Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (57 page)

23.
Allison,
Crescent Obscured
, xvii, 3–106; Marr,
Cultural Roots
, 1–81. For echoes of both Allison and Marr’s definition of American views of North Africa as “a kind of inverse mirror of their own democracy, probity, and enlightenment,” see Michael Oren,
Power, Faith, and Fantasy
, quote on 32.

24.
For a survey of cultural views of Islam, American domestic political rhetoric and, most in depth, an analysis of the Barbary Wars and their “legacy,” see Allison,
Crescent Obscured
, xiii–59; Marr,
Cultural Roots
, 1–114. A focus on inter-Protestant uses of
Islam and early American sermons in provided by Kidd, “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?,” and Kidd,
American Christians and Islam
, 10–11, 18.

25.
Quoted in Esposito,
What Everyone Needs to Know
, 1st ed., 172.

26.
James Hutson wrote a two-page argument in 2002 that Jefferson and other Founders intended to include Muslims “in their vision of the future republic”; see “The Founding Fathers and Islam.” Jefferson, Washington, and Madison are identified as supporting pluralism, which is attributed to “their ethnic backgrounds” by Akbar Ahmed,
Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010), 58–61.

27.
Those who study Jews and Catholics in founding discourse sometimes refer to Muslims in relation to sources that link the three groups, but either dismiss these references without historical context or see Muslims as ways of making Jews and Catholics even farther from normative Protestants. Arthur Hertzberg casts references to Muslims in relations to Jews as “outlandish”; see Hertzberg,
The Jews in America
, 15. Morton Borden makes multiple references to Muslims in his important study of Jews, but never explains them; see Borden,
Jews, Turks, and Infidels
, 14, 16, 33. Naomi W. Cohen, like Hertzberg, sees Muslims as markers that place Jews beyond Christian norms; see Cohen,
Jews in Christian America
, 24–25. Gerard V. Bradley refers to Muslims as “totally behind the horizon of civility”; see Bradley, “The No Religious Test Clause,” 702. References to Muslims appear in works on the relationship of religion to the state in the founding era but without explanation in Leonard Levy,
The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 10, 47, 55, 59, 68, and Michael McConnell, “The Origins and Historical Understanding of the Free Exercise of Religion,”
Harvard Law Review
103 (1990): 1473 n. 323.

28.
For the best history of this twentieth-century struggle for both Jews and Catholics, see Kevin M. Schultz,
Tri-Faith America
:
How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)
.

29.
Perhaps the first to note the continued exclusion of Muslims from “a tripartite pluralism” of “Protestants, Catholics, and Jews” in the twentieth century was the historian William G. McLoughlin,
Soul Liberty: The Baptists’ Struggle in New England, 1630–1833
(Hanover, NH: Brown University Press/University Press of New England, 1991), xi. For a study of the concept of Muslims as “not fully American,” see Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad,
Not Quite American: The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States
(Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004).

30.
Some scholars, myself included, have used
Edward Said’s model of
Orientalism to characterize Muslims as quintessential Others in eighteenth-century American thought, part of an unending binary of “Them” and “Us” that Said would have recognized in the American context. But my intent in this study is not to define or indicate new or old forms of Orientalism in America, but rather to document the more elusive opposition to these negative visions. For earlier work with an emphasis on Orientalism, see D. A. Spellberg, “Islam on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Voltaire’s
Mahomet
Crosses the Atlantic,” in
Views from the Edge: Essays in Honor of Richard W. Bulliet
, ed. Neguin Yavari, Lawrence G. Potter, and Jean-Marc Ran Oppenheim (New York: Columbia University Press for the Middle East Institute, 2004), 245–60, and Denise A. Spellberg, “Islam in America: Adventures in Neo-Orientalism,”
Review of Middle East Studies
43, no. 1 (Summer 2009): 25–35. Neither Said nor American specialists have ever documented what might be termed an anti-Orientalist pattern. A unique attempt to argue a form of philo-Islamic belief for England with a brief suggestion of its transfer to the early American Republic may be found in Humberto Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 1–29, 243 n. 28. Until now, historians of early America have not focused on correcting or explaining the distorted images of anti-Islamic materials. The result has been unquestioning acceptance of anti-Islamic references without attention to concocted distortions, errors, and caricatures. Emphasis on this negative data has inadvertently resulted in the
acceptance of these distortions as normative. This type of analysis does not provide insight into what Muslims actually believed or why these misrepresentations became particularly problematic for Americans. Most important, historians of Islam in early America have not focused on exceptions to the predominant anti-Islamic rule of completely negative representations.

1.
Quoted in John Leland, “Extracts from Number Two, A Little Sermon Sixteen Minutes Long,” in
The Writings of the Elder John Leland
, ed. L. F. Greene (New York: G. W. Wood, 1845), 410.

2.
This is not a new idea. Anti-Islamic representations predominate in most historical works. For example, see Robert J. Allison,
The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 35–59; Thomas S. Kidd,
American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), xii–xiii; Timothy Marr,
The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5–9. One exception to this pattern is David S. Reynolds,
Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 15–20. Most recently, Edward E. Curtis IV, “Stereotypes,” in
Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History
, ed. Edward E. Curtis IV, 2 vols. (New York: Facts on File, 2010), 2:529–30.

