Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (14 page)

In 1671, the same year that Locke read Pococke’s Latin translation, Stubbe attempted the first sustained English defense of Islam and its Prophet. Presenting Islam as a more tolerant faith than Christianity, Stubbe contrasted it with his own Christian society’s intolerance, but his rigorous defense of Islam and critique of English religious persecution proved too inflammatory for publication, and his work circulated only in manuscript form.
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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
drew heavily upon Dr. Pococke’s Latin translations of early Islamic history, suggesting that the author of the first English treatise defending Islam was, like Locke, unable or unwilling to use Arabic, or else found it unnecessary.
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Stubbe’s intention was to assault the “great untruths” and “little integrity” in Christian histories of Islam,
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single-handedly challenging a millennium of anti-Islamic Christian polemic. Unlike all of his predecessors, he characterized the seventh-century Islamic conquests of the Middle East as “that Stupendous Revolution.” He postulated that the triumph of Islam could be explained in part by Christianity’s being weak, rife with “irreligion, impiety, & division into Sects,”
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in what was clearly also a comment on circumstances in seventeenth-century England.

But while aiming to correct certain prevailing distortions, Stubbe made several glaring mistakes of his own. He claimed, for instance, that the Prophet traveled to North Africa and Spain during his lifetime, and served in Christian armies under a powerful early convert named Abu Bakr (d. 634), whom Stubbe claimed to be his uncle, but was actually his father-in-law.
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Finally, following one of the more common Christian misrepresentations of Islamic tradition, Stubbe insisted that the Prophet “wrote” the Qur’an.
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Stubbe praised the Prophet as a political leader, contradicting what he described as “the Calumnies charged upon him by the Christians.” His
Muhammad was an “extraordinary person,” of “ready Wit,” “penetrating Judgment,” and “undaunted courage,” who was “equally qualified for Actions of Warr, or the Arts of Peace and civil Government.”
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At the same time, Stubbe expressed admiration for Islam’s emphasis on
the oneness of God and its rejection of the Trinity, which he attributed to the influence of Arianism, a Christian heresy.
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By implication, then, the Prophet Muhammad’s religion was not new; he had revived an early, truer form of Christianity, in which the Trinity and Jesus’s divinity were later corruptions.
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Clearly, Stubbe’s support for these unorthodox and unpopular ideas made him a Christian heretic.

Polygamy and warfare, two aspects of Islam historically denigrated by Christian authors, also found a champion in Stubbe. Stubbe reminded readers that King David had been a polygamist. Rather than institutionalizing licentiousness, Stubbe argued, the Prophet had solved a social problem because, as he asserted strangely, “East and South” “there are far more Women than Men.” In the chapter devoted to “the justice of the Mahometan Warrs,” Stubbe refuted as “a falsehood” the notion that Islam was spread by the sword.
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At the same time, he noted that many Christian theologians had addressed spreading their own faith by force, a premise the author rejected.
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Stubbe emphasized that the Islamic precedent for the toleration of Christians and Jews came from the Qur’an, was practiced by the successors of the Prophet during the conquest of the Middle East, and continued to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire.
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The lesson for his readers? Toleration for fellow Christians would promote peaceful coexistence and prevent the sort of civil strife witnessed repeatedly in seventeenth-century England.
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Noting that “Christians and other Religions might peaceably subsist under their Protection, if they payed the Tribute demanded,” meaning the annual poll tax called the
jizya
, Stubbe implied that Christians defined as heretics in England might in fact be better treated in the Islamic world: “As Mahomet persecuted none for Religion, who believed one God & the day of Judgment, so lest of all the Christians, who, as we have seen before, enjoyed more of his Favours than any of the other Religions.”
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That he “did not see fit to publish” his manuscript may well suggest he knew that King Charles II would have answered such criticism with prison or worse.
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Stubbe’s treatise would remain unpublished during Locke’s lifetime, but as a friend and correspondent, Locke may have had access to the widely circulated manuscript.
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In his later work on toleration, Locke also notes the Ottoman Turkish toleration of Christians, but this does not appear to be the origin of his support for the “civil rights” of Muslims.
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Still, plagiarized parts of Stubbe’s manuscript would find their
way into the English Deist
Charles Blount’s
Oracles of Reason
(1693), four years after Locke’s first letter on toleration was published, as part of the connection between Deism’s remote but unitary God and the God of Islam that was first established in late-seventeenth-century England.
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A form of this heretical association with Islam would be linked to Locke at the end of his life.
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The partial appearance of Stubbe’s treatise in the Deist Blount’s work may have in turn provoked Humphrey
Prideaux’s 1697 attack on the Prophet Muhammad, which was also intended as an indictment of the ideas of English Deists.
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By the end of the seventeenth century, not only Deists but Unitarians (as the Socinians, who rejected the Trinity, came to be known) and Muslims were “linked in the public mind,” according to James Jacob.
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More recently, John Marshall has asserted that “Islam was thus central to tolerationist debates in late seventeenth-century England because of the similarities alleged between Islam and anti-Trinitarianism,” including both Deism and Unitarian thought.
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Both were heresies in need of extirpation in the eyes of Anglican Protestants like
Humphrey Prideaux, who compared them to Islam.
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By contrast, the English minority who embraced Deist or Unitarian viewpoints often represented Islam in a positive light, presenting it as one of three similar “pristine” monotheisms, its revelations equal to but not surpassing those of the Old and New Testaments.
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But such relatively positive views of Islam were limited to the extent that the faith mirrored their own heterodox Deist and Unitarian Christian-based theologies. In 1682, English Unitarians attempted to meet with the Moroccan ambassador in London to discuss their theological unity.
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Locke knew about this meeting and wrote an acquaintance for a description of the Muslim ambassador.
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He would eventually in his work on toleration defend both Unitarians and Muslims from persecution. In other ways, the same English Protestants also simultaneously denigrated Islam in order to critique repressive Anglican Christianity, the established faith of the English government. And so Islam, understood on its own terms, remained selectively overwritten and frequently distorted.
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Views like Prideaux’s anti-Islamic, anti-Deist, and anti-Unitarian arguments would prevail among Protestants into the eighteenth century.
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Prideaux eventually rose through the Anglican clerical ranks to become dean of Norwich.
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In contrast, Stubbe’s surreptitiously circulated manuscript in defense of Islam would not be published in England until 1911, thanks to a subscription by a group of Muslims residing in
London.
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Although
Humberto Garcia has emphasized the importance and scope of Stubbe’s underground circulation in England, his views in praise of Islamic toleration did not contribute directly to debates about Muslim rights or citizenship in the Anglo-Atlantic world, having been limited to the reform of English religious and political liberties.
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Locke’s long association with the seditious
Lord Shaftesbury, a founder of the opposition Whig party and advocate of religious and civil toleration for dissenters but not Catholics, resulted in suspicion falling on Locke too. (Locke never knew that Prideaux, a copy of whose anti-Islamic polemic Locke owned, had spied on him at Oxford in 1681, reporting directly to Charles II’s undersecretary of state.)
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Locke wrote a pamphlet to aid Shaftesbury’s defense, which only exacerbated suspicions about the author. After his exoneration at trial, Shaftesbury fled to Holland in 1682, where he died the next year. In 1683, Shaftesbury’s radical Whig associates plotted to assassinate the king and his brother. Although Locke’s involvement in this conspiracy is also debated by scholars, his acquaintance with the conspirators put him at risk.
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He too fled to Holland in 1683, where he remained active in opposition to the government. By 1685, all associates of the Whig movement in England had been removed from office, imprisoned, or fled the country amid renewed persecution of religious dissenters. Locke’s support for the failed insurrection forced him to live in hiding in Holland beginning in 1685, when the rule of the Catholic James II (r. 1685–88) began.
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It was then that he began to write his first letter on toleration.

Locke would travel throughout the Netherlands during his exile, but his idea of religious toleration for Muslims had already been formed in England a quarter century before. He had acquired it from someone with whom he disagreed, initially, about the toleration of Christian dissenters.

Unlike Stubbe, Locke never found in Islam a theology or a prophet worthy of praise.
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Yet Locke chose to use the example of Muslims in England to advance the toleration of Christian dissenters there, building initially on a conceptual connection that had originated in Europe in the sixteenth century. Both the Baptist Helwys and Roger Williams had already advocated complete religious liberty for Muslims (in
1612 and 1644 respectively), together with the separation of church and state, based on purely Christian references to Jesus and the New Testament. Locke took the same cause but argued for it as an individual right grounded in “immutable principles of reason.” His
A Letter Concerning Toleration
(1689) would be far more influential than either of these earlier works.
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Locke may have been aware of both Helwys and Williams, but his most direct influence was
Edward Bagshaw’s work
The Great Question concerning Things Indifferent in Religious Worship
, published in 1660
.
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Bagshaw (1629 or 1630–1671) was a fellow graduate of Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, but unlike the Anglican Locke, he was a Christian dissenter for whom the matter of religious freedom for non-Anglicans was of more personal urgency.

As shown by
Nabil Matar, Bagshaw was the first to make the case for greater toleration of Christian dissenters in England, based on an analogy to the protections already extended to Muslims and Jews by Cromwell’s government (1649–60) for the purpose of increasing trade.
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In 1656 Jews were allowed to return to England, for the first time since the Edict of Expulsion forced them out in 1290.
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Muslim diplomats, traders, and possibly a very few English converts to Islam seem also to have practiced their faith privately without government interference.
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Locke would cite Bagshaw in his own unpublished
Two Tracts on Government
(1660–61):
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“ ’tis agreed that a Christian magistrate cannot force his religion on a Jew or a Mahomedan, therefore much less can he abridge his fellow-Christian in things of lesser moment.”
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But while Bagshaw supported complete religious toleration for all Christians, arguing that they should enjoy whatever protections Muslims and Jews already did, Locke rejected toleration for Christian dissenters. In 1660, he still believed the magistrate or king had power over religious issues where Christians were concerned. It made sense to him, since at the time he was interested in promoting civil order, not toleration per se.
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What is most interesting, however, is that Locke, again according to Nabil Matar, “rejected neither the presence nor the toleration of Muslims and Jews” while accepting the “political logic” behind
royal religious authority over non-Anglican dissenters and Catholics. Locke rejected any English ruler’s interference with Muslim or Jewish practice because it would “give Christian legitimacy to a non-Christian belief.”
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By 1667, Locke had reversed his views about the king’s right to
interfere with Christian dissenters, while his support for the toleration of Muslims and Jews endured unchanged.
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In his
An Essay Concerning Toleration
, he presented two pragmatic reasons for the toleration of dissenting Christians: The individual’s relationship to God could pose no danger to society, and the ruler was not infallible in matters spiritual.
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By this time, Locke had also rejected religious coercion for both political and moral reasons, charging that such tactics did not change belief and only provoked opposition to the government. What accounts for this shift is unclear, but his arguments moved closer toward depriving the state of control over religion.
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