Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (5 page)

Foxe concluded his addendum on the Ottomans with “A Prayer against the Turks,” which attempted to rally the faithful against “the malicious fury of these Turks,
Saracens, Tartarians, against Gog and Magog, and all the malignant rabble of Antichrist, enemies to thy Son Jesus, our Lord and Saviour.” By invoking the last battle between Gog and Magog in the book of Revelation, Foxe drew a now familiar comparison between the pope and the Ottoman sultan, judging that “the Turk is the more open and manifest enemy against Christ and his church.” But he could not in the end decide whether the Ottoman sultan or the pope “hath consumed and spilt more Christian blood.”
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Aided by illustrations, Foxe’s work would become “the most influential” of Protestant martyrologies in America’s British colonies.
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Foxe’s book was followed by an equally popular anti-Islamic polemic by another Englishman, which would prove extremely influential in the American colonies. In 1697, an Anglican clergyman named Humphrey
Prideaux (1648–1724) wrote
The True Nature of Imposture Fully Display’d in the Life of Mahomet. With a Discourse Annex’d for the Vindicating of Christianity from this Charge, Offered to the Consideration of the Deists of the Present Age
, to attack both Deists and
Socinians. Charging that these sects believed “the Gospel of Jesus Christ is an Imposture,” Prideaux thus likened them to the followers of the ultimate impostor, the Prophet Muhammad.
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Mahomet, Prideaux argued, had “pretended to
receive all his Revelations from the Angel Gabriel,” and had “forged” chapters of the Qur’an based on Jewish and Christian sources.
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Prideaux drew other similarities between Islam and the two new Protestant sects. The Deists in England were never “an organized religious group”; nevertheless, they were deemed dangerous because they emphasized that God could be understood by human reason.
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Even more alarming was their rejection of miracles and the divine authority of the Bible.
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The Deists also opposed religious intolerance and the clergy’s imposition of Christian orthodoxy.
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Most important, Deists, like Socinians, rejected both the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity; both, like Muslims, believed in a unitary God.
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Indeed, some Deists and Socinians looked favorably upon Islam’s uncompromising monotheism, much to the consternation of their critics.
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Prideaux claimed to know Arabic, which would have been taught at both his secondary school of Westminster in London and his college of Christ Church, Oxford; but his published works demonstrate little interest in the original sources of the faith.
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Instead,
The True Nature of Imposture Fully Display’d in the Life of Mahomet
merely echoes earlier English texts in its depiction of the Prophet as an impostor. Already in 1678, nineteen years before Prideaux, Lancelot Addison had anonymously published a book titled
First State of Muhametism, or an Account of the Author and Doctrine of that Imposture.
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Drawing from such contemporary English publications, flawed Latin translations of Arabic texts, and medieval Christian polemic, Prideaux would make numerous erroneous assertions about Islam.
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Prideaux’s book may have been written as a response to a treatise authored by
Henry Stubbe in 1671.
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Stubbe denied the charge that Islam was spread by the sword, and portrayed the Prophet in a uniquely positive light.
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The pro-Islamic argument of Stubbe’s work had prevented it from being published; nevertheless, it had circulated widely in manuscript form.
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In contrast, Prideaux’s rebuttal would become enormously popular in England, with three editions the first year and multiple later ones on both sides of the Atlantic.
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British editions of Prideaux appeared in Philadelphia in 1758 and in Connecticut in 1784; an American edition was published in Vermont in 1798.
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Through Prideaux’s book, the Prophet in American political discourse evolved to become not just a religious impostor, but also a militant zealot who held the “sword in one hand, and the Qur’an in the other.”
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After crossing the Atlantic, anti-Islamic polemic found a ready audience in Protestant congregations throughout the American colonies. Following their European predecessors, American preachers across denominations demonized Islam (or the Prophet or the Ottoman sultan) as one of the twin-headed manifestations of the
Antichrist.
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In the colony of Massachusetts Bay, the
Puritan leader
Cotton Mather (1663–1728) and the banished
Anne Hutchinson (d. 1643) would both condemn Islam, invoking the familiar image of the Ottoman Antichrist’s head merged with that of the pope.
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In New York, the Lutheran pastor
Erick Tobias Bjorck identified the Antichrist with Martin Luther’s grotesque conflation of the pope and “Mahomet.”
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But such vilification of Islam did not preclude selective appropriation of its ideas and precedents. In his 1721 book
The Christian Philosopher
, Mather directs his Christian readers to excel Muslims in their piety and intellectual pursuits: “
May our Devotion exceed the Mahometan as much as our Philosophy!
”
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And although Mather denigrated Islam as a religion, he found in it a useful example for the reconciliation of natural science and philosophy. He had read a 1686 English translation of the medieval Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl (d. 1185), who had demonstrated that human reason led ineluctably to belief in the existence of God.
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Mather found this idea so compelling that despite his general disdain for Islam, he would urge, “Reader, even a
Mahometan
will shew thee one, without any
Teacher
, but
Reason
in a serious View of
Nature
, led on to the Acknowledgement of a Glorious GOD.” Mather even proclaimed that “
God has thus far taught
a Mahometan!”—thus acknowledging Islam’s solution to a philosophical problem he himself also wished to solve.
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The first Latin translation of Ibn Tufayl’s Islamic treatise that Mather thus praised had earlier influenced the English philosopher John Locke to develop one of the key ideas of the Enlightenment.

