Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (6 page)

In one essay on absolute monarchy, Trenchard and Gordon depicted the Ottoman sultan’s “power” as “absolutely despotick: His will, that is to say, his lust, his maggots, or his rage, is his only law, and the only bounds to the authority of the vice-regent of God.”
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Likewise,
Sultan Ismail of Morocco (r. 1672–1727) was called a despot, “an armed tyrant” who waged “unrelenting war … upon his unarmed subjects.”
⁶⁸
This Whig example referred to North African naval forces’ attacks on English ships by Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya beginning in the sixteenth century. The British navy would quell the threat by 1750, but when Trenchard and Gordon were writing
Cato’s Letters
, North African pirates still dominated the seas.
⁶⁹

Taking a page from Protestant polemic,
Cato’s Letters
tied tyranny to Islam in asserting that the problem with all Islamic governments was the faith they shared: “the Mahometan religion, which enjoins a blind submission to all [the sultan’s] commands, on a pain of damnation,” leaving the sultan’s subjects in “abject postures of crouching slaves.” Yet the authors of
Cato’s Letters
were also aware that this extreme characterization of the Ottomans, though useful political rhetoric, was not fully accurate. Even the
janissaries, those most feared, musket-bearing Ottoman troops, the authors of
Cato’s Letters
admitted, sometimes “killed the tyrants.”
⁷⁰
Throughout the sixteenth century, in fact, local uprisings in Damascus, Macedonia, and Baghdad plagued the Ottoman Empire.
In 1622 Osman II (r. 1618–22) became the first sultan to be assassinated by janissary revolt, setting an unfortunate precedent. After him, others would also be deposed, including Mehmed IV in 1687, in the aftermath of the second failed siege of Vienna. Trenchard and Gordon would also have known that in 1703 a janissary rebellion forced the abdication of the sultan Mustafa II (r. 1695–1703).
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But the authors of
Cato’s Letters
may not have known—and certainly never acknowledged—that in this last uprising the military elite in Istanbul were also joined by members of the
ulama
, or religious authorities, and tradesmen. So much for the British belief that Islam fostered mindless political passivity.

In a tract entitled “Arbitrary Government proved incompatible with true Religion, whether Natural or Revealed,” Trenchard and Gordon argued that “true” religion could not “subsist under tyrannical governments.” They claimed that the Islamic faith of the Ottoman Empire was “founded on imposture, blended with outrageous and avowed violence; and by their religion, the imperial executioner is, next to their Alcoran, the most sacred thing amongst them,”
⁷²
views that echoed those of
Prideaux, whose work on matters theological and historical was well known to both authors.
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The blend of imposture and violence linked to the Qur’an found a ready audience among Protestants in Britain and the American colonies.

Predictably, the Ottoman
Turkish sultan (termed “the Turk”) and the pope as the two heads of the Antichrist appeared again in one of
Cato’s Letters
, reiterating the Protestant idea promoted since the sixteenth century. Thus an originally theological symbol was transformed in these tracts into a political vision of individual oppression:

The dichotomies were clear and intractable on both sides of the Atlantic: Islamic imposture versus Protestant Christian truth and Ottoman tyranny versus English liberty.

These anti-Islamic tracts continued to inspire American revolutionaries, who might have read reprints of
Cato’s Letters
in newspapers from New England to the southern colonies.
⁷⁵
And so when they began to apply the Whig political theory of
Cato’s Letters
in defense of their rights, the American rebels defamed British tyranny in anti-Islamic terms.

Samuel West, a Congregational minister in Massachusetts, wrote in 1776 “On the Right to Rebel against Governors.” As he argued, for American rebels, the British were now the new “merciless tyrants” whose “barbarity” surpassed even that of the Ottomans—the ultimate political insult.
⁷⁶
West’s tactic had been pioneered by Protestants of all denominations, who had long impugned their theological foes in the same way. By the American Revolution, the slur best understood on both sides of the Atlantic, whether theological or political, remained an unfavorable comparison to Islam.
⁷⁷

Embedded within “Turk” and “Mahometan,” the two most popular European terms for Muslims, were older, more pejorative connotations. The term “Turk” was often used as a synonym for “Muslim,” even though Turks were a small portion of an enormous variety of ethnic and linguistic identities in the Islamic world, and it was not a neutral designation. Reflecting fears of Ottoman conquests, a “Turk” in English-language usage since the sixteenth century signified “a cruel, rigorous, or tyrannical man” capable of barbaric behavior.
⁷⁸
Even when the Ottoman military threat subsided in Europe, their continued aggression from the North African coast (as ethnic rulers of all pirate states except Morocco) kept the term in use on both sides of the Atlantic. These multiple negative connotations survived in American religious and political discourse through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Another sixteenth-century English word, “Mahometan,” incorrectly identified a Muslim as a worshipper of “Mahomet,” or Muhammad, rather than as a worshipper of God alone.
⁷⁹
This misrepresentation of a basic Islamic tenet became popular in America, as indicated by a variety of spellings: “Mahomedan,” “Mahommedan,” and “Musselman.”
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(Thomas Jefferson had his own orthographic variation of the word: “Mahamedan.”) American reference to the faith as “Mahometanism” rather than Islam, as both Catholics and Protestants had historically
done in Europe, thus compounded inherited European misconceptions of Islamic beliefs.
⁸¹

Englishmen and Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also referred to Muslims with more ethnically accurate designations. By 1785, various American newspapers used the terms “
Arab,” “Moroccan,” “Tunisian,” and “Tripolitan.” The term “
Moor” was more problematic in origin and application.
⁸²
This English word derived from the Latin
Maurus
, meaning someone from Mauretania, the name for the northwestern region of North Africa since Roman times. Ethnically, a Moor could be a Berber or an Arab, who had conquered and ruled the Iberian Peninsula until the Reconquista, while some still remained as a subject population until 1614. As late as the seventeenth century, the term also referred to a person of black or dark skin, in which case it was also rendered as “blackamoor.”
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A tertiary meaning of “Moor” was Muslim, although Muslims did not use this term for themselves.

