Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (44 page)

A further complication in the theory of theological progress: In the midst of his numerous versions of the New Testament, one finds two volumes of Old Testament scripture, one of the prophet Isaiah and the
other the Psalms of David, which at the very least represent an interruption in a supposed Christian teleology.
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Then, following more New Testaments and their concordances, Jefferson placed a number of exclusively Christian works, focusing on matters ranging from martyrdom to heresy and theological schisms, and also includes a critique of Calvinism, an account of the Moravian sect, another on Anabaptism, a meditation on “toleration and religious liberty,” and one on the subject of suicide.
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What seems to emerge in this section on Religion is less a chronological or thematic order than a degeneration of Christianity into faction and persecution, the opposite of what Jefferson considered religious or civil progress. If he had placed his Qur’an after the New Testaments in strict chronological order, he would have left his only Islamic work stranded between Christian scripture and a host of subsequent elaborations and studies.

Instead, placing the Qur’an next to numerous volumes of the Hebrew Bible, Jefferson appears to recognize an affinity between the Jewish and Muslim varieties of monotheism and that of the Deism and Unitarianism he would espouse, all these traditions similarly rejecting the Trinity of normative Christianity. Underscoring this linkage is the unassailable fact that he also continued to view both the Qur’an and the Old Testament as repositories of religious law, a category not applicable to the Gospels. Indeed in 1824 Jefferson wrote that “in my Catalogue, considering Ethics, as well as Religion, as supplements to law, in the government of man, I had placed them in that sequence.”
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It is important to recall that when Jefferson purchased his Qur’an in 1765, he was still a student of the law; Sale’s description of the Prophet as the “lawgiver of the Arabians” in his introduction to the reader would surely have made an impression.
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With seven key exceptions, Jefferson never had a positive thing to say about Islam, either in public or in private. He twice publicly endorsed his government’s tactful respect for “the Laws, Religion or Tranquility of Mussulmen,” in the Tripoli treaties, once as vice president in 1797, and again as president in 1806. He privately affirmed a much more
pointed approval of the faith in one letter to Tripoli and in four to Tunis, the last in 1806, wherein he assured his “great and good friend” of the mutuality of their beliefs in a single supreme being. Jefferson’s kind words for
Hammuda Bey’s faith may have been purely an expression of diplomatic politesse, or even desperation, but considered alongside his final placement of the Qur’an, they suggest something more akin to respect for a monotheism that would have seemed to him theologically closer to the faith into which he had grown than the one into which he’d been born.

In contrast, his negative associations of Islam with fanaticism and tyranny, which continued throughout his life, may reflect his appropriation of a commonplace transatlantic political language, one that he also applied to gain his political ends. Jefferson’s ambiguities in political thought about equality, race, and slavery have been noted by other historians.
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These paradoxes blinded him to the possible presence of American Muslims in the United States. His perceptions of Islam in his political life remain, at the very least, ambiguous, even enigmatic. Only in the later evolution of his private religious beliefs does Jefferson’s diplomatic appreciation for Islam’s central tenet seem sincere.

In the autobiography written five years before his death in 1821, Jefferson, reviewing his conduct of foreign policy, still refused to indict Islam as the motivation behind the predations of those he called “the Barbary cruisers.” And in this perspective too, he appears consistent. North African enemies remained, in his estimation, simply “lawless pirates,” a generic designation for a universal problem.
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Despite having gone to war against Tripoli, he would not inscribe “enmity” in his treaty of peace, preferring to reaffirm his nation’s previous approbation of “the Laws, Religion or Tranquility” of Muslims. Insisting that not all the followers of Islam were enemies, he would never present their faith as a barrier to peaceful diplomatic relations.

Whatever his ambivalence about Islam, Jefferson’s position on Mus- lim rights and potential for citizenship remained consistent from his days as a law student in the 1760s until the end of his life. Having first concurred with a seventeenth-century English legal case that had ruled as “groundless” the categorization of “Turks and Infidels” as “enemies for life,” he held fast to the possibility of their eventual inclusion in the American experiment.
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In fact, in his thinking about American citizenship, Jefferson subscribed an even more expansive and, at the time, unusual idea, borrowed from John Locke in 1776: “neither Pagan nor
Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.”
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The experience of engaging in military action against Tripoli might well have given Jefferson occasion to reconsider his lofty notions, and to ask whether all Muslims were not in fact foreign and potential enemies. But looking back in 1821 upon his efforts to advance his Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786, he would proudly recall how the omission of the words “Jesus Christ” from the legislation affirmed his lifelong intent “to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.”
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These words affirm Jefferson’s belief in the free exercise of religion in America, and the principle of American civic inclusion irrespective of faith.

