Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (16 page)
Read Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders Online
Authors: Denise A. Spellberg
Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #Political Science, #Civil Rights, #Religion, #Islam
Besides, I think you are under a mistake, which shews your pretence against admitting Jews, Mahometans, Pagans, to the civil rights of the commonwealth is ill-grounded; for what law I pray is there in England, that they who turn to any of those religions, forfeit the civil rights of the commonwealth by doing it?
278
Locke also sarcastically reminded his opponent that Christians in the Ottoman Empire faced no force at all, compared with the “moderate” or “sufficient force” Proast proposed to use against non-Christians in England:
I think a conscientious and sober Dissenter might expect fairer dealing from one of my Pagans or Mahometans, as you please to call them, than from one who professes moderation, that what degrees of force, what kind of punishments will satisfy him, he either knows not, or will not declare.
279
He also expressed a new religious relativism when he suggested that Turks, like Christians, also “sincerely seek the truth,” however misguided he knew them to be.
280
In fact, he allowed that Muslims believed as adamantly in their salvation through the Qur’an as Christians did through their own scripture. Both groups, he understood, were fixed on the rewards of the next life:
281
Do not think all the world, who are not of your church, abandon themselves to an utter carelessness of their future state. You cannot but allow there are many Turks who sincerely seek the truth to whom you could never bring evidence sufficient to convince them of the truth of the Christian religion, whilst they looked on it as a principle not to be questioned, that the Koran was of Divine revelation.
282
Pressing the point even further, Locke sounds almost like Menocchio, the heretical Italian miller, when he allows that Turks believed in their “way,” just as Christians did. Yet the philosopher held out as the only possibility for the salvation of Muslims their conversion to Christianity:
283
And why then may you not allow it to a Turk, not as a good way, or as having led him to the truth; but as a way, as fit for him, as for one of your church to acquiesce in; and as fit to exempt him from your force, as to exempt any one of your church from it?
284
Irrespective of their rightness or wrongness, Locke believed that doctrinal differences, whether among Christians or between Christians and non-Christians, should not be subject to state coercion.
In a fourth, posthumous letter, published in 1706, Locke would reaffirm the futility of religious polemic. These matters were not to be resolved on earth, particularly not by the magistrate or ruler:
Try when you please with a Brahmin, a Mahometan, a Papist, Lutheran, Quaker, Anabaptist, Presbyterian, etc., you will find if you argue with them, as you do here with me, that the matter will rest here between you, and that you are no more a judge for any of them than they are for you. Men in all religions have equally strong persuasions, and every one must judge for himself; nor can anyone judge for another, and you last of all for the magistrate.
285
The ultimate form of Locke’s near universal religious toleration resulted, then, from a kind of disapproving empathy, a reasoned if saddened understanding of why Muslims and Jews continued to defend their beliefs, even unto death. What others had defined previously as heresy or fanaticism, Locke finally describes as natural and common to all believers:
Nor is there among the many absurd religions of the world, almost any one that does not find votaries to lay down their lives for it: and if that be not firm persuasion and full assurance that is stronger than the love of life, and has force enough to make a man throw himself into the arms of death, it is hard to know what is firm persuasion and full assurance. Jews and Mahometans have frequently given instances of this highest degree of persuasion.
286
Violence over matters of religion, Locke understood, produced only more violence and death. These were the unjust if predictable wages of state coercion.
287
Even in the aftermath of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, the year Locke fled to Holland, when most other European Christians viewed all Muslims as agents of religious error and a foreign threat, Locke chose to defend the civil rights of Muslims.
288
In this context, particularly, it was a remarkable choice. From 1660 until his death in 1704, the adherents of Islam would remain part of Locke’s principled, reasoned, and ultimately Christian ideal of state-supported universal toleration. He would not live to see it become a political reality in his lifetime, but his words would survive him, granting him his most notable afterlife in eighteenth-century America.
