Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (19 page)

Jefferson was
studying British legal precedents in order to apply them to his practice in Virginia. What he learned from this passage established a foundation for his initial conception of the toleration of
Muslims in America, predating his later notes on John Locke’s views of Muslims and “civil rights.” It may have even spurred him to examine Locke’s view of the issue. What is clear is that by the mid-1760s, Jefferson had considered Muslims and Jews as people “of the same kind,” who should not be legally proclaimed enemies or persecuted because of their religion, either in Britain or in Virginia.
¹⁰⁰
This refusal to cast Muslims as perpetual enemies would later be formalized in his legislation on religious freedom, but his comment on this British precedent marks the dawn of Jefferson’s distinctively positive view about the possibility of Muslim citizenship in America.

Jefferson’s first reference to Islam (as opposed to the status of individual Muslims) appears in his extensive notes on Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke’s (d. 1751) five-volume
Philosophical Works
.
¹⁰¹
In fact, Jefferson transcribed from Bolingbroke more than from any other author.
¹⁰²
Samuel Johnson once called Bolingbroke “a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality,” but Jefferson was clearly fascinated by this fellow Deist who remained deeply skeptical of religion, including not just Judaism and Christianity but also Islam.
¹⁰³

Douglas L. Wilson, editor of Jefferson’s
Literary Commonplace Book
, was first to observe the remarkable degree to which Jefferson embraced Bolingbroke’s philosophy. The direct effect is notable not only in Jefferson’s views on religion, but in his reliance on reason as the only valid path to knowledge, as well as a corresponding distrust of theologians and clergymen. Jefferson would also adopt Bolingbroke’s aversion to Plato and his influence on Christian theology, as well as a skepticism about the historicity of biblical accounts.
¹⁰⁴

Jefferson took careful note of Bolingbroke’s analysis of the basic tenets of Christianity—the divinity of Jesus, his crucifixion and resurrection—all of which Jefferson too would come to doubt, and of Bolingbroke’s criticism of how Christian dogma gave rise to an unfortunate
history of schism, persecution, and torture.
¹⁰⁵
Paraphrasing Bolingbroke’s moral relativism, Jefferson wrote:

Almost twenty years later, and eight years after rejecting the establishment of a state religion in the legislation of 1776, Jefferson would again echo Bolingbroke in his
Notes on Virginia:
“Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.”
¹⁰⁷

Jefferson also restated in a nutshell the skeptical premise of Bolingbroke’s multivolume treatise concerning all revealed religions, including Islam:

Jefferson also recorded Bolingbroke’s own more succinct statement of the same: “No hypothesis ought to be maintained if a single phaenomenon stands in direct opposition to it.”
¹⁰⁸
This premise undermined the acceptance of the miraculous without logical analysis in any belief system, be it Christian, Stoic, or Muslim.

In 1767, two years after his purchase of the Qur’an and his first written reference to Islam, Jefferson was admitted to the bar in Virginia.
¹⁰⁹
In 1772, while working on a difficult
divorce case, he would have
occasion to seek out Islamic legal precedents, but, once again, he apparently did not consult Sale’s introduction or his translation of the Qur’an. He might have made his job easier if he had.

Dr.
James Blair of Williamsburg was sued for divorce by his wife,
Kitty Eustace, who demanded separate maintenance and alimony based on a specific prenuptial agreement.
¹¹⁰
The delicacy of the situation had the potential for a local scandal: Jefferson’s notes indicate that the marriage was never consummated, probably due to Dr. Blair’s illness.
¹¹¹
Between November 1772 and Dr. Blair’s death at the end of that year, Jefferson made extensive notes
on divorce law from
Freiherr von Pufendorf’s legal treatise
Of the Law of Nature and Nations
. (The work of the eminent jurist Von Pufendorf had been first published in 1692 in Latin, but Jefferson consulted a 1749 English edition.)
¹¹²
For Anglicans, divorce was nearly impossible without an act of Parliament, which was the equivalent of an annulment.
¹¹³
Such long odds of succeeding would explain why Jefferson’s search for precedents eventually led him so far afield, even to non-Western jurisprudence and Sharia law.

Jefferson divided his findings on divorce into “pro” and “con” sections, comparing the permissive and prohibitive cases around the world. Under the heading “Miscellaneous Practices of several Nations,” he included references to the Dutch in Japan, ancient Athens, the Maldives, the Amazons, and the Jews.
¹¹⁴
Jefferson then chose only one Islamic precedent, despite the fact that Von Pufendorf cites many others:
¹¹⁵
“Among the
Turks is a kind of marriage called Kabin, where parties agree on the fixt time of separation, securing to the woman a sum of money on dismission.”
¹¹⁶
The Persian term
kabin
had two distinct Ottoman legal applications, depending on location.
¹¹⁷
Von Pufendorf correctly defines one form, a temporary marriage that was in practice in European Balkan territories of the empire. That variant is generally known by the Arabic legal term
mut‘a
, or a marriage “contracted for a fixed period” that remunerates the woman at its end with an “indemnity payable to a divorced wife where no
mahr
or dowry has been stipulated.”
¹¹⁸
In Anatolian regions of the Ottoman Empire, however, the same term referred instead to the dowry or “marriage portion contracted to be paid by the husband to his wife if he divorces her without sufficient cause.”
¹¹⁹
So, for example, on becoming the legal wife of the Ottoman sultan Suleyman (r. 1520–66), Hürrem (d. 1558), the favorite concubine, known in Western history as Roxelana, received the
kabin
of five thousand ducats as dowry.
¹²⁰

