Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (31 page)

In contrast to New York, this requirement excluded Jews and Muslims, who would not accept the New Testament, but not Catholics. An earlier proposal that the oath affirm “merely belief in one God” met with opposition precisely because it would provide “Jews and
Turks”
access to political power.
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An explicit provision against Jews and atheists taking seats in the legislature was enacted later in the year. But even this could not placate one Lutheran minister, who warned that Christians “were [to be] ruled by Jews, Turks, Spinozists, Deists [and] perverted naturalists.”
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In Delaware, state officers were obliged to swear to the Trinity, the doctrine over which so many had died in Europe.
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This provision excluded American Jews and any Muslims who might arrive. New Jersey allowed only Protestants to be elected.
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Massachusetts in 1778 prohibited non-Protestants from public office, while the 1780 constitution more broadly allowed “Christians,”
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though for Catholics a special oath “renouncing the superiority of papal authority” was required.
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New Hampshire also prohibited non-Protestants, despite objections from
William Plumer, later to be a senator but for now “a solitary voice.”
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Rhode Island and
Connecticut both denied Jews political equality,
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the former persisting in this arrangement until 1842.
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In
Maryland, Catholics, who had founded the colony, had political equality, but Jews did not.
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Virginia was notably distinct, passing in 1786 Jefferson’s first state law to mandate
religious freedom and political equality for all faiths, including Catholics.
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North Carolina was geographically and politically positioned between Virginia, with its universal religious freedom and political equality, and South Carolina, which had Protestantism as the state’s “established religion.”
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Farther south,
Georgia similarly mandated that all representatives “shall be of the Protestant religion.”
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The 1776 state constitution of North Carolina ended the establishment of “any one religious church or denomination in the State, in preference to any other,” but in Article 32 maintained that officeholders take an oath to affirm “the truth of the Protestant religion”:

The insertion of this language was spearheaded by Reverend David
Caldwell, a Presbyterian minister, who would later urge the inclusion of a religious test in the federal Constitution.
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The state constitution also had more explicit language excluding Catholics for having religious principles “incompatible with the freedom and safety of the State,” though Article 32 was deemed sufficient protection against Jews and, theoretically, Muslims.
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Samuel Johnston (1733–1816), who would preside over North Carolina’s 1788 constitutional convention, had opposed a religious test for state officials since the 1776 state constitutional convention. As he wrote to his sister, Hannah, he had hoped to “get home in a few days, but unfortunately one of the members of the back country introduced a test, by which every person, before he should be admitted to a share in the Legislature, should swear that he believed in the Holy Trinity, and that the Scriptures of the old Testament was written by divine inspiration. This was carried after a very warm debate, and has blown up such a flame, that everything is in danger of being thrown into confusion.”
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The final version of Caldwell’s Article 32 would leave out the oath to the Trinity, but inserted along with the Old Testament the affirmation that the New Testament was also of divine origin, to much the same effect.
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Although by 1788 the Ottoman Empire had long ceased to be a European military problem, its image as an oppressive regime remained central to British Whig rhetoric, which Americans then adopted in framing their Constitution. Islam came up sporadically during ratification debates throughout 1787 and 1788, with references to Ottoman despotism or the predations of the four pirate states of North Africa. It was ironically unknown to the delegates from the political parties in North Carolina, both of whose members owned slaves, that they themselves may have lived in proximity to real Muslims of West African origin, for whom they were the oppressors.
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What they did know about Muslims had been filtered through a complex web of associations both foreign and frightening, as attested by their persistent allusions to Islam as a civilization of threat.