OCKE
, D
EFENDER OF
M
USLIMS AND
S
OCINIANS OR
U
NITARIANS
, A
TTACKED AS
B
OTH
, 1696
After repeatedly defending the religious and political rights of Muslims, in 1696 Locke would be accused in print of being one as well as a
Socinian and a Deist.
289
John
Edwards (d. 1716), an Anglican clergyman and friend of Proast’s, attacked the theological views Locke expressed in
The Reasonableness of Christianity
in 1695.
290
Impugning Locke’s apparent lack of support for the Trinity, Edwards defamed him as a heretic Christian and, by extension, a supporter of Islamic monotheism.
291
The connection in England between Islam and the Socinian or Unitarian
heresy was an insidious attempt to place Locke beyond any legally tolerated status in his own country.
In all, Edwards would write three tracts attacking Locke’s religious views as heretical:
Some Thoughts Concerning the Several Causes of Atheism
(1695),
Socinianism Unmask’d
(1696), and
The Socinian Creed
(1697).
292
It is likely that Locke did indeed embrace Socinian or Unitarian theology by the late 1690s, for he read extensively on the subject and knew many Socinians, but he prudently never professed the position publicly, and would be counted an Anglican during his lifetime.
293
Nonetheless, Locke’s presumed rejection of the Trinity cleared a path for the accusation of his being a Muslim. Edwards wrote that “it is likely I shall further exasperate this author when I desire the reader to observe that this lank faith of his is in a manner no other than the faith of a Turk.”
294
A subsidiary charge was that he “seems to have consulted the Mahometan bible,” a damning accusation.
295
Indeed, Locke had in his library a copy of the 1647 French translation of the Qur’an by André du Ryer.
296
The assumption that Locke was both a Christian heretic
and
a Muslim, perhaps, was also the result of his repeated pleas for the rights of both groups in his work on toleration. As we have seen, accusing a Christian theological or political adversary of being a Muslim (or a Turk) was by now a time-honored feature of Christian polemic. Menocchio, Servetus, and the Italian translator of Servetus’s questioning of the Trinity had all been termed Turks or Muslims in the sixteenth century. Thomas Jefferson, almost two centuries later, would suffer the same fate for his own defense of Muslim rights, only to find in John Locke’s thoughts about toleration his most powerful precedent.
What Jefferson Learned—and Didn’t—from His Qur’anHis Negative Views of Islam, and Their Political Uses, Contrasted with His Support for Muslim Civil Rights, 1765–86
To be acquainted with the various laws and constitutions of civilized nations, especially those who flourish in our own time, is, perhaps, the most useful part of knowledge.
—George Sale, from the “Preliminary Discourse”
to his English translation of the Qur’an, 1734
[T]hat our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions … that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.
—Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,
drafted in 1777; proposed in Virginia, 1779;
made state law, 1786
I
N
1765, the
Virginia Gazette
, the local newspaper in Williamsburg, which also served as the only bookseller in the colony, recorded a purchase by Thomas Jefferson.
1
The item at the bottom of
this page
, under the heading “Williamsburg October 1765,” indicates Jefferson acquired
“Sale’s Koran,” in “2 Vols,” for sixteen shillings.
2
The books had been shipped from London, where in 1734 George Sale had first published his translation of what in English was commonly called “the Alcoran of Mohammed.”
3
Jefferson would have bought the third edition, printed in 1764.
4
Jefferson was not the only one to possess Sale’s Qur’an in eighteenth-century Virginia. In 1781, Dr.
James Bryden of Goochland County would claim that British troops during the Revolutionary War had seized not just his many medical books but also what he listed as “Al Coran of Mahomet” in two volumes, whose value he estimated at one pound, more than Jefferson had paid sixteen years before. Dr. Bryden did not mention Sale as translator, but that the book was in two volumes with the title “the Alcoran of Mohammed” makes the identification certain.
5
Whether Bryden was ever reimbursed for his loss is unknown, but the more important question remains: What happened to Jefferson’s Qur’an of 1765?
Jefferson’s purchase of “Sale’s Koran, 2 Vols.” recorded in the
Virginia Gazette Daybooks.
(
illustration credit 3.1
)
