Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (35 page)

Iredell lamented the failure of his state to enter the Union in 1788, eventually writing a newspaper address to “The People of North Carolina” on September 15, 1788, in which he was blunt about the implications for the state’s future:

Only the state of Rhode Island was in the same predicament with regard to ratification of the Constitution.

Despite his local failure, Iredell’s compelling arguments in support
of the new Constitution and future American Muslim rights were read by congressmen throughout the new Union, especially in New York City. In this way, Iredell’s foresight in having paid a secretary to record the proceedings paid off when they were published in 1789.
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What Locke had only theorized and Jefferson had already concluded but had legislated only in Virginia, Iredell was thus first to champion in open, fractious debate about the Constitution.

Iredell’s ardor impressed President George Washington, who appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1790, at the age of thirty-eight,
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citing “the reputation he sustains for abilities, legal knowledge, and respectability of character.”
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Even Thomas Jefferson owned Iredell’s 1790 revisions of the laws of North Carolina.
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The new associate justice brought his family to Philadelphia, the nation’s capital, in the 1790s, but he was also required to ride the southern judiciary circuit to adjudicate cases twice a year.
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By the time of his Supreme Court appointment in 1790, Iredell owned forty-five hundred acres and eight slaves.
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The year before, Iredell’s brother-in-law, Samuel Johnston, had left the governorship of North Carolina to become his state’s first senator, but only after presiding over the ratification of the Constitution at a second convention, at Fayetteville in 1789. Returning to North Carolina after one term as senator, he would remain active in judicial matters until 1813, when he was seventy.
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For his part, Iredell would not be so blessed, meeting an untimely death at forty-eight. The strain of riding circuit through rough terrain did him in only nine years after his appointment to the high court.
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While Iredell argued for rights that would extend in theory to hypothetical future Muslim citizens, there were, unbeknownst to him, actual American Muslims in his state and throughout the new nation languishing in slavery, unable to exercise rights of any kind. Two coincidences, one chronological, the other geographical, invite us to consider them. The first,
Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman (d. 1829), was transported against his will to the United States in 1788, the same year as North Carolina’s debate.
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The second,
Omar ibn Said (d. 1863), arrived in the United States in chains at the age of thirty-seven in 1807, a year before the end
of the slave trade. He ran away to Fayetteville, North Carolina, twenty-two years after the Constitution was adopted there at the second state convention in 1789. Neither of these men were the only Muslims in their vicinities, much less the United States, but both became famous in their time.
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Ibrahima and Omar had more than their faith and West African origin in common. I render their names as they traditionally appear in American sources, though in a more accurate transliteration from the Arabic they would be Ibrahim and Umar. It would perhaps have mattered to them, as both men knew Arabic, which skill they used to impress their white owners with their intelligence.
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And both had studied the Qur’an in their West African homes. Despite appearing to profess Christianity in order to improve their conditions, there is evidence that neither truly abandoned Islam. In Ibrahima’s case, his seeming conversion eventually allowed him to return to Africa and pay for the freedom of some of his children. Omar’s two-page Arabic plea in 1819 for his release and repatriation, on the other hand, failed.
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Neither man would ever be considered a free American citizen, or a voter, much less a potential candidate for political office.

Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman came from a town called Timbo in what is today Guinea.
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According to his memoir, written by a secretary in English in 1828, this member of the Fulbe tribe spent a torturous six weeks in the Middle Passage before submitting to bondage in North America.
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In what was presented as his words, Ibrahima tells us:

The characterization that he had been “indulged” was perhaps partly an effort to flatter his owner, who could have read the account.

Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman, a Muslim slave who became known as “the Moorish Prince.” The Arabic caption below the picture, in his own hand, reads: “His name is ‘Abd al-Rahman.” His Arabic literacy fascinated the public and eventually secured his freedom. (
illustration credit 5.2
)

Born in Timbuktu around 1762, Ibrahima had received a solid Muslim education in the city that had been a famed center of Islamic learning since medieval times.
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His Arabic was learned in this context, though it was not his native language. In fact, Ibrahima spoke three African languages: Bambara, Mandingo, and Jallonke.
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His father having been a religious and military leader, Ibrahima himself led men in local wars against enemy animist tribes, captives from which were often sold to Europeans as slaves. Eventually he was ambushed by these enemies and himself enslaved and sold to the British in 1788.
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His owner in Natchez, Mississippi, Colonel Foster, named him “Prince” because “of his still proud ways” and Ibrahima’s references
to his elite position in Africa.
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He would manage Colonel Foster’s plantation from 1800 to 1813, marrying a fellow slave who’d become a Baptist convert around 1794, with whom he had nine children.
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As a Muslim man, Ibrahima was permitted to marry a Christian woman.