Robert J. Allison first noted that references to the Ottoman Empire
as the source of eternal despotism worked for both Federalists and Anti-Federalists, who, despite their political differences, “agreed that Islam fostered religious and political oppression.”
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But the Anti-Federalist strategy of fearmongering in opposition to the Constitution found more use in invoking such images, particularly in Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, and South Carolina.
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The other side responded to these assertions but did not emphasize them in
The Federalist Papers
, the influential series of newspaper tracts written in support of the Constitution by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay.
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On May 22, 1788, the Anti-Federalist Patrick
Dollard of South Carolina invoked the Ottoman infantry, the
janissaries, to warn that similar forces of despotism threatened should the United States support a standing army under a central government.
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It was an echo from the 1720s, when Radical Whig pamphlets, such as
Cato’s Letters
, arrived in the colonies, portraying Ottoman tyranny as the very antithesis of a civil society with natural religious and political rights for individual men. In 1787, even Thomas Jefferson in Paris was not immune to this rhetorical tactic, writing James Madison about the constitutional feature, “I dislike, and greatly dislike: ‘the abandonment in every instance of the necessity of rotation in office, and most particularly in the case of the President.’ ” In his litany of historical examples of hereditary power and its dangers, he included the Algerian ruler, known as the dey: “The Roman emperors, the popes, while they were of any importance, the German emperors till they became hereditary in practice, the kings of Poland, the Deys of the Ottoman dependencies.” As Jefferson was learning, negotiating with these Islamic powers depended on the inclinations of one, usually disinclined, ruler.
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In another letter to Madison, he would call Turkey a place where “the sole nod of the despot is death.”
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In his forceful argument against the
centralization of military power, the Anti-Federalist Dollard said that his constituents saw the new government as a breeding monster, “big with political mischiefs, and pregnant with a greater variety of impending woes to the good people of the southern states, especially South-Carolina, than all the plagues supposed to issue from the poisonous box of Pandora.”
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The people of South Carolina, he promised, would resist the standing army, believing it better left to “the meridian of despotic aristocracy” where “Turkish Janizaries enforcing despotic laws, must ram it down their throats with the point of Bayonets.”
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His fears would be echoed on June 16, 1788, by another Anti-Federalist, Patrick
Henry of Virginia, who in debate with James Madison at the Commonwealth’s ratification convention invoked a more immediate image of military oppression: “Is the government to place us in the situation of the English?” The
British army’s abuses during the Revolutionary War were indeed fresh in the American memory, when Henry recalled how the redcoats had been billeted, even in times of peace, “in any manner—to tyrannize, oppress, and crush us.”
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But he too would eventually find his way to the Ottoman precedent:

Madison’s reply to Henry, in defense of the Constitution, was that a national army “is to be employed for national purposes,” and only “for executing its laws.” He defied Henry to maintain the new nation without an armed force: “Would it be wise to say, that we should have no defence?” He added further, “There never was a Government without force,” in the form of a national army.
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Writing nearly a year before Madison’s response to Henry under the pen name “a Citizen of America,” the Federalist Noah
Webster of New Hampshire cited historical precedent to optimistically proclaim in October 1787 that the new Constitution contained “the wisdom of the ages” as well as the consensus of “the millions,” who had formed “
an empire of reason.
”
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As if in anticipation of the Anti-Federalist arguments of the next year by Dollard and Henry, Webster attempted to assuage what he considered the groundless fears of a standing army, appropriating the Ottoman example for his own ends:

The danger from a standing army was, to Webster’s way of thinking, no less absurd than the prospect that Americans would suddenly embrace the Qur’an and jettison the Bible. So, concluded Webster, since the presence of janissaries or a tyrannical janissary-like army was impossible in the future, there was also no need to legislate against it. Provisions against standing armies were as unnecessary analogously, he argued, and the need to avoid janissaries being as fanciful as the need “to prohibit the establishment of the Mahometan religion,” an eventuality in this uniquely Protestant nation that he believed would never come to pass.
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On one day of the North Carolina ratification convention, Federalist delegates challenged their opponents to consider whether American liberty was consistent with a Protestant religious establishment. Should the United States permit a form of religious tyranny that most North Carolina delegates wrongly assumed existed only in the despotic Ottoman Empire? In pursuing this line of argument against a religious test—and the injustice of including it—the Federalists would find themselves forced to defend what to most Americans were then the three most despised religious practitioners: Muslims, Jews, and Catholics.

Muslims in particular, with whom no one involved in the debates had any direct acquaintance, had always been thought of collectively. There had never been an attempt to consider the existence of the individual believer, nor any effort to hypothesize about a Muslim’s potential to be an American, and how this faith might determine status before the law, as equal or not to any other American. But when the occasion for just such a consideration occurred on July 30, 1788, it must have seemed to most inconceivable that one could plausibly advance a case for religious freedom and political rights, given the predominant transatlantic anti-Muslim bias.

The transcript of the North Carolina debate about religious tests captures a moment when the multiple meanings of the word “Muslim”
collided, then shifted abruptly, from known threat to potential American citizen and even possible president. From the debate emerged a
Federalist vision of Muslim rights at once hopeful and cynical: hopeful because it marked the first time American politicians accorded Muslims full rights, at least theoretically; but cynical, too, because the reluctant advocates of these rights assumed that they would never be exercised by actual people. Both Anti-Federalists
and Federalists imagined the unimaginable: a population of free American Muslims. But while the Anti-Federalists envisioned, to their dread, a population in reality, the Federalists, for the sake of their principled argument, merely posited one in theory, assuming it would never exist. Racial bias occluded the awareness among all the delegates that actual Muslims might already live among them, and there were no visible, free Muslim inhabitants of the country, only
negative stereotypes. Such stereotypes also prevailed in their understanding of Jews, and indeed, similar sentiments were expressed to argue against full citizenship for both groups. But in the debates about American citizenship, the Jews, however few and maligned, were real, the Muslims merely imaginary. Federalist and anti-Federalist alike had as their only recourse negative European precedents enshrined in Protestant imagination.
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Still, it was the Federalists who charted new territory in their extension of American egalitarianism to the practitioners of Islam.