If words for Muslim were fraught with complexities, so was the word for the Islamic sacred text. The Arabic meaning of the word is “Recitation,” a reference to the oral revelation of what, after the Prophet’s death, became a book. The exact transliteration of the Arabic characters into English should be rendered
Qur’an
, but this spelling was never used in Europe during the medieval or early modern period. More prevalent in both French and English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the term “
Alcoran,” which wrongly fused the Arabic definite article,
al
, with the French spelling “Coran.” So when Europeans called it “the Alcoran,” they were effectively terming it “the the Coran,” a convention that Voltaire recognized as an idiocy, even while maintaining it.
⁸⁴
“
Koran,” another common spelling in the eighteenth century, was what
George Sale would use for the title of his 1734 English translation, which Thomas Jefferson would eventually acquire for his library. But Americans preferred Alcoran, or “the Alcoran of Mahomet,” wrongly intimating that the Prophet was the sacred text’s author.

With such distortions of Islam and its adherents prevalent, fictional representations could only worsen popular misunderstandings. The following analysis of two eighteenth-century works reminds us of the choice that European and American authors faced in representing Islam: to reprise and elaborate standard misconceptions, or to depict the faith and its adherents more accurately. The latter approach would ultimately prove too extreme for eighteenth-century American Protestant audiences.

The first play about Islam performed in America was written by François-Marie Arouet, better known as
Voltaire (1694–1778).
Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophète
, ostensibly about Islam’s founding era, was first staged in Paris in 1742, two years before an English-language production in London. By 1776, a revival of the play had become a hit on the London stage. During the Revolutionary War,
Mahomet
would be performed on both sides, first by the British troops in 1780, and for American and French allied forces two years later.
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In France, Britain, and America, this play was appropriated as a template for religious and political attacks against various enemies, foreign and domestic, all of them Christians. Voltaire had chosen to depict only the Prophet’s aggressive pursuit of his political ends, a caricature who was both a religious impostor and a political fanatic. Through the filter of a distorted Islamic past, Voltaire intended French audiences to receive a more general message about the evils of religious persecution and intolerance. At a time when Catholic violence against Protestants was a national policy, Voltaire used an imagined Islamic context to avoid direct censure from the clergy and the government. But his ploy failed to fool Catholic censors. The play would find a more receptive audience when reinterpreted in British and American contexts. In the former, with the addition of new prologues, newspaper advertisements, and reviews, this play ostensibly about Muhammad became freighted with concerns about religion and political liberty.
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Americans at war with Britain would follow suit in adapting the play’s Muslim villains to serve their ideological ends.

In contrast to Voltaire’s distorted representation of Islam, the American
Royall Tyler’s 1797 novel
The Algerine Captive
advanced a more accurate depiction of the faith. Tyler claimed his protagonist’s captivity in Algiers was based on facts culled from real American experiences, in line with an older British genre of North African captivity narratives with which Americans were familiar.
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Unlike Voltaire, Tyler allowed his Muslim characters to speak forcefully and often accurately about their beliefs, and in doing so, he criticized European authors for their bigotry against Islam. Along the way, the author condemned Christian religious intolerance and castigated the practice of slavery in both America (by white Americans) and North Africa (by Muslims).
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Like
Voltaire’s play,
The Algerine Captive
provided an opportunity for Americans to reflect upon their own most pressing religious and political issues through the prism of an Islamic context.
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But both literary efforts revealed more about their authors and audiences than about their ostensible subjects.
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In
Mahomet
, Voltaire recounted the founding of Islam as a polemical tale of a licentious villain, whose relentless lust and pursuit of power victimize all who stand in his way. Since the eighth century, Christians had charged that the Prophet’s multiple marriages could only be the evidence of unbridled desire, emphasizing a notable contrast with the celibacy of Jesus.
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Criticism of the Prophet’s marriages had become a cornerstone of his polemical biography in medieval Catholic sources, and would be reiterated in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestant texts.
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The majority of the characters in
Mahomet
were Voltaire’s creations, with no relation to historical reality.
⁹³
His plot reimagined how the intransigent Meccan pagans of the seventh century were forced through violence to yield their faith and sovereignty to the duplicitous false prophet Mahomet. In fact, the final capitulation of pagan Mecca to the Prophet’s monotheist forces in 630 had been negotiated by a treaty two years before. When the city surrendered, only four inhabitants were actually killed.
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But Voltaire’s point about religious fanaticism would not be served by retelling this basically peaceful resolution. By imagining the murder of pagans, Voltaire condemns rather than celebrates the triumph of Islam as a new monotheistic religion. To further stimulate outrage against the Muslim “oppressors,” he depicts the Meccan pagans as true, honest, heroic martyrs.