Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (36 page)

Ibrahima and his wife arrived in Monrovia, Liberia, on March 18, 1829.
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As soon as the coast of Africa came into view, the former slave publicly resumed his Islamic prayers, proof that he had never truly embraced Christianity.
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Ibrahima would never see his African family again or reach his homeland nearly three hundred miles away. Four months after his arrival, he would succumb to illness at age sixty-seven. His hope of raising money to bring his entire family back to Africa was only partially fulfilled. Eight of his children arrived in Liberia in 1830, a year after his death, and were reunited with their mother.
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It is possible that seven other members of his family later migrated to Liberia in 1835,
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but most of Ibrahima’s progeny would remain in slavery in Mississippi, never to see him or his wife again.
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In 1789, Fayetteville, North Carolina, became the site for the state’s second and final convention to consider ratification of the Constitution. Today, there is a mosque in that city, the Masjid Omar ibn Sayyid, which commemorates the Muslim slave
Omar ibn Said.
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Omar had fled to Fayetteville in 1811, after a month’s journey from Charleston, South Carolina, to escape the harsh treatment of an owner he described as a “weak, small, evil man called Johnson, an infidel (
kafir
) who did not fear Allah at all.”
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Omar had been captured and taken in slavery from his home in Senegal.
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Omar ibn Said, another Muslim slave from West Africa, wrote his autobiography in Arabic, and likely retained his faith until his death. (
illustration credit 5.3
)

Although many American Muslim slaves distinguished themselves by writing Arabic, Omar’s proficiency allowed him to write an entire autobiography of fifteen pages in that language in 1831.
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Indeed, it was his Arabic literacy that first brought him to the attention of his future owners in North Carolina, the prominent and wealthy Owen family, when Omar reportedly used coal to write Arabic on the walls of his Fayetteville jail cell following his daring escape from South Carolina.
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In his autobiography, Omar praised the family with whom he would live more than fifty years, before dying in his nineties.
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In his Arabic autobiography, he exclaimed:

A decade before writing his life story Omar joined the Presbyterian Church and was baptized.
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David Caldwell, the Anti-Federalist delegate who expressed such fears about the “emigration of those people from the eastern hemisphere” at the 1788 North Carolina ratification debate, might have been shocked by Omar’s presence at a church of
his Presbyterian denomination. In 1822, the convert was sent a copy of the Bible in Arabic by Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and belonged to the American Colonization Society, the group that had helped Ibrahima and other freed slaves return to Africa.
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Someone else would give Omar a Qur’an in English, though he would never own one in Arabic.
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That nonetheless did not prevent his reproducing parts of it.

Omar begins his autobiography with the
bismillah
—“In the name of Allah”—followed by “the merciful, the compassionate” and “May God bless our Lord Mohammed.”
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He then re-creates from memory (despite a few errors) the sixty-seventh chapter of the Qur’an, known as
al-Mulk
, which can be translated as “the Sovereignty” but also as “the Dominion” or “the Ownership.” Though the author does not identify or explain these verses, Omar’s choice, as one scholar has suggested,
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represents an implicit “resistance” to the earthly dominion of slavery, to ownership of him as a human being.
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The chapter emphasizes Allah’s role as the ultimate owner of “all things” and the Prophet Muhammad’s role as “a warner.”
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The twelfth and thirteenth verses, which suggest that only God knows the nature of an individual’s spiritual beliefs, may have had a special significance for Omar:

