Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (2 page)

The expertise of other colleagues also deserves my thanks. Despite being on leave, Laurie Green critiqued a chapter and provided valuable comments. Mervat Hatem, who supported the project from its inception, offered key suggestions and timely encouragement that improved the structure of the book. Carel Bertram doggedly rescued the introduction and the first two chapters from their twisted incarnations as
first drafts, devoting much time to untangling organizational snafus. Kim Alidio and Elizabeth Englehardt also provided helpful suggestions at early stages of the book’s evolution. Expert advice about the Reformation Susan Boettcher generously provided, although especially in this era all errors remain mine alone.

I am grateful to Margaret Larkin, an extraordinary Arabist, for a memorable evening during which she shared her insights into the Arabic grammatical nuances in an American Muslim slave narrative. Cutting through eighteenth-century North African Arabic calligraphy, Linda Boxberger and Abraham Marcus helped me to finally see and check the original Arabic language in key American treaties. Over the years, helpful students Tommy Buckley, Reem Elghonimi, Zaid Hassan, Elizabeth Nutting, and Sharon Silzell undertook varied research tasks with care.

The College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin generously provided me with both supported leave and leave without pay to write this book. Evan Carton, director of the UT Humanities Institute in 2007, and other members of the institute offered valuable encouragement at an early stage. In 2009, the Carnegie Foundation intervened with the generous award of their Carnegie Scholarship, without which I could not possibly have finished this project. The timely intercession of Gail Davis, then History Department administrator extraordinaire, prompted me to submit the initial Carnegie Scholarship application at my university when I might otherwise have missed the deadline.

My thanks go to Columbia University Press for allowing me to draw upon an early part of
chapter 1
that first appeared in my wonderful dissertation advisor Richard W. Bulliet’s
festschrift
as “Islam on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Voltaire’s
Mahomet
Crosses the Atlantic,” in
Views from the Edge: Essays in Honor of Richard W. Bulliet
, ed. Neguin Yavari, Lawrence G. Potter, and Jean-Marc Ran Oppenheim (New York: Columbia University Press for the Middle East Institute, 2004), 245–60. Thanks also go to the editor Julia Simon for allowing me to use portions of an early version of
chapter 5
, previously published as “Could a Muslim Be President? An Eighteenth-Century Constitutional Debate,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies
39 (2006): 485–506. (The final paragraph of that article I now utterly disavow.) My thanks to the editor Gregory Starrett for allowing me to use parts of “Islam in America: Adventures in Neo-Orientalism,”
Review of Middle Eastern Studies
43 (2009): 25–35.

This has been a long, unforgiving first decade of the twenty-first century for many close friends and my immediate family. At the University of Texas, I lost two powerful female mentors. The first, Elizabeth W. Fernea, a pioneer in the study of Middle Eastern Muslim women, I remember as a rare colleague. Unfailingly thoughtful, she read a very early draft of what became one of this book’s chapters, insisting that she had faith in the project when few others did. In the History Department, Janet Meisel, a spectacular teacher and loyal friend, listened to my ideas with customary generosity. Despite years of ill health, her integrity and sense of fairness never ebbed. Both women were giants in their own way, and both I deeply miss. Their exemplary courage in the face of adversity still inspires.

I could not have completed this project, or kept my job, without the extraordinary intervention of Paula Malkey, who helped care for both of my ailing and elderly parents over a period of eight difficult years. It is no exaggeration to add that Paula, a great soul and an utterly generous Texan, saved my family and my sanity. Without her professional expertise in elder matters, energy, and sagacity, dosed always with her unfailing sense of humor, I would have been unable to teach or write during multiple periods of parental illness. After she had ministered to so many with such kindness, Paula’s sudden death in 2012 shocked me. I lost in her friendship a protean strength, a person rare and irreplaceable. She could laugh at anything except bigotry. I feel her absence profoundly because she is no longer here to be thanked for all her years of strength and support.

Near the beginning of this past decade, after years of suffering, my mother died. Two years before the end of this project, my father abruptly joined her. I mourn their loss, but know that this is a book they would have understood. My father, Israel Abraham, known to his friends in the South End of Boston as Larry, and my mother, Angelina Rita, who preferred Ann, were two people who wanted to fit into their country desperately at a time when they believed that meant choosing less obvious religiously and ethnically identified monikers. Both believed in God and found one another in spite of theological differences. In the face of prejudice, they proved always true to themselves and each other.

