Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (20 page)

By 1788, in a letter written from Paris, Jefferson would acknowledge the importance of Arabic manuscripts as a repository of classical learning, writing with excitement about a discovery in Sicily as a possible source of the historian Livy’s lost volumes. Jefferson was determined to procure the texts upon their translation from Arabic into Italian.
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But in 1775, he would note only one of the major Islamic contributions to European culture cited by Voltaire, where he observes that the numerals in use in Europe were adopted from those of the Arabs, who borrowed them from India.
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Still, it is Voltaire’s depiction of Islam as an enemy of science that made the stronger impression on Jefferson: As late as 1785, commenting on the possibility of the Turks being driven “out of Europe” in support of the Greeks regaining control of “their own country,” Jefferson describes the Ottomans as “a set of Barbarians with whom an opposition to all science is an article of religion.”
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Voltaire’s condemnation of Islam contained another element of lasting impact on Jefferson. In his final clause regarding the Qur’an, Voltaire charged Muslims with forced religious conversion after military conquest, claiming that they “already showed that their genius would be to extend [the Qur’an] over all.”
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It was merely a rote assertion of the old anti-Islamic polemic that the faith was spread by the sword alone. Islam did not become the dominant religion of the Middle East overnight, or by sheer force. Most historians now believe that conversion of the mainly Christian and Zoroastrian populations took centuries, spurred by a host of economic, social, and religious factors unique to each denomination and region.
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But in the Atlantic culture of the eighteenth century, the narrative of violent conquest was accepted as fact.

After writing the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776, Jefferson returned to Virginia in the autumn to draft new laws for the Commonwealth concerning the separation of religion and government.
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It was, apart from much else, a critical year for his thinking on Islam. For in attempting to end the establishment of Anglicanism, which discriminated against other religions and Protestant sects, Jefferson would draw upon precedents in Voltaire and various British political tracts depicting Islam as a coercive force inimical to scientific inquiry.

The door to toleration for non-Anglican Protestants had been opened by the last clause of the June 1776
Virginia
Declaration of Rights:
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In theory, the clause opened the door to full freedom of religion
in Virginia, but it assumed that the state’s population remained exclusively Christian, and thus implicitly excluded non-Christians from the sphere of equal rights. Under the establishment of Anglicanism, other Protestants, though lacking religious equality, were obligated to pay for the financial support of Anglican churches and ministers. So were non-Protestants. Jews and Catholics were also denied religious freedom or political equality, but they were present in much smaller numbers. Muslims, if any had been known to exist in Virginia, would have been similarly denied full rights of citizenship.

