And say not three” (Qur’an 4:171).
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Yet Sale does not elaborate upon the Islamic definition of Jesus as merely a prophet and a mortal, albeit one who
could perform miracles.
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Perhaps he did not intend to emphasize what Unitarians had done in England since the seventeenth century, which was to define Islam as a monotheism that rejected both the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus.

Sale does, however, expound the Islamic vision of the afterlife in detail, emphasizing its belief in a final judgment, which would determine rewards in heaven or punishment in hell. In this connection, he challenges the “falsehood of a vulgar imputation … that women have no souls, or, if they have, that they will perish, like those of brute beasts, and will not be rewarded in the next life.”
⁷⁷
By contrast, Sale allows that the Prophet “had too great a respect for the fair sex to teach such a doctrine,” and he correctly identifies several passages in the Qur’an “which affirm that women, in the next life, will not only be punished for their evil actions, but will also receive the rewards of their good deeds, as well as the men, and that in this case God will make no distinction of sexes.”
⁷⁸

It is an indication of Sale’s deep immersion in early Islamic prophetic precedents that he even appends to his Qur’an’s chapter 66, verses 11–12, a note about the two most praised women of the sacred text: Maryam, or Mary the mother of Jesus, and the pharaoh’s wife, later called Asiya. Sale does not cite the source,
al-Tabari (d. 929), a famed Sunni Qur’anic commentator, but he paraphrases his commentary: “That among men there had been many perfect, but no more than four of the other sex had attained perfection; to wit, Asia [Asiya], the wife of Pharaoh, Mary, the daughter of Imran, Khadijah the daughter of Khowailid (the prophet’s first wife,) and Fatema [Fatima] the daughter of Mohammed.”
⁷⁹

Detailing the
five pillars of Muslim belief, Sale begins with the first, known as the
shahada:
“there is no god but the true God; and that Mohammed is his apostle.” (He included “the true” in his addition to the original Arabic phrase, and he inserted the word “that” in the second clause, but both changes serve to clarify the intended meaning.) The four remaining pillars are accurately described as well: prayer five times a day (
salat
); the giving of alms annually in support of the needy in the community (
zakat
); fasting during the holy month of
Ramadan in commemoration of the beginning of the Qur’an’s revelation (
sawm
); and the pilgrimage to Mecca (
hajj
).
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Sale devotes considerable attention not only to the specifics of the pilgrimage ritual, but also the configuration of the holy city with the help of a map and a diagram of the sacred shrine of the Ka‘ba.
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In addition to describing Muslim obligations, Sale also details the
prohibitions: wine, pork, gambling, theft, murder, and adultery. He also explains more recent Islamic legal debates concerning two new products:
tobacco, from North America, and
coffee, from Yemen.
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The latter had first reached the Ottoman Empire and continued westward, with the first coffee house in England appearing around 1652; the English would come to regard the new beverage as a brew of “the Mahometan berry.”
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Sale was informed enough to understand that Muslim legal authorities did not initially agree about the lawfulness of either tobacco or coffee.

Praising the Prophet as “the lawgiver of the Arabians,” Sale devotes sections six and eight of his
introduction to a brief outline of
Islamic legal schools.
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He describes the four Sunni schools, noting that all were considered orthodox by the majority of Muslims.
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Of the famed jurist al-Shafi‘i (d. 820), Sale tells us that he “is said to have been the first who discoursed of jurisprudence, and reduced that science into a method,”
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and particularly emphasizes legal precedents concerning marriage, divorce, and inheritance for both men and women.
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Sale also defines the basic doctrinal differences between Sunni and Shi‘i Muslims, chiding the philosopher Spinoza for his ignorance of this division.
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Committed as he was to cultivating an awareness of law and culture beyond those of Britain and continental Europe,
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Jefferson probably would have approved of Sale’s introductory statement: “To be acquainted with the various laws and constitutions of civilized nations, especially those who flourish in our own time, is, perhaps, the most useful part of knowledge.”
⁹⁰
In his
Notes on Virginia
, published in 1784 in Paris and 1787 in London, he had a rather similar recommendation for students in America: “History, by apprizing them of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations.”
⁹¹

But is there evidence that Jefferson gleaned anything from Sale’s work to enhance his own knowledge and judgment? Jefferson’s voluminous writings, including legislation and correspondence from 1765 to 1776, offer virtually none. Although Jefferson owned a Qur’an, there is no indication that he scrutinized the text verse by verse, as he would the New Testament much later, to create two expurgated volumes of
Gospel selections he could accept as true, a version known after his death as the Jefferson Bible.
⁹²

The phrase “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an” implies no such interest in creating a version of the Islamic text he could approve, but it symbolizes a pivotal starting point in his lifelong exploration of Islamic belief and history. His direct references to the Qur’an, with one exception, appear neither as numerous, detailed, or systematic as those issuing from his lifelong engagement with Christianity. Indeed, Jefferson has been criticized for his “many unfair, unnuanced, and shallow caricatures” of several faiths, including Calvinism, Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam.
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Such a sweeping assertion does not reflect the totality of his views about Islam. At this juncture, suffice it to say, Jefferson did subscribe to the anti-Islamic views of most of his contemporaries, and in politics he made effective use of the rhetoric they inspired.

In the absence of any notes
of Jefferson’s on Sale’s translation of the Qur’an, we can only speculate how Sale’s views would have struck him. Although both men were lawyers and Anglicans, Jefferson privately rejected the theological doctrines that Sale unquestioningly accepted. But they had in common a rejection of coercion or violence against religious minorities on account of their faith, and this alone puts them both within an alternative strain of European thought endorsing religious toleration; Jefferson would go even further, calling for the guarantee of individual rights regardless of religion.

Sale’s attempt to present a relatively unbiased picture of the Prophet and Islam would result in the cooling of relations with his employer, the Anglican
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
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And he would suffer even more illustrious disapproval:
Edward Gibbon (d. 1794) condemns Sale in the fifth volume of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1788) as “half a Musulman” for criticizing Prideaux’s anti-Islamic invective.
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But Sale, who had died two years after the completion of the translation that would make him famous, would never read it, nor its echo in the treatment of
Royall Tyler, who, just over a decade later, would be condemned for being influenced by the “liberality of the good Sale” in his novel
The Algerine Captive.
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Anything less than a complete condemnation of Islam reliably provoked rebuke in eighteenth-century Britain and America.

Jefferson, like Sale, would not be daunted by the certain negative reception for any views sympathetic to Islam. But unlike Sale, Jefferson
had no interest in converting Muslims, seeking only their acceptance and enfranchisement, toward which end he applied his study of their faith. His earliest preserved references to Islam, however, relied
not
on Sale’s extensive overview, but instead on four European authorities on religion and law.

In the decade between 1765 and 1775, Jefferson wrote on Muslims and Islamic theology, practice, and history in four separate series of notes in his
Literary and Legal Commonplace Books
.
⁹⁷
What appears to be his earliest reference to Muslims under British law may also be his most terse—and provocative. In notes on
William Salkeld’s
Reports of Cases Adjudg’d in the Court of the King’s Bench
(1717), Jefferson duly numbered and copied out hundreds of legal decisions, with the original volume and page number, to which he added a single-line description. For case 97, Jefferson wrote, “
Turks and Infidels, perpetui inimici,” meaning “enemies for life.” But to that he added “groundless,” a word he preserved from the original English legal ruling, an older precedent dating to the rule of King Charles I (r. 1625–49).
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Under the text’s subheading “Aliens” regarding “Allegiance, Denizen,” the legal precedent refuted the idea that Muslims and “Infidels,” probably including Jews, are perpetual enemies of the English crown: