Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (9 page)

At the end of the eighteenth century, it was still theologically and politically dangerous to suggest that Islam retained some merit even for Muslims. In fact, Tyler had, in certain paragraphs in his novel, done just that. He had chastised the mutual enmity of Muslims and Christians and held each group to account for their violence as a perversion of their own creeds:

The only factual flaw in this compelling passage was Tyler’s misunderstanding of the Islamic stance
on Jesus: The Qur’an accepts Jesus only as a prophet, and does not acknowledge his “divinity.” But otherwise it was a cogent call for mutual tolerance.

There were, however, earlier European precedents for religious tolerance. A handful of scattered Christians spoke bravely against religious violence while it raged around them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many were accused of heresy. Even fewer opposed systematic persecution by the state in the name of doctrinal difference. Among these, a subset of Catholics and Protestants also defended Muslims from coerced conversion, state persecution, and violence. Their ideas were never considered acceptable while they lived. But these ideas evolved over centuries, eventually to be espoused by Jefferson and other Founders as religious freedom, political equality, and citizenship.

O
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A
PRIL
28, 1584, a garrulous miller from a town near Venice, Italy, told the Inquisition that Jesus commanded all to “Love God and your neighbor,” an application of the Golden Rule he interpreted to include Muslims: “the majesty of God has given the Holy Spirit to all, to Christians, to heretics, to Turks, and to Jews; and he considers them all dear, and they are all saved in the same manner.”
¹
Domenico Scandella, known by the nickname Menocchio (d. 1601), advocated the equality of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, a shocking and heretical idea for the Catholic inquisitors who believed there was no salvation outside of the Catholic Church.
²
But God, in this miller’s estimation, did not play favorites based on religion or Christian denomination. This meant that the church held no exclusive claim on the only or true faith—an intolerable heresy for the Inquisition.

Since the Italian miller believed God loved and saved everyone equally, he had argued for universal religious tolerance, although “tolerance” was a word he never used. In so doing, Menocchio had unwittingly professed the heresy of Origen of Alexandria (d. 254), and of that he was accused at his first Inquisition trial in 1584: “You brought again to light
Origen’s heresy that all peoples would be saved, Jews, Turks, pagans, Christians, and all infidels, since the Holy Spirit has been given equally to them all.”
³
For these and other heretical beliefs, Menocchio would be imprisoned for two years, in squalid conditions. His health broken, he was released, but required by Inquisition order to wear a smock with a cross as a penitential sign, and enjoined never to speak of his beliefs or leave his village.
⁴

In his monumental inquiry into Menocchio’s cosmology and persecution,
The Cheese and the Worms
,
Carlo Ginzburg first tried to make sense of these beliefs in the context of the Reformation, a time of religious violence throughout Europe that set Catholics against Protestants and various denominations of Protestants against one another.

The miller’s heretical ideas about tolerance toward Muslims were predicated upon his assumption of their ultimate capacity for salvation, an unusual position among both Catholics and Protestants. More commonly, the Christians who argued for the toleration of Muslims did so with an eye toward the eventual conversion of the adherents of Islam to Christianity, presumed to be the only Muslim path to heaven. Few indeed were those Christians in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries who would have argued for the toleration of Muslims as Muslims, and they never much disrupted the consensus of anti-Islamic sentiment among the Christian majority. Nevertheless, these ideas about universal tolerance evolved into policies that often explicitly included Muslim toleration in a variety of Christian societies on both sides of the Atlantic from the sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries.
⁵
Eventually these marginalized views laid the groundwork for eighteenth-century ideas about Muslims as future citizens of the United States.

Menocchio’s defense of Muslims as saved and equal in God’s eyes extended also to Jews, who would be linked with Muslims in other European arguments about tolerance during this period. Unlike Muslims, who were a powerful external political force and for the most part lived outside of European society, Jews were a scattered, resident minority who were never considered a military danger to their Christian neighbors.
⁶
But, like Muslims, Jews were deemed “quintessential religious outsiders,” whose refusal to convert and acknowledge Jesus as messiah provoked resentment and sporadic violence.
⁷
The term “infidel,” synonymous with Muslims, would also be applied somewhat less frequently to Jews.
⁸
Uniquely, Jews were also implicated as deicides, complicit in perpetuity for the death of Jesus.
⁹
In Catholic and most Protestant theologies, both Muslims and Jews remained “in different ways, an immanent presence and perceived threat to Christian society.”
¹⁰
Whether described as objects of Christian persecution, forced conversion, salvation, or tolerance, Muslims
and
Jews continued to be conjoined in these disputes.
¹¹

Some of Menocchio’s ideas of tolerance seem to echo earlier medieval European peasant lore about Muslims in Catholic France, Italy, and Spain. They remind us that these perspectives existed even among some common folk in Europe.
¹²
Twenty years before Menocchio’s first Inquisition trial, an Italian poem by an anonymous peasant expressed ideas similar to his. In verses never published yet part of a rich peasant oral culture, the poet declaimed that Muslims, Jews, and Christians all had a “law” based on the Ten Commandments dictated to them by the same God. Describing Muhammad as “a prophet and a great warrior of God,” the poem commanded Turks and Christians to end their strife:

There is no proof that Menocchio heard these verses recited. Nor do we know whether the words circulated in nearby villages. However, the equality of the three monotheisms and the divine command for Christians and Turks to cease military strife (even if this meant Christian retreat and Muslim advance to a stalemate) were consistent with the miller’s own worldview. Such pacifist sentiments are remarkable in light of the ongoing Ottoman military
threat to Western Europe. Only thirty-five years before, in 1529, the Ottomans had attempted their first unsuccessful siege of Vienna. By 1537, Sultan Suleyman’s fleet had attacked the coasts of Italy, with the Ottoman military remaining a significant threat to Western Europe until the end of the seventeenth century.
¹⁴

Menocchio paraphrased a second popular European source, known as
The Legend of the Three Rings
, an allegorical tale identifying the God of Muslims as the one of Christians and Jews.
¹⁵
In this medieval tale, all three religions were literally a family, with God as their father. As Menocchio boldly told his inquisitors in a second trial in 1599, God was merciful to all his children:

If Christianity, Islam, and Judaism were all religions of the same God, then no religion could claim superiority. Menocchio’s implication that Christianity was not
the
religion, but merely
one
religion among the three divinely inspired, was a dangerous departure from the vast majority of his contemporaries.

The inquisitors seized upon the miller’s heretical words, and immediately asked him which religion represented the “right law.”
¹⁷
The only doctrinally correct answer—Christianity—was obvious, but Menocchio refused to provide it. Instead, he offered a sociological reason for the existence of religious differences. The miller affirmed, “Yes sir, I do believe that every person considers his faith to be right, and we do not
know which is the right one: but because my grandfather, my father, and my people have been Christians, I want to remain a Christian, and believe that this is the right one.”
¹⁸
The correct answer but for the wrong reasons. This failure to assert the summary superiority of Christianity confirmed Menocchio as a heretic.
¹⁹

Menocchio was not the first Catholic in Italy to have come under scrutiny for his strange ideas about the salvation of Muslims and Jews. More than a decade before him and hundreds of miles away, another miller whom Menocchio never met asserted that “the Hebrew, the Turkish,” and all other believers should retain their faiths.
²⁰
Similar utterances are to be found in
Spanish Inquisition records beginning in the fifteenth century, even while mid-fourteenth-century
Castilian legal codes forbade the forced conversion of Jews and Muslims in Christian territory.
²¹
In 1488, a Catholic peasant woman named
Juana Pérez declared that “the good Jew would be saved and the good Moor, in his law, and why else had God made them?”
²²
It wasn’t until four years later, in 1492, that their Catholic majesties Ferdinand and Isabella conquered the last Islamic dynasty in Spain and expelled the Jews for their beliefs. Beginning in the early sixteenth century, Muslims in Spain would be forcibly converted to Catholicism.