But for the most part the example of Islam was put to disparaging use, and American Protestants of all denominations also learned to deploy it against fellow Christians when they deviated theologically.
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In 1676, Roger Williams, the Puritan whose heterodox ideas led to his banishment from Massachusetts Bay, summoned anti-Islamic imagery to condemn the Quakers at his new colony in
Providence, Rhode Island. Williams reiterated that the Qur’an was an invention of the
Prophet Muhammad’s when he charged that
George Fox, the founder of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, likewise laid false claims to divine inspiration.
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According to medieval Catholic lore that was later adopted by Protestants, the Prophet had trained a dove, the Christian symbol of the Holy Spirit, to trick his followers into believing his revelation divine.
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Yet Williams also correctly identified the core Islamic tenet that Muhammad, the seal of the prophets and God’s final messenger, superseded the revelations of both Moses and Jesus, earlier prophets sent by the same divine source. Williams thus concluded that both Muslims and Quakers were deceived by false revelations.
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In spite of his vehement condemnation of George Fox, however, Williams admitted and tolerated Quakers in his new colony when they would have been executed in Massachusetts Bay. Similarly, his defamation of Islam’s founder belied his very different views about the proper treatment of individual Muslims, as will be detailed in the next chapter.

Even the dramatic, compelling sermons of
the Great Awakening, a revival of evangelical Protestant religious fervor throughout the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, featured preachers who applied such anti-Islamic rhetoric to new circumstances both theological and personal. The American Congregational pastor
Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), a key figure in the movement, preached and wrote against Islam, contending that the destruction of both the Catholic Church and Islam would usher in the Judgment Day foretold in the book of Revelation.
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Around this time, the itinerant British evangelical preacher
George Whitefield (1714–1770) made several trips across the Atlantic to great acclaim. Whitefield was popular, but he also harshly condemned an Anglican bishop, stating that he was “no more a true Christian than Muhammad, or an infidel.”
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But such insults were so commonly used that even Whitefield himself was not spared similar attacks: his own former printer in London showered him with anti-Islamic slurs, calling him “a Mahomet, a Caesar, an impostor, a Don Quixote, a devil, the beast, a man of sin, the Antichrist.”
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In 1739, multitudes flocked to hear Whitefield’s sermons in Philadelphia.
Benjamin Franklin observed that the local clergy refused to let him preach from their pulpits, and so “he was obliged to preach in the fields.” To remedy the “inclemencies” attendant on these outdoor meetings, a new building was commissioned by the city’s trustees “expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion who
might desire to say something to the people of Philadelphia.” Franklin added that “the building’s design” would not cater to any particular sect, “so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mahometanism to us, he would find a pulpit in his service.”
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Franklin’s apparently universal religious toleration and inclusion of Islam in planning this new Philadelphia religious gathering site ignored the reality that even if a Muslim cleric were to be dispatched from the hated regime of the Ottoman Turks, Whitefield and other Protestants would certainly have monopolized the building to demonize Islam.
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Franklin’s inclusion of Islam as a potential American faith was a decidedly unusual point of view, one that the majority of Protestant Americans would have abhorred and rejected.

The view of the Prophet as a militant zealot laid the foundation of the idea that the Ottoman Empire, ruled by the sultan and his standing army of
janissaries, was the epitome of tyranny. In this political defamation, the pope and the Catholic powers, such as France and Spain, were again linked to the Ottomans, just as Islam and Catholicism were conflated to represent the Antichrist in apocryphal imagery.
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As colonists, rebels, and citizens of a new nation, Americans, long fed Protestant eschatological dogma, rapidly adopted these political fears of Islam and Catholicism. Later these suspicions would also influence prejudices about Muslims and Catholics as citizens of the new country.

Eighteenth-century American hatred of the Ottoman Empire was further fueled by anti-government tracts evoking the Whig ideology then emerging in England. These treatises emphasized the importance of individual rights, including the natural right to form a government by compact, exercise freedom of speech and the press, and worship freely without government control.
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Inherent in these uniquely British liberties was the belief that a government that infringed on these rights could be legitimately overthrown. The Whigs proposed the Ottoman regime as an antithesis of these ideals, commonly calling the sultan’s subjects his “slaves.” Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Ottomans depicted as the symbol of despotism allowed Englishmen to make veiled criticisms of their own government.
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The Whig characterization
of the Ottomans would eventually cross the Atlantic and become the antithesis of American political ideals. Americans thus sought to assert their rights as British subjects, in opposition to Ottoman and all other Islamic governments—a pattern that would prevail through the Revolution and during the framing and ratification of the Constitution.
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Among the Whig texts, those of
John Trenchard (1662–1723) and
Thomas Gordon (d. 1750) especially influenced the American revolutionaries. The two first united to produce a London weekly called the
Independent Whig
, as a vehicle to attack the establishment of religion. From 1720 to 1723, Trenchard and Gordon together adopted the pen name
Cato the Younger (95–46 BCE), after the Roman critic of political corruption, authoring a series of tracts known as
Cato’s Letters, or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects
, first issued in the
London Journal
and later produced as a book.
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In these essays, they would repeatedly vilify the Ottoman Empire and North African states as symbols of Islamic religious and political tyranny in order to advance their Whig agenda.
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