Was this perhaps Omar’s confession, even repudiation, of his outward conversion to Christianity?
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In any case, most scholars of African Muslims in America believe that Omar, despite appearances, did not fully embrace Christianity.
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Omar does explicitly confess the faith into which he was born: “Before I came to the Christian country, my religion is the religion of Mohammad, the Prophet of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace.”
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The sentence reads no less oddly in the original, with Omar deliberately using the Arabic present tense. Here is another potential indication of his religious ambivalence, or a refusal to put Islam in his past. He then describes essential Islamic rituals he no longer observed in North Carolina, including walking to the mosque, ablutions before
prayer, and prayer several times a day. As a Muslim in Africa, he tells us, he gave
zakat
, or alms, one of the
five pillars of the faith; fought in
jihad
against non-Muslim tribes; and even made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
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Omar may have outwardly embraced Presbyterianism in order to please his owners, or because he missed the fellowship of a community of believers of the sort he’d known in Africa. His church attendance may also reflect a Muslim reverence for Jesus as a prophet in Islam. But a few pages later, the tensions in Omar’s religious commitment became more pronounced: “I am Omar,” he declares, “I love to read the book, the Great Qur’an.”
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But literally the sentence could also be read, “I am Omar, he loves to read the book the Great Qur’an,” because the verb is in the third-person masculine, not the first person. And this happens more than once.
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All translators assume that Omar means the first person throughout his text, which is perfectly reasonable. Yet this remains an odd grammatical choice for an autobiography. In English translations, the repetition throughout of the first-person pronoun “I” evokes an immediacy and agency somewhat less palpable in the original. It may be another instance of his ambivalence, or simply that despite Omar’s claims to have studied Islamic subjects for twenty-five years in Africa with various learned men, his Arabic-language skills had predictably eroded over time, reflecting the imperfect memory of a script that he could no longer accurately reproduce.
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While Omar tried to retain the memory of his past, his owner Jim Owen and his wife “used to read the Bible to me a lot.” But rather than mention Jesus, Omar’s account goes on simply to ask that his “heart” be “open to the Bible,” and he concludes the thought with a Qur’anic form of praise for Allah, “Lord of the Worlds.”
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When he does mention Jesus on the following page, it is after Moses, described as the one to whom God gave the law. He does depict “Jesus the Messiah” as receiving “grace and truth,”
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but then immediately states, “First, [following] Mohammed. To pray I said,” after which he inserts the
Fatiha
, the first chapter of the Qur’an.
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This sentence could also indicate his view of the superiority of the Prophet Muhammad in the prophetic continuum of the Qur’an.

Omar provides other clues that he never forsook belief in the Prophet Muhammad’s singular importance. He did write out Christian prayers, and, unlike Ibrahima, when Omar claimed to have written out the Lord’s Prayer or the twenty-third Psalm in Arabic, that is exactly what he wrote. He would never try to pass off verses from the Qur’an as
Christian scripture, his efforts no doubt facilitated by the Arabic Bible Scott Key gave him.
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On the other hand, as late as 1855, eight years before his death, his Arabic transcription of the twenty-third Psalm is introduced by the
bismillah
, followed by this invocation of the Prophet: “May God have mercy on
our
Lord, the Prophet Muhammad.”
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Omar died in 1863, two years before the passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which would have finally granted his freedom. According to the Constitution under which he had lived, as a slave he remained only three-fifths of a person, a ratio accepted by the free, white male Protestant delegates to his state’s 1788 ratification debate.
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The historian Michael Gomez has referred to both Omar and Ibrahima, among others, as “Founding Fathers of a Different Sort,” a title both certainly deserve in the annals of American Muslim history.
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These two lives remind us that while hypothetical Muslims inhabited the rhetoric of the Founders, in their midst there also lived flesh-and-blood Muslims who, as slaves, remained invisible and without rights. Only literacy in Arabic set both men apart from their coreligionists in the African slave population, and while that skill was enough to win Ibrahima a rare return journey from the Middle Passage, it would not save Omar, despite his protests, from languishing in the United States.

In constitutional history, Muslims are not traditionally associated with definitions of American citizenship, but for one day in 1788 the adherents of Islam came to symbolize the aspiration of political equality, irrespective of religion, in the new Republic. The lives of America’s actual Muslim inhabitants, slaves from West Africa, like Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman and Omar ibn Said, could not have been more remote from the possibility that any Muslim could conceivably seek the presidency one day. And they remained invisible to the delegates, just as Omar’s words written in Arabic after the vote, his plaintive plea, “O, People of North Carolina,” would remain unread.

Nevertheless, it was in North Carolina’s debate on religious tests that Muslims—albeit imaginary ones—stepped directly onto the American political stage for the first time. At a time when fearful visions of Islam
as a fanatical religion and foreign threat prevailed, two Federalists in North Carolina promoted the simultaneous establishment of religious and political equality for Muslims as potential American citizens, meeting a predictable response from the majority of delegates, whose negative monolithic vision of Islam would persist and prevail. And yet a new vision of Muslims as individual believers, people who might yet enjoy a full membership in the new polity, was born. Iredell and Johnston created this possibility in debate, without believing or wishing that the rights they advocated in principle would ever come to be practically tested by real Muslims. Nevertheless, in the absence of a religious test, Federalists would be forced to concede the possibility of a Muslim president when they managed to win ratification for their Constitution in 1788. That they did so, however reluctantly, suggested that Americans might depart from inherited European prejudices in realizing their national ideals.

Thomas Jefferson was not in the United States during debates about the Constitution and Muslim rights, remaining in France until November 1789. The next month, he accepted the post of secretary of state and, returning to the United States, took up the problem of North African piracy once again. He did not expect that even on the domestic political scene references to Islam would figure in attempts to defame him.