After nearly twenty years of slavery, Ibrahima met by chance a Dr. Cox, whom Ibrahima’s father had saved when the white traveler was ill and lost in West Africa in the 1780s.
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Cox recognized Ibrahima immediately. He, and later his sons, would attempt to buy Ibrahima’s freedom. The effort would fail, but Cox’s story made Ibrahima a celebrity. Local newspaper editors interviewed the slave in the 1820s.
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In 1826, the year Thomas Jefferson died, Ibrahima, at the suggestion of
Andrew Marschalk, one of the local newspapermen, wrote a missive in Arabic, which was in fact a passage he remembered from the Qur’an.
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Marschalk forwarded the letter to the senator from Mississippi, with an explanation wrongly identifying Ibrahima as a member of “the royal family of Morocco.”
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On Ibrahima’s behalf, Marschalk pled for the slave known as Prince to be able to return to this homeland.
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The ascription of Moroccan origin would have played into erroneous contemporary assumptions that African slaves necessarily differed from North Africans in color and faith. But since Ibrahima himself claimed an ethnic and religious superiority setting him apart from non-Muslim Africans, he would initially “not dispute” that he was “a
Moor,” and further claimed that he had “no ‘negro’ blood.”
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In 1827, when Marschalk’s letter reached the State Department, the U.S. government began to correspond with Morocco on the slave’s behalf via the U.S. consul in Tangier. Sultan Abd al-Rahman II recognized that the author of the Arabic text was a Muslim, and volunteered to pay for his freedom and his passage home. Manumitting Ibrahima seemed a diplomatic windfall for the U.S. government, a way to improve relations with Morocco and secure the future return of any Americans shipwrecked on those North African shores. Secretary of State Henry Clay, a slaveholder himself, recommended the action, to which President John Quincy Adams assented.
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Colonel Foster, Ibrahima’s owner, agreed on two conditions: first, that he himself would pay nothing;
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second, that his slave would “not remain free or at liberty in any part of the United States.”
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Only in Africa would Ibrahima find his freedom. When Colonel Foster finally permitted Ibrahima to leave for Washington, D.C., the slave refused to depart without his wife, who was still valuable as the plantation’s midwife. Local whites
raised the price of her freedom in a day.
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But Ibrahima’s children and grandchildren remained behind in Mississippi.

Colonel Foster described Ibrahima as “by birth and education a strict Mahometan,” yet added that “he expresses the most reverential respect for the Christian religion, the moral precepts of which he appears to be well informed [about] and speaks of having read some of the Christian scripture of the Old Testament in his own country in the Arabic language,” having even requested a copy of the Old Testament in Arabic.
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Marschalk, the newspaperman, went so far as to imply that Ibrahima had renounced Islam for Christianity.
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In this Ibrahima spied another opportunity. And so when the
American Colonization Society, whose purpose was to return freed blacks back to Africa, volunteered to pay Ibrahima’s passage to Liberia, their West African point of colonization, Ibrahima agreed to spread the Gospel and promote American trade in Africa. It was still hundreds of miles away from his former home and true destination, but it was closer than Morocco.
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One of Ibrahima’s contemporary biographers stated that in 1828 he was “the most famous African in America.” For the departure from the plantation, Marschalk bought Ibrahima a colorful costume he thought befitting only a Moroccan prince: “a white turban topped with a crescent, blue cloth coat with yellow buttons, white pantaloons gathered at the ankles, yellow boots—and, sometimes … a scimitar.”
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With much fanfare, Ibrahima embarked on a trip through many cities in the Northeast in the hope of raising enough money to free all his descendants and pay for their passage to Africa. His tour would take him up the Mississippi to Cincinnati, and then to Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Worcester, Salem, and New Bedford, Massachusetts, as well as Providence, Rhode Island, and New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut.
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He met with many dignitaries, including President John Quincy Adams, who earlier in his political career on his father’s behalf had directed anti-Islamic invective against Thomas Jefferson.

Ibrahima was not the first Muslim Adams had met, having attended President Jefferson’s dinner reception for the Tunisian ambassador in 1805. In his journal entry for May 15, 1828, the day of the meeting, he wrote, “Abdel Rahman is a Moor, otherwise called Prince or Ibrahim, who has been forty years a slave in this country. He wrote, two or three years since, a letter to the Emp of Morocco, in Arabic.”
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In that encounter, however, Ibrahima disabused Adams of the idea that he was
originally from Morocco, and revealed his preference to go to
Liberia, which was closer to his true native land.
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The president, reported Secretary Clay, “thought it proper to yield to his inclination on this subject.”
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Ibrahima also asked the president to contribute to the emancipation fund for his enslaved children and grandchildren, but Adams declined.
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On his tour through the Northeast, whenever he was asked, Ibrahima never declined to demonstrate that he could write Arabic. Examples of his calligraphy still exist. Often he would claim that the specimen produced was the Lord’s Prayer, but in fact he had written the
Fatiha
, the revered first chapter of the Qur’an, which has been called “the Lord’s Prayer of the Muslims.”
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Of course, his American audience never knew the difference. His reliance on this one passage, no less than his actual calligraphy, suggests that after forty years of slavery Ibrahima’s Arabic had become rusty.
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