Read Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders Online
Authors: Denise A. Spellberg
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190.
Henry Stubbe,
An Account of the Rise and Progress of Mahometanism: with the Life of Mahomet and a Vindication of Him and His Religion from the Calumnies of the Christians
, ed. Hafiz Mahmud Khan Shairani (Lahore: Oxford and Cambridge Press, 1911; repr. 1975), 72.
191.
Ibid., 2, 1.
192.
Ibid., 74–75; Holt,
Defender of Islam
, 20.
193.
Stubbe,
Mahometanism
, 89.
194.
Ibid., 141–42.
195.
Ibid., 145–46.
196.
James R. Jacob,
Henry Stubbe, Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 71–72; Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment
, 1–59.
197.
Stubbe,
Mahometanism
, 180.
198.
Ibid., 181.
199.
Ibid., 181–84.
200.
László Kontler, “The Idea of Toleration and the Image of Islam in Early Enlightenment English Thought,” in
Sous le signe des lumières: Articles rédigés à l’occasion du VIIe Congrès International de Lumières
, ed. Eva Balazs (Budapest: n.p., 1987), 6–26.
Humberto Garcia rightly argues that Stubbe’s references to “Islamic toleration” were used “as a beating stick against English toleration—the entitlement to freedom of conscience that in practice excluded many nonconformists for citizenship.” See Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment
, 5–6.
201.
Stubbe,
Mahometanism
, 188.
202.
Ibid., 71.
203.
Marshall,
John Locke
, 6–7, 11, 14, 59–60.
204.
Locke,
Epistola
, 81; Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment
, 58–59; Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 71–72. Matar stresses not the Ottoman precedent but instead the importance of the English dissenter Edward Bagshaw’s work on toleration.
205.
Jacob,
Stubbe
, 147, 154, 161; Holt,
Defender of Islam
, 10.
206.
See John Toland,
Nazarenus or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity
(London, 1718), 14–16; J. A. I. Champion,
The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken
:
The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 126. For this connection between Deists, Unitarians, and Islam, see also Kidd, “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?,” 785–86; Marshall,
John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture
, 391–92; Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment
, 30–59.
207.
Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment
, 51. The first use of the term “Unitarian” in English print dates to 1672, according to Earl Morse Wilbur,
A History of
Unitarianism in Transylvania, England, and America
, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 1:199.
208.
Jacob,
Stubbe
, 155; David A. Pailin,
Attitudes to Other Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 129–32.
209.
Marshall,
John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture
, 393.
210.
Holt, “Arab History,” 292.
211.
Champion,
Pillars
, 99–132. This “Islamophilia” was a limited English religious and political construction, which embraced toleration, following the impact of Stubbe and Toland, but had its most decided impact on English literature rather than actual political change regarding Muslims on either side of the Atlantic. See Srinivas Aravamudan,
Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3. These ideas are most fully explored as they move into the eighteenth-century by Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment
, 1–59. For a revisionist view of early Islamic history as comprised of a collective of monotheist “believers” that included Jews and Christians as well as Muslims that Socinian/Unitarians might have hailed as their own, see Fred M. Donner,
Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2010).
212.
Jacob,
Stubbe
, 155; Champion,
Pillars
, 110–11; Marshall,
John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture
, 391–92.
213.
Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 72.
214.
Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment
, 1–7.
215.
A response to Prideaux titled
Mahomet No Impostor, or A Defence of Mahomet
, allegedly authored by a Muslim fictively named Abdullah Mahumed Omar, is found in Daniel,
Islam and the West
, 288; Robert J. Allison,
The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 35–42.
216.
Russell, “
Philosophus
,” 258 n. 63.
217.
Holt,
Defender of Islam
, 10. For a detailed account of the first Muslims to publish this treatise and its ramifications, see Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment
, 225–31.
218.
Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment
, 30–59, 159–68, 243 n. 28.
219.
Russell, “
Philosophus
,” 258 n. 63.
220.
Milton, “Locke,” suggests that Locke was not directly involved with Shaftesbury’s plan to foment rebellion or the assassination plot against the king, but the scholar James H. Tully disagrees; see Tully, introduction to Locke,
Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
, 9–11.
221.
Tully, introduction to Locke,
Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
, 9–11.
222.
Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 76.
223.
Kamen,
Toleration
, 231.
224.
J. W. Gough, introduction to Locke,
Epistola
, 4–7; Marshall,
John Locke
, 12, 14, 17–18, 20–21; Marshall,
John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture
, 597–98.
225.
Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 68–69; Kamen,
Toleration
, 224.
226.
See Robin R. Mundill,
England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David S. Katz,
Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1665
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); David S. Katz,
The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
227.
Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 68–69. For an in-depth study of the presence of Christian converts to Islam in Britain as well as diplomatic and commercial relations with Islamic nations during this period, see Matar,
Islam in Britain
, 1–50, and also Nabil Matar,
Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005).
228.
Zagorin,
Toleration
, 248. Locke did not know that Samuel Richardson, a Baptist, had advanced the same argument about Muslims much earlier in 1646 in debate with Presbyterians; see Estep,
Revolution
, 67.
229.
Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 68; John Locke,
Two Tracts on Government
, ed. and trans. Philip Abrams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 127. Bagshaw may have been implicitly referring to a legal precedent promulgated under King Charles I (r. 1625–49) that warned that it “would be a sin in us to hurt their Persons,” referring to “Turks and Infidels,” meaning Muslims and, presumably, Jews; see William Salkeld,
Reports of Cases Adjudg’d in the Court of King’s Bench
(London: E. Nutt and R. Gosling, 1717), 1:46.
230.
For the best account of Locke’s change of attitude about toleration, see Marshall,
John Locke
, 62–83; Zagorin,
Toleration
, 250.
231.
Quoted in Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 69.
232.
Marshall,
John Locke
, 62–89.
233.
Zagorin,
Toleration
, 251–52; Marshall,
John Locke
, 62–89.
234.
Zagorin,
Toleration
, 251–52, 255.
235.
Locke,
A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
, x.
236.
Zagorin,
Toleration
, 259. Locke met
Philip von Limborch (d. 1712), a follower of Arminius (d. 1609), and member of a group known
in Holland as the
Remonstrants. They embraced the idea of universal grace, avoided the persecution of all others, and felt it their duty to follow their own consciences “and to leave others to the judgment of God.” Russell, “
Philosophus
,” 249. In Rotterdam, Locke lived for two years in the house of Benjamin Furly (d. 1714), an English Quaker, who had worked with Henry Stubbe.
237.
Marshall,
John Locke
, 357.
238.
Zagorin,
Toleration
, 245.
239.
Quoted in Marshall,
John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture
, 593.
240.
Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 71–73, 75.
241.
Marilyn C. Baseler,
“Asylum for Mankind”: America, 1607–1800
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 326.
242.
Salkeld,
Reports of Cases
, 1:46.
243.
Ibid.; Baseler, “
Asylum for Mankind
,” 242, 326, 330.
244.
Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 75–76; Baseler, “
Asylum for Mankind
,” 330.
245.
Locke,
Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
, 50. For the difference between English citizens and denizens, see Baseler, “
Asylum for Mankind
,” 329–30.
246.
Locke,
Epistola
, 135. That this mistaken precedent came from John Greaves’s text on the Ottoman Empire, see Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 76. On the connection between the mufti and the pope, see Waldron,
God, Locke, and Equality
, 220–21; Marshall,
John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture
, 593–617, 597 (quote).
247.
Locke,
Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
, 50.
248.
R. C. Repp, “Shaykh al-Islam,” in
Encyclopaedia of Islam
, 11 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960), 9:399–402; Matar, “Turbanned Nations,” 75–76.
249.
This point was first made by Matar, “Turbanned Nations.”
250.
Richard L. Smith,
Ahmad al-Mansur, Islamic Visionary
(New York: Pearson Longman, 2006), 58–61, 138–40.
251.
Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law and Muslim Minorities: The Juristic Discourse on Muslim Minorities from the Second/Eighth to the Eleventh/Seventeenth Centuries,”
Islamic Law and Society
1 (1994): 141–87.
252.
Nabil Matar, introduction to
In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century
, ed. and trans. Nabil Matar (New York: Routledge, 2003), xxv. The dispute between the Hanafi, which would become the dominant Ottoman Sunni school of law, and the Maliki or North African precedents in the premodern period are noteworthy; see Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law,” 147, 149.
253.
Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law,” 152. On legal precedents for Muslim concepts of
“religious freedom” in non-Muslim lands, see Andrew F. March,
Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 165–79.
254.
Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law,” 171–73.
255.
Ibid., 175; March,
Islam and Liberal Citizenship
, 183–89, 261–63.
256.
Quoted in Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law,” 175.
257.
Locke,
Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
, 54.
258.
Waldron,
God, Locke, and Equality
, 220–21.
259.
Waldron makes this point for Muslims and Catholics, ibid., 220–22.
260.
Tully, “Note on the Text,” in
Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
, 19. Locke’s Latin original had listed Christian groups found
in Holland: “Remonstrants, Anti-remonstrants, Lutherans, Anabaptists, or Socinians.”
261.
Marshall,
John Locke
, 369–70.
262.
Locke,
Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
, 54. This is a facsimile of the first edition of the anonymous publication of the Latin
Epistola de Tolerantia
in English by William Popple.