As a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, Jefferson was appointed to the nineteen-member Committee on Religion on October 11, 1776.
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Having proposed throwing off the yoke of British political tyranny in the Declaration of Independence in the spring and summer of that year, he was not about to relent in the face of homegrown oppression. Indeed as the Presbyterian petitioners in Virginia put it, Jefferson was “forming independent Governments upon
equitable and liberal foundations … freed from all the incumbrances which a spirit of Domination, prejudice, or bigotry hath interwoven with most other political systems.”
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For Presbyterians and Baptists particularly, this necessitated a complete separation of the Anglican religion from the state in Virginia, and that is precisely what they demanded. Reflecting on this time in his 1821 autobiography, Jefferson would allow that these petitions “brought on the severest contests in which I have ever been engaged.”
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One petition addressed to Jefferson’s committee was called
“Memorial of the Presbytery of Hanover,” Virginia. Dated October 24, 1776, it demanded “
free exercise of Religion, according to the dictates of our Consciences.
” The Presbyterians charged that this ideal was infringed by the levy of taxes supporting the construction of Anglican churches and “the established Clergy.” Such, they said, represented “so many violations of their natural Rights; and in their consequence a restraint upon freedom of inquiry and private judgment.”
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The Protestant dissenters sought the disestablishment not just of the Anglican Church but also of Christianity, for which they asked no preferment beyond what Islam might claim,
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“no argument in favour of establishing the Christian Religion, but what may be pleaded with equal propriety for establishing the tenets of Mahommed by those who believed the Al-Coran; or, if this be not true, if it is at least impossible for the Magistrate to adjudge the right of preference among the various Sects that profess the Christian Faith without erecting a Chair of Infallibility which would lead us back to the Church of Rome.”
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Dissenting Presbyterian petitioners well understood the difference between asking for religious equality among Christians, which would require an official status for Christianity, and a universal religious freedom, which might include the most far-fetched of possible Virginian believers—Muslims. But whatever their distaste for Islam—and it would have been typical of their day—they more passionately feared the establishment of some repressive regime like that of the pope, whom they viewed as the chief, eternal persecutor of Protestants. It was inscribed in the collective memory of these dissenting Protestants to prefer no established religion at all, and an end to all religious inequality, even at the expense of a Christian polity.
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These petitioners may not have owned a Qur’an as Jefferson did, but they knew of the text’s sacredness to Muslims. It was a commonplace of English culture. As early as 1386,
Geoffrey Chaucer referred
to the Qur’an’s “holy laws,” and many English authors would express the same notion in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, most without having read the Muslim holy book. Even later in 1777, the Scottish philosopher
David Hume, whose works Jefferson owned, would refer to the Qur’an as “a sacred book.”
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In 1776, as a response to numerous petitions from Presbyterians as well as Baptists, Jefferson proposed two separate pieces of legislation. The first was a bill for Disestablishing the Church of England and for Repealing Laws Interfering with Freedom of Worship; the second, for Exempting Dissenters from Contributing to the Support of the [Anglican] Church.
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These groundbreaking efforts were clearly the logical extension of the same beliefs Jefferson had expounded about the new nation’s government in the Declaration of Independence. For it must have occurred to Jefferson that he could scarcely declare all (free, white) men “created equal” and “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights” if the Virginians among them did not have the right to freely practice their chosen faith.
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Furthermore, he questioned the legitimacy of compelling payment to support a sect to which the majority of citizens did not belong, proposing that this was but another form of taxation without representation.
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In his autobiography, Jefferson would reflect upon the oppressive status quo his bills aimed to reform as “unrighteous compulsion, to maintain teachers of what they deemed religious errors,” and he referred to the petitioners as having sought “to abolish this spiritual tyranny.”
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When it came to matters of conscience, whether political or religious, Jefferson advocated complete intellectual freedom.
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Religion, as he understood it, was after all “a system of opinions,” and these were “formed in the mind.”
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But at this time, how did he define Islam? In 1776, Jefferson’s speeches in the Virginia House of Delegates to disestablish the Anglican Church relied on negative comparisons to Islam, which he described as a religion that repressed free inquiry. It was an illegitimate characterization but it served Jefferson’s immediate goal: to discredit the coercion of a state religion.
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Extant Protestant polemics would suffice for his negative representation of Islam, but he would tweak the emphasis. For Jefferson was not aiming to elevate another Protestant denomination, as others in Britain—and America—had before him.
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Instead, he compared the Anglican Church to Islam, in order that no Protestant denomination could legally oppress another.

“Not a ready debater,” in the judgment of some historians, Jefferson made painstaking outlines to bolster his legislative proposals.
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His notes, comprising a four-page document “written in a long, narrow column,” are organized in question-and-answer format; the shorthand abbreviations are sometimes difficult to interpret.
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Most, however, are straightforward. For example, in support of his resolution for “Religs. Lib.,” or religious liberty,
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he outlined the long history of Christian heresy, dissent, and repression.
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Jefferson included two direct negative references to Islam. First, he likened his opponents to Muslims, with a variation of Voltaire’s claim that Muslims wished for no form of science other than the Qur’an. Jefferson then asserted more generally that a state religion quashed “free enquiry,” by which he meant the spiritual exploration of others whose “uncoerced reason” led them to a different truth.
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In his shorthand, his point was rendered thus:

His main theme throughout the argument was the protection of the individual’s right to choose, and to question everything, even religion: “Free enquiry enemy only to Error,” by which he meant that rational inquiry could threaten only religion that could not reasonably defend itself. By 1784, when he had finally revised his
Notes on Virginia
, he would reproduce this argument:

In 1776, however, Jefferson took the Islamic counterexample against an Anglican establishment further, by suggesting that the Prophet Muhammad had denied rational argument, and that this was the mark of repressive religion. As he wrote in his debate notes:

Jefferson used Voltaire’s notion about Islam and free inquiry a second time under the heading, “Is Uniformity [of religion] desirable?”
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His shorthand provides his answer:

Jefferson then provided some historical examples of the dangers attending a single state religion. He included Islam, but only after first expounding the dangers of Catholicism. It was a long-standing Protestant polemical approach to denigrate both Islam and Catholicism together, as also reflected in his reference to the Reformation:

Under this declaration, Jefferson concluded that “Philos. reformd by
free
enq.,” or “Philosophy is reformed by free enquiry,” to which he appended as proof the names of two towering scientific figures: Galileo and Newton.
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(Galileo, whose ideas were repressed by the
Catholic Inquisition, may seem rather a victim of “monkish impositions” than a proof of “free enquiry,” but Jefferson acknowledged as much later in his
Notes on Virginia
.)
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He argued that suppression of rational thought, whether religious or not, was a sign of the weakness, even error, of whatever system relied on such means to control its adherents. This premise, he believed, held true universally, whether that system of thought was Islam or Christianity.