Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (21 page)

Why did Jefferson neglect Sale’s Qur’an and its more thorough, better-informed views of Islam? In short, he recognized what he needed when he saw it.
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Though a meticulous reader and note taker, Jefferson was also a politician and knew what his audience would respond to and how to sway them.

Long before taking notes on Voltaire’s anti-Islamic essay, Jefferson had probably absorbed similar caricatures from
Cato’s Letters
, an even more popular text in the American colonies. He owned the 1748 edition
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of these Whig political tracts, which were published between 1720 and 1723,
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and though he recorded no notes regarding Islam, he had certainly read
Cato’s Letters
long before his debates on religion in Virginia, as had most of his Revolutionary American cohort.
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As described in
chapter 1
, these tracts contained repeated pleas for greater civil and religious liberties, along with a vision of Islam as the foundation of the most religiously and politically repressive regimes on earth.
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Attempting to divorce religion from state control, Jefferson found in
Cato’s Letter
number 66 an example of the Islamic fusion of these spheres. The tract “Arbitrary Government proved incompatible with true Religion, whether Natural or Revealed,” published on February 17, 1721, condemned both the Islamic conquests and Muslim rulers. The conquests in the Middle East were inaccurately attributed to “the
Caliphs
of
Egypt
, who founded the
Saracen
Empire there,” and who “were at once Kings and Priests.” As to the rulers, Trenchard and Gordon revile them roundly: “there never lived more raging Bigots, or more furious and oppressive Barbarians.” But the kernel of the objection here was to the merging of political and religious power in one entity, the caliph, as
khalifat rasul Allah
, or “the successor to the Prophet of God.”
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Jefferson’s debate points in Virginia in 1776 echoed the anti-Islamic precedents that his fellow legislators would have already known and accepted.
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His point in comparing Islam to the Anglican establishment of state religion in Virginia would have been lost on no one as he suggested that this form of repressive Christianity had become antithetical to individual liberties, a belief his listeners already attributed to Islam. Jefferson did not pioneer this strategy, but he put it to good use
in the House of Delegates. But, unlike Voltaire, Jefferson distinguished between Islam, which he freely disparaged, and its adherents, whose civil rights figured in his most important Virginia legislation, A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which sought political and religious equality for all believers. In framing this legislation in 1777, he followed his intellectual hero, John Locke, but would surpass him by aiming for universalism.
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Unlike Locke, Jefferson would brook no exceptions based on religion in his concept of citizenship in Virginia—and, by extension, the newly founded United States.
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While Locke proposed that Muslims and Jews should be officially tolerated as citizens in English Anglican society, Jefferson imagined them as full citizens with equal civil rights in a non-Anglican, and even a non-Christian society.
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Nor did he share Locke’s qualms about including Catholics or atheists in the new country.

In October 1776, a month before his debate to end the Anglican establishment in Virginia, Jefferson considered a more universal question: “Why persecute for diffce. [difference] in religs. [religious] opinion?”
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Many in Europe had already struggled and suffered in the absence of an answer, leading a critical minority in seventeenth-century England and North America to consider the toleration of Muslims as a basis for ending the scourge of religious persecution of Christians. But no one until Thomas Jefferson had ventured to legally substantiate the idea of Muslims as citizens in the United States.

Jefferson drew his inspiration
for Muslim “civil rights” directly from John Locke’s 1689
A Letter Concerning Toleration
. While Locke had made multiple references to Muslims and Islam, Jefferson preserved only the salient ones in his notes: “[He] sais ‘neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.’ ”
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Here in Jefferson’s notation is the first attempt in the new nation to consider the “civil rights” of both Muslims and Jews.
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As in earlier European thought on tolerance and toleration, the fates of both groups remained entwined. While Locke, as we have seen, would continue a vigorous defense of Muslim civil rights in his second, third, and fourth letters on toleration, Jefferson never cited these,
relying entirely on the first letter for his precedent.
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Jefferson’s paraphrase of Locke included a slight abbreviation of the original, omitting the introductory words: “Nay, if we may openly speak the Truth, and as becomes one man to another.” But he does replicate
William Popple’s 1689 English translation of Locke’s groundbreaking idea that “neither Pagan nor Mahumetan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the Civil Rights of the Commonwealth because of his Religion.”
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Jefferson’s notes on Locke: “[He] sais ‘neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.’ ” (
illustration credit 3.3
)

