Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (55 page)

Nonetheless, this planned mosque in Manhattan inflamed for many the painful memory of 9/11, a wound on the national psyche that had
not healed a decade later and remains associated with Islam, despite ample evidence dissociating terrorism from the faith. Loss and fear remain powerful emotions for all Americans who witnessed the attacks. Ironically, those who planned the mosque intended the building to bring Americans of different faiths together, not to divide them. But divide Americans it did.
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Anti-Muslim activists like
Pamela Geller and
Robert Spencer joined the fray insisting that the mosque represented an attempt by Muslims to take over the country, finishing what they claimed 9/11 had left half done. The two are the cofounders of
Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), which is defined as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2011, their film
The Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks
was presented at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
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(Not surprisingly, Geller believes President Obama to be a Muslim.)
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New York City’s mayor,
Michael Bloomberg, defended the right of American Muslims to build the mosque complex in lower Manhattan in 2010, citing clear constitutional principle in the midst of overwrought emotions: “Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.”
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Bloomberg even cited the
Flushing Remonstrance of 1657 as a precedent for contemporary freedom of religion. If he had been informed that the religious freedom of Muslims as well as Jews and all sects of Christians had been included in this extraordinary protest by Dutch settlers, his point might have been even more powerful. The Remonstrance clearly espouses a universal religious freedom in the seventeenth century, a time when to do so was to risk jail and banishment, as two members of the community eventually suffered. Still, the signatories insisted:

In 1957, President
Dwight D. Eisenhower made his own case for the construction of the Islamic Center Mosque in the nation’s capital. Visiting the site in June of that year, he offered a definition of American principles that might seem entirely un-American to the anti-Muslim opponents of mosques throughout the United States. Eisenhower saw no difference between the new Muslim “church” in Washington, D.C., and “a similar edifice of any other religion.” His message to American Muslims was simple and direct:

In the same spirit, Eisenhower would authorize the military to identify Muslim servicemen on their dog tags.
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Would a majority of Americans still affirm that “America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your conscience”? It bears mentioning that Eisenhower embraced Muslims as fellow believers “under one God,” at a time when the gravest threat to the United States was thought to be “godless” Communists, both at home and abroad.
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Events in the Middle East that would darken the image of Islam in the latter twentieth century had yet to occur. Nevertheless, it is difficult to deny that acceptance of Muslims into the American fold has deteriorated considerably in the past half century.

Although many editorials celebrated the existence of Jefferson’s Qur’an as a novelty in the midst of Congressman Keith Ellison’s swearing-in controversy in 2007, those wedded to fears of Islam were at pains to deny what Ellison had affirmed about Jefferson, that he was “a visionary” who “believed that wisdom could be gleaned from many sources.”
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The Boykin- and Soyster-directed anti-Sharia screed of 2010 argued that Jefferson had purchased the Qur’an in order to better know his enemies: “When confronted with an Islamic threat, they took the effort to consult primary sources and to conduct competent analysis of that threat.”
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According to Boykin and Soyster, the book was merely a remnant of his diplomatic encounter with the Muslim ambassador from Tripoli in London in 1786.
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Such assertions ignore the fact that Jefferson actually bought his Qur’an in 1765, twenty-one years before the diplomatic effort in question, and eleven years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Although Jefferson doubtless did check the Qur’anic basis for Islamic piracy sometime after his 1786 meeting with the Muslim ambassador in London, he had much earlier documented his interest in the sacred text unrelated to foreign policy. Those who claim otherwise similarly ignore Jefferson’s pointed refusal to consider Muslims as either perpetual foreign or domestic enemies and his defense of their future, and that of all non-Christians, as potential citizens.

In March 2011,
Bryan Fischer, director of issues analysis for the socially conservative American Family Association, a group with two million members headquartered in Tupelo, Mississippi, denied that Muslims and other non-Christians enjoyed the full protection of the First Amendment. To justify this assertion, he appears to repeat the analysis of Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an found in the 2010 Boykin and Soyster anti-Sharia manifesto, defining Islam not as a religion but as a “totalitarian ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States.” Fischer writes, “The First Amendment was written by the Founders to protect the free exercise of Christianity. They were making no effort to give special protections to Islam.” As to Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an, Fischer explains that too in a way that follows the Boykin-Soyster treatise:

In fact, Jefferson had not met the ruler of Tripoli, but only his ambassador, who told him that the Qur’an provided the rationale for North African piracy. (Jefferson was also told, as
chapter 4
of this book attests, that the devil had enabled those successful forays.) Of course, Fischer evinces no awareness that the treaty concluded with Tripoli states at the very outset that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”
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Nor, one expects, would Fischer be interested in the inconvenient historical truth that Jefferson as president addressed the Islamic rulers of both Tripoli and Tunis with an emphasis on their shared deity: “I pray God, very great and respected friend, to have you always in his holy keeping.”
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Possessing a serviceable knowledge of its basic tenets, Jefferson clearly thought Islam was a religion.

Jefferson did not hate Muslims, nor did he allow fear to inform his views of their future in the United States. In direct opposition to the stated goals of Jefferson’s most cherished legislation, Fischer’s excision of the civil rights of American Muslims also forecloses those of all non-Christian citizens:

Nowhere is it more explicit that those who overtly deny the civil rights of Muslims often hold the rights of all non-Christians in equal contempt. And so the ultimate strength of those guarantees that in the eighteenth century deliberately included Muslims are now being tested, together with the seriousness of our national commitment to the cherished ideals of religious freedom, political equality, and pluralism.
We remain in the midst of this struggle over the definition of national identity and citizenship.

A year before his death, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend’s son. The young man’s father had urged him to do so in order to “have a favorable influence.” Contemplating his own mortality, “as one from the dead,” Jefferson advised, “Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself.”
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His final reference to the Golden Rule is as clear a signal as we have of its irreducible importance and universal application in his personal ethics, as well as its centrality to his conception of patriotism.

On the very day of his swearing-in upon Jefferson’s Qur’an in 2007, Representative Ellison also invoked the Golden Rule as a pointed admonition to fellow citizens. In the editorial he wrote entitled, “Choose Generosity, Not Exclusion,” Ellison argued that the Christian majority had a pivotal decision to make about religious pluralism, based on their understanding of the New Testament. Was the Golden Rule applicable only to Christians—or all Americans, no matter their religion?

Even Ellison’s opponents might agree that this was now an unavoidable question for the nation, however differently they might phrase it. What cannot be denied is how Jefferson and other important Founders answered.

Invoking the Golden Rule in this way, as a commandment to embrace humanity without qualification, linked Jefferson to a select fraternity of men who had suffered for the sake of this seemingly simple belief. When those who first espoused it in Europe refused to accept violence or coercion in religion’s name, they laid the foundation for the crucial question that Jefferson would pose in 1776, answering it
with universal legislation: “Why persecute for difference in religious opinion?”
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In his own answer, the Italian miller Menocchio invoked his love for all who were his neighbors—whether Muslim, Christian heretic, or Jew—before his death on the Inquisition’s pyre in 1601. Just