Yet Jefferson’s insistence on the universality of his bill’s inclusive nature, confirmed by the excision of any reference to Christianity, had also been a cause taken up by numerous, often nameless Protestant dissenters
in Virginia since the Revolution. There, Presbyterians and Baptists, who had suffered the most persecution under the state’s Anglican establishment of religion, supported Jefferson and Madison with their “remarkably robust notion of religious liberty.” This position, according to
John A. Ragosta, also meant that these same Protestant dissenters “emphatically rejected the notion of a ‘Christian nation’ on both religious and political grounds.”
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Without the groundswell of this faith-based dissenting support, neither Jefferson nor Madison would have been able to realize their legislative goals in Virginia.
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But the dissenting Virginian ideal of a non-Christian nation that would also support religious pluralism for non-Protestants would meet with resistance throughout the country. In
New England, state establishments of Congregational Protestantism persisted beyond the ratification of the Constitution and its First Amendment, leaving all other Protestants and all non-Protestants subject to state regulation of their faith and taxes. In 1785, Protestant dissenters in Virginia insisted that their government be separate from any interference in religious matters—and in this protection they included non-Protestants: “Let Jews, Mehomitans, and Christians of every Denomination find their advantage in living under your laws. Religion is of god to man the Civil Law is of you to your people.”
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This absolute separation of government from religion, in the interest of protecting any religion, including
Judaism and Islam, would be forcefully articulated by John Leland, one of Jefferson’s and Madison’s key Baptist allies in Virginia.

The evangelical minister Leland, arguably the most significant if unsung Baptist political activist of his generation, preached a new American gospel about the inalienable rights of conscience and political equality, not just for persecuted Baptists, but for all believers, including Muslims. In following Leland’s remarkable ministry in the next chapter, from Virginia into New England through the mid-nineteenth century, we see combined the reverberations of key Jeffersonian precedents and the pleas of the earliest Baptists in England for the protection of all spiritual beliefs from government control.

John Leland, Baptist Advocate for the Rights of Muslims, 1776–1841

T
HE
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APTIST EVANGELICAL MINISTER
John Leland (d. 1841) considered the “established creeds” of his native Massachusetts to be “the worst of evils” because they sanctioned religious and political inequality long after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 and the passage of the First Amendment in 1791.
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Leland would return to New England from Virginia, where he had first fought for religious liberty and political equality; now he would champion those rights in Connecticut and Massachusetts not just for his fellow Baptists but for all believers, including Muslims.
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But Leland’s principled insistence on citizenship for American Muslims was based, like Jefferson’s, on an imagined rather than a real population.

Leland’s dedication to the cause of Muslim rights echoed repeatedly in the sermons he preached and the editorials he published from 1790 until the end of his life. What he sought would not be fully realized until passage of the
Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, which explicitly
forbade any state to “abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens” or “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” making good on what was already promised by the Constitution and the First Amendment. But Leland did live long enough to witness the end of Protestant Congregational religious establishments in Connecticut in 1818 and in Massachusetts in 1833. His writings and his election in 1811 to the Massachusetts legislature would contribute mightily to those developments.
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Leland deemed toleration a “despicable” concept insofar as it compromised the “liberty,” or complete political equality, he advocated for Jews, Catholics, Baptists, Deists, and Muslims.
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His Virginian ally James Madison had already replaced the phrase “all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion” in the 1776
Virginia
Declaration of Rights with the more egalitarian “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion.”
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Madison too realized that, unlike equality, “toleration” could be extended or withdrawn at whim, depending on the degree of government tolerance.
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He believed, as Leland would write, that “religious liberty is a right and not a favor.”
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It was not something the government could infringe or limit to select believers.