Jefferson’s notes ignore Locke’s defense of various Christian heretical sects preceding his mention of Muslims and Jews: “Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arminians, Quakers and others.” It was perhaps another matter of rhetorical strategy: Locke was using the case of Christian heretics to clear his way to toleration for Muslims and Jews, whereas Jefferson was using the case of Muslims and Jews to extend tolerance not just to dissenting Protestants but to all faiths. Nor did Jefferson choose to repeat Locke’s reference to the Christian scriptures—“The Gospel commands no such thing”—which immediately followed his demand not to exclude Muslims and Jews from the civil rights of the Commonwealth on religious grounds. Defending the rights of non-Christians, Jefferson would make no appeal to Christian
precepts, as Locke, Helwys, and Williams had done in the seventeenth century.
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Instead, paraphrasing Locke’s defense of the rights of non-Christian groups, Jefferson posed a question grounded in what appeared to be
cultural neutrality: “shall we suffer a Pagan to deal with us and not suffer him to pray to
his god
?”
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Locke had originally put the question in more ecumenical terms, asking, “shall we not suffer him [the pagan] to pray unto and worship God?”
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It is a subtle distinction: Jefferson’s absolute tolerance of other religions as against Locke’s qualified plea for tolerance, based on an implicit belief in the superiority of Protestant Christianity. But both men, to be sure, placed commercial and diplomatic considerations above any disapproval they harbored of the idolatrous religious beliefs of “pagans,” by which term Locke also encompassed Native Americans and African-born slaves, a measure of inclusiveness that Jefferson, a slave owner, would have likely rejected.
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Locke might tolerate Muslims and Jews as residents under an Anglican Protestant government, but he never expected their salvation except through conversion to the state religion.
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(In this regard, his view was not unlike that of George Sale.) Jefferson, however, believed it was not for the state but the individual to be concerned about his own salvation, be he Christian, Muslim, Jew, or pagan. His ideal society was, from the first, one of religious pluralism and not foundationally Protestant or even Christian, a fact reflected in his legislation of October 1776 on immigration and citizenship.

Though Jefferson might accept Locke’s thinking about the civil rights of Muslims and Jews, the question remains: Did he intend for them to become citizens of his state? The answer is clarified by one of his earliest pieces of legislation put forth on October 14, 1776: A Bill for the Naturalization of Foreign Protestants.
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Jefferson crossed out the original title from the first draft by his fellow legislator Edmund Pendleton and replaced it with A Bill for the Naturalization of Foreigners, thus implicitly opening the door to Catholics, as well as Muslims and Jews.
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He later removed “Foreigners” and made it “Persons.”
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By November, the bill was debated by the state Committee on Religion, on which Jefferson served. On the back of the bill, he wrote debate notes, most specifically supporting the admission of Jews, and listing some of the “advantages” of universal citizenship, including the economic and demographic considerations of “Consumption, Labor, Procreation.” He then defended Jewish character with the words “Honesty” and “Veracity.” He added a rhetorical question somewhat later: “Religion—is theirs less moral.” Jefferson also enumerated the dangers of religious discrimination, warning that “all who have not
full rights
are secret enem[ies].”
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This idea might have been inspired by Locke, who wrote in his first letter on toleration:

Jefferson then wrote that “this Obj.[ect] no nation allows them to realize,” referring to the reality that Jews were barred from full citizenship everywhere in the world. Finally, he concluded, “Jews advantageous.”
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Despite Jefferson’s best efforts, however, the bill never became law.
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Julian Boyd, the editor of Jefferson’s voluminous early papers, was first to emphasize that this rejection of Protestant exclusivity in immigration and naturalization in Virginia—and by extension the United States—opened the door to Catholics.
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Indeed, the bill mentioned no religious qualification in affirming that “all persons born in other countries,” after residing for an unspecified number of years in Virginia, “shall be considered as Free Citizens of the same and shall be entitled to the Rights, privileges and immunities civil and religious of this Commonwealth, as those born therein.”
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There was, however, a requirement that an “Oath of Fidelity” to the “Commonwealth” be taken by new residents. Jefferson would draft his own version of this pledge of allegiance to the state in 1779.

Jefferson probably knew no Jews personally during this period.
There were only about two thousand in the country at the time, and a Baptist contemporary noted that there were no synagogues in Virginia.
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Indeed Jefferson’s support of Jewish rights was given without understanding very much about Judaism; what he did know, he found “defective in several respects.” He rejected the idea that the Old Testament was divinely revealed, believing that God’s existence must be proven only through rational means. Though embracing what he defined as Jewish “Deism,” he rejected the religion’s vision of God as “cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust.”
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Nor did he have much regard for the rabbinate or its politically coercive policies, which he described as “bloodthirsty,” “cruel,” and “remorseless.”
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