Again, Jefferson apparently did not consult Sale’s excursus on Islamic law. Had he done so, he would have found the following, a more helpful and accurate description of a Muslim woman’s grounds for divorce:

Indeed, under Islamic law, Kitty Eustace would have had a claim to dissolve her marriage based on her husband’s alleged “impotency.” Sale had described exactly what Jefferson had been looking for.

Jefferson’s notes around 1775 about law and history in his
Legal Commonplace Book
included entries about Islam based on
Voltaire’s observations.
¹²²
As detailed in
chapter 1
, Voltaire’s mostly ahistorical play demonized the Prophet as a violent and lascivious religious impostor. This harshly negative view of Voltaire’s would be unchanged when he later attempted a world history.

Jefferson, who attended the theater in Williamsburg, never bought or saw Voltaire’s play, but he encountered a similarly unforgiving vision of Muhammad in the philosophe’s 1756
Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations
, or, as translated for the 1759 London edition,
An Essay on the Universal History, Manners, and Spirit of Nations
.
¹²³
Jefferson cited vol- ume 14 of the original French edition, his notes beginning briefly in English before switching to French.
¹²⁴
He took few notes on the disparaging portrait of the Prophet himself.
¹²⁵

He likewise ignored Voltaire’s footnote praising Sale as “wise and judicious.”
¹²⁶
Instead, Jefferson focused on Voltaire’s description of the reign of
Umar ibn al-Khattab (r. 634–44), the second caliph and the Prophet’s political successor, whose conquests pushed the borders of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula to Egypt in the west and Iran in the east. Jefferson also recorded Voltaire’s account of the fall of Iran and the demise of Zoroastrianism, the pre-Islamic faith of the country.
¹²⁷
Most of the Zoroastrian population, known in the eighteenth century
as Parsis, relocated to remote reaches of Iran and India, which prompted Voltaire to group them with the Jews, describing both groups as “ignorant, scorned, and in their poverty close”; he claimed that the Zoroastrians in diaspora, like the Jews, were “so long dispersed without allying themselves with other nations.”
¹²⁸

A second paragraph Jefferson copied from Voltaire concerned Umar’s conquest of Egypt. Here Voltaire falsely claimed that the Muslims “burned the famous library of Alexandria, monument to the understanding and the errors of men, begun by Ptolemy.”
¹²⁹
Probably the library was destroyed much earlier than 642 CE, when the Islamic siege of Alexandria was lifted by truce; the true arsonists, according to scholars versed in Greek, Latin, and Arabic sources, were either Caesar’s legions in 48 BCE or Coptic Christians battling Hellenistic pagans in the fourth century CE. The popular myth of the library’s destruction by Muslims would nevertheless persist into the twentieth century.
¹³⁰

Although he did not refer to the anecdote, Voltaire’s supposition was based upon a curious command falsely attributed to the caliph Umar, and cited five hundred years after the fact; he supposedly ordered the library destroyed because its “books of wisdom” concerning philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and law challenged “the Book of God”—the Qur’an.
¹³¹
What must Jefferson, the bibliophile, who’d lost his own library to fire in 1770, have thought of a religion that Voltaire presented as demanding the burning of books?

Voltaire’s belief in the myth about the destruction of the library inspired a further misrepresentation, which Jefferson also recorded in his notes: “The
Saracens wanted no science except the Alcoran.”
¹³²
This was a peculiar assertion for Voltaire, who knew better: Only four pages later, he included a partial list of Islamic scientific, medical, and mathematical achievements that had enhanced European understanding in the late medieval period. He admitted that algebra was “one of their inventions”
¹³³
and that “chemistry and medicine were cultivated by the Arabs,” adding for good measure that chemistry was initially unknown to Europeans.
¹³⁴
Voltaire then praised the Muslims’ preservation of ancient medical remedies from the schools of Hippocrates and Galen, which survived via Latin translations from Arabic, though he failed to mention significant advances in diagnostics, surgery, and pharmacology transmitted from the Arabs to Christian Europe.

Voltaire might have explained that the works of
Aristotle were also directly inherited by the Arabs, who added their own extensive
commentaries. This allowed the medieval Spanish Muslim jurist and philosopher Ibn Rushd, known in Western Europe as Averroes (d. 1198), to explore the tension between reason and revelation, the very problem Jefferson would address in his own analysis of Christianity. In fact, Ibn Rushd’s detailed annotations of Aristotle, translated in Spain from Arabic into Latin in the thirteenth century, fired the progress of empiricism and rationalism at universities in Paris and Bologna. Medieval Islamic scholarship would thus contribute to European Renaissance debates, without which Jefferson’s rationalist philosophy could not have come into being.