3.
Kidd,
American Christians and Islam
, 11–12, 15–17.

4.
Allison,
Crescent Obscured
, 35, 57–59.

5.
The historian who first noted, “There was a Christian picture in which the details (even under the pressure of facts) were abandoned as little as possible, and in which the general outline was never abandoned.… There were shades of difference, but only within a common framework,” is Norman Daniel,
Islam and the West: The Making of an Image
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), quote on 260. See also R. W. Southern,
Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 91–92, 108–9; Edward Said,
Orientalism
(New York: Vintage, 1994), 61–73; Daniel J. Sahas,
John of Damascus on the “Heresy of the Ishmaelites”
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), 127–59; John Tolan,
Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 40–67.

6.
Daniel,
Islam and the West
, 184–88. The idea that, with the exception of John of Damascus in the eighth century, Islam was perceived until the twelfth century as a form of idolatry or paganism has been documented by Daniel,
Islam and the West
, 70, 105–34; Sahas,
Heresy of the Ishmaelites
, 93–95, 131–37; Alberto Ferreiro,
Simon Magus in Patristic, Medieval, and Early Modern Traditions
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005), 221; Frederick Quinn,
The Sum of All Heresies: The Image of Islam in Western Thought
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 24–43, 221. The idea of the heretical Christian monk was described first as an Arian by John of Damascus; Daniel,
Islam and the West
, 4–5. The same monk later was referred to as a heretical Nestorian Christian. Later, his name was revealed as Sergius (or in Islamic texts Bahira); see Susan R. Boettcher, “Insiders and Outsiders,” in
Reformation Christianity
, ed. Peter Matheson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 239.

7.
Robert Fuller,
Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3, 33, 157.

8.
Quoted in George W. Forrell, “Luther and the War Against the Turks,”
Church History
14, no. 4 (December 1945): 264.

9.
R. W. Scribner,
For the Sake of the Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 182–83, plates 150–52. My thanks go to Caroline Castiglione for this reference.

10.
Daniel,
Islam and the West
, 184–85.

11.
Nabil Matar,
Islam in Britain, 1558–1685
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 110.

12.
Forrell, “Luther and the War Against the Turks,” 260.

13.
Quinn,
Sum of All Heresies
, 44.

14.
Forrell, “Luther and the War Against the Turks,” 259, 263 (quote); Adams S. Francisco,
Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and Apologetics
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 4–5, 45–69, 75–121, 174–237; Sean Foley, “Muslims and Social Change in the Atlantic Basin,”
Journal of World History
20, no. 3 (2009): 380–85; Egil Grislis, “Luther and the Turks,”
Muslim World
64, no. 3 (July 1974): 180.

15.
Quoted in Tolan,
Saracens
, 275.

16.
Quinn,
Sum of All Heresies
, 44; Tolan,
Saracens
, 275.

17.
Margaret Meserve,
Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 14; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein,
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 3.

18.
Quoted in Jan Slomp, “Calvin and the Turks,” in
Christian-Muslim Encounters
, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Wadi Z. Haddad (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 134.

19.
Quoted in J. Gregory Miller, “Holy War and Holy Terror: Views of Islam in German Pamphlet Literature, 1520–1545” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1994), 146.

20.
Quoted in Albert Hourani,
Europe and the Middle East
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 26.

21.
Thomas S. Kidd, “ ‘Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?’ Early American Uses of Islam,”
Church History
72, no. 4 (December 2003): 767, 774, 776, 787; Kidd,
American Christians and Islam
, 1–2.

22.
Thomas S. Freeman, “Foxe, John (1516/17–1587),”
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, 58 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 20:165–209.

23.
John Foxe,
The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, with a Life and Defence of the Martyrologist by the Late Rev. George Townsend, D.D.
(London: George Seeley, 1870), 4:80, 39–41, quotations on 4:80.

24.
Muhammad M. Pickthall, trans.,
The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an: Text and Explanatory Translation
(New York: Muslim World League, 1977), 40; Yohanan Friedmann,
Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in Muslim Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 87–120.

25.
Friedmann,
Tolerance
, 6-7.

26.
In Turkish,
yeni çeri
.

27.
Foxe,
Acts
, 4:36.

28.
Ibid., 4:122.

29.
Susan Juster, “What’s ‘Sacred’ about Violence in Early America? Killing and Dying in the Name of God in the New World,”
Commonplace
6, no. 1 (October 2005): 6–7.

30.
Humphrey Prideaux,
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
(London: E. Curll, J. Hooke, and T. Caldecott, 1716), 16–20. Stress on the Prophet as “impostor” has been defined as an “Oriental category” opposite to Jesus; see Edward Said,
Orientalism
, 72; Allison,
Crescent Obscured
, 37–39, 41.

31.
Prideaux,
True Nature of Imposture
, 141–44.

32.
Quoted in Richard H. Popkin, “The Deist Challenge,” in
From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution in England
, ed. Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 195.