Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (23 page)

If government has no business meddling in matters of faith, it follows that every individual’s religious freedom should be protected by law. But such protection would require a perfect neutrality toward religion on the part of the state, and in 1777 such did not exist in the United States or in Europe. As
Merrill D. Peterson explains:

To achieve a separation of civic and religious authority, upon which true religious freedom depended, Jefferson would appropriate not only Locke’s idea about the fallibility of the ruler in spiritual matters, but also another point from Locke’s first letter:

In translating Locke’s notion of rights by natural law, Jefferson’s statute rejects any denial of rights on the basis of religion, and in particular the denial of the privilege of office:

It is difficult to reach any conclusion but that Jefferson intended his statute’s application to extend beyond Christian denominations to include all faiths. The letter of the law as written went beyond Locke’s ideal of a tolerant but still dominant Protestant establishment, prefiguring the no-religious-test clause of Article VI, section 3 of the Constitution as well as the First Amendment.

That Jefferson’s universalism was meant to include Muslims as well as Jews is attested by a passage in his 1821 autobiography.
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However, the lack of explicit references in his legislation did not prevent it from being blocked in 1779, when it was first proposed. But in 1785, while Jefferson was away in France, James Madison undertook to lobby for the bill, winning Jefferson’s admiration. Jefferson praised Madison for his “unwearied exertions” in directing his most important bill’s passage, a monumental victory achieved on January 16, 1786,
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only after “warm opposition” in the last days of 1785.
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Jefferson describes “the endless quibbles, chicaneries, perversions, vexations and delays of lawyers and demi-lawyers” that the bill suffered along the way. Indeed, while “most of the bills were passed by the legislature, with little alteration,” Jefferson admitted that his original text did undergo changes.
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Jefferson believed that the bill had been “drawn in all the latitude of reason and right,” only to encounter resistance over the breadth of its principled reach: “It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal.” Jefferson laid bare his “universal” intent when describing a last-ditch effort to resist the insertion of the words “Jesus Christ”:

In his 1776 notes on Locke, the basis of his original conception, Jefferson omitted most of the philosopher’s seventeenth-century synonyms for Jesus, including “the Captain of our salvation” and “that Prince of peace,” who “not armed with the sword, or with force … furnished the Gospel, the message of peace.”
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Jefferson did, however, understand the point of Locke’s characterization of a religiously tolerant Jesus, according to his notes of 1776:

Nevertheless, in 1777 Jefferson’s legislative language deliberately departed from Locke’s explicit Christian references even while alluding to Jesus’s teaching, in which, by Jefferson’s novel assertion, reason had taken the place of force:

The italicized final clause, which appears in Jefferson’s original draft, was excised in the final version.

The question remained: Did Jefferson intend “the holy author of our religion” to be synonymous with Jesus Christ as Locke clearly had? Most fellow legislators, all Anglican Christians, would certainly have assumed as much. Not surprisingly, some moved to make the reference explicit, but the bill’s author emphatically refused. In his final word on the subject, Jefferson rejoiced in the ultimate rejection of the attempted assertion of those two pivotal words: “Jesus Christ”:

From Jefferson’s “Autobiography”: At the bottom of the page, he advocates for the protection of “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.” (
illustration credit 3.4
)

Thus one can comfortably infer that since the 1760s and most certainly in 1776, Jefferson’s ideal of national religious and political equality included Muslims, as well as Jews and all others “of every denomination,” who would never have referred to themselves as “infidels.”
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On account of such convictions, by 1821 Jefferson would know firsthand what it felt like to be an “infidel,” but his own use of it indicates none of the venom with which it was attached to him.

Jefferson was not alone in appreciating the impact of omitting the words “Jesus Christ”; Madison agreed that allowing them would have vitiated the universal intent with an implied establishment of Christianity, or as he wrote years after the bill’s passage, the mention of Jesus was designed “to imply a restriction of the liberty defined in the Bill, to those professing his [Jesus Christ’s] religion only.”
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By standing fast, Jefferson ended the establishment of Protestant Christianity in Virginia. In the final lines of his bill’s text he warned future generations against overturning the law, reminding them that “the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.”
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The right to one’s chosen faith was to be understood ever after as a natural endowment, not contingent on even the most beneficent God.

Jefferson believed until the end of his life that his legislation concerning religious freedom had universal scope, protecting all believers, including Muslims. But he was wrong. While his bill would retain enormous importance for future free American Muslim citizens in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, his universal vision never included the first American Muslims, who in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were West African slaves transported to North America against their will. Considered by Jefferson to be property rather than citizens, a view his hero Locke had also endorsed, these Muslims of African descent enjoyed no freedoms of any kind.
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They could not practice their faith anywhere, except secretively or at least circumspectly in the proximity of Protestant slaveholders and among an increasing majority of slave converts to Protestant Christianity.
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Nor could they ever claim political equality. Race and slavery placed
them beyond rights and, apparently, beyond Jefferson’s vision, despite the distinct possibility that
slaves of Muslim heritage might have lived on his own plantations.

There were certainly more Muslim slaves in eighteenth-century America than Jews, and possibly more than the twenty-five thousand Catholics in the United States at its inception.
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How many Muslim slaves? Their numbers while significant remain difficult to specify exactly. The historian Michael Gomez observed that “53 percent of all those imported to North America” were taken from four areas of West Africa in which “Islam was of varying consequence.” Of the estimated 481,000 West Africans “imported into British North America” as a result of the slave trade, “nearly 255,000 came from areas influenced by Islam.”
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It is therefore reasonable to conclude, as Gomez has, that “Muslims arrived in North America by the thousands, if not tens of thousands.”
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Other historians have proposed an unverified estimate that 15 to 20 percent of all those enslaved in the Americas and the Caribbean were Muslim, but their numbers in Jefferson’s Virginia would be even more difficult to define with any precision.
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The first twenty African slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619, but by 1756, when Jefferson was thirteen years old, there were 120,156.
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If even 10 percent of those were Muslim, they constituted a scattered but significant minority. By 1774, Jefferson owned 187 slaves, and throughout his life this number would rise and fall with his financial fortunes.
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Although Jefferson attempted and failed to end “this execrable commerce” of the slave trade in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, there is no evidence that he ever met a Muslim on his Virginia plantations.
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In the detailed inventories of slaves he kept in his
Farm Book
, which also kept account of his horses, mules, oxen, and cattle on his multiple plantations from 1774 until his death, no name of any Islamic resonance is obvious.
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In contrast, at Mount Vernon plantation, where Jefferson’s Virginian neighbor George Washington owned more than three hundred slaves, at least two and possibly four names register a distinct Islamic identity. These include a mother and daughter, named “Fatimer” and “Little Fatimer,” after the Prophet’s daughter.
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Other African slaves named Fatima have been documented in Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia in the eighteenth century.
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