When I asked my mother what she thought was an individual’s most important quality, she replied instantly, “Fairness.” My father’s favorite
song, “You’ve Got to Be Taught,” from the 1949 musical
South Pacific
, lyrically proclaimed that “hate and fear” were lessons learned early about “people whose skin was a different shade and people whose eyes are oddly made.” But my father refused to “hate all the people your relatives hate.” Neither parent ever lectured, but they were both powerful teachers.

Their integrity, as much as their refusal to make religion a barrier to respect or love, shaped my world, as did their shared insistence that all people deserve to be treated equally—without exception. When I began to notice that the idea of the Muslim as citizen at the founding of the United States was as contentious a subject as the citizenship of Jews and Catholics, I felt as if my study of the Islamic world had led me to appreciate an aspect of the American past that specialists had overlooked. Thus all history is autobiography, however unintended.

As Americans, the vast majority of us might recall that our ancestors began here as outsiders, immigrants and strangers, not citizens; an even more compelling reason to remember the Golden Rule. Jefferson would do so at the end of his life, following a pronounced pattern in those who had fought before him against the persecution of Muslims.

A
T A TIME
when most Americans were uninformed, misinformed, or simply afraid of Islam, Thomas Jefferson imagined Muslims as future citizens of his new nation.
¹
His engagement with the faith began with the purchase of a Qur’an eleven years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s Qur’an survives still in the Library of Congress, serving as a symbol of his and early America’s complex relationship with Islam and its adherents. That relationship remains of signal importance to this day.

That he owned a Qur’an reveals Jefferson’s interest in the Islamic religion, but it does not explain his support for the rights of Muslims. Jefferson first read about Muslim “civil rights” in the work of one of his intellectual heroes: the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke.
²
Locke had advocated the toleration of Muslims—and Jews—following in the footsteps of a few others in Europe who had considered the matter for more than a century before him. Jefferson’s ideas about Muslim rights must be understood within this older context, a complex set of transatlantic ideas that would continue to evolve most markedly from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

Amid the interdenominational Christian violence in Europe, some
Christians, beginning in the sixteenth century, chose Muslims as the test case for the demarcation of the theoretical boundaries of their toleration for
all
believers. Because of these European precedents, Muslims also became a part of American debates about religion and the limits of citizenship. As they set about creating a new government in the United States, the American Founders, Protestants all, frequently referred to the adherents of Islam as they contemplated the proper scope of religious freedom and individual rights among the nation’s present and potential inhabitants. The founding generation debated whether the United States should be exclusively Protestant or a religiously plural polity. And if the latter, whether political equality—the full rights of citizenship, including access to the highest office—should extend to non-Protestants. The mention, then, of Muslims as potential citizens of the United States forced the Protestant majority to imagine the parameters of their new society beyond toleration. It obliged them to interrogate the nature of religious freedom: the issue of a “religious test” in the Constitution, like the ones that would exist at the state level into the nineteenth century; the question of “an establishment of religion,” potentially of Protestant Christianity; and the meaning and extent of a separation of religion from government.

Resistance to the idea of Muslim citizenship was predictable in the eighteenth century. Americans had inherited from Europe almost a millennium of negative distortions of the faith’s theological and political character. Given the dominance and popularity of these anti-Islamic representations, it was startling that a few notable Americans not only refused to exclude Muslims, but even imagined a day when they would be citizens of the United States, with full and equal rights. This surprising, uniquely American egalitarian defense of Muslim rights was the logical extension of European precedents already mentioned. Still, on both sides of the Atlantic, such ideas were marginal at best. How, then, did the idea of the Muslim as a citizen with rights survive despite powerful opposition from the outset? And what is the fate of that ideal in the twenty-first century?

This book provides a new history of the founding era, one that explains how and why Thomas Jefferson and a handful of others adopted and then moved beyond European ideas about the toleration of Muslims. It should be said at the outset that these exceptional men were not motivated by any inherent appreciation for Islam as a religion. Muslims, for most American Protestants, remained beyond the
outer limit of those possessing acceptable beliefs, but they nevertheless became emblems of two competing conceptions of the nation’s identity: one essentially preserving the Protestant status quo, and the other fully realizing the pluralism implied in the Revolutionary rhetoric of inalienable
and
universal rights. Thus while some fought to exclude a group whose inclusion they feared would ultimately portend the undoing of the nation’s Protestant character, a pivotal minority, also Protestant, perceiving the ultimate benefit and justice of a religiously plural America, set about defending the rights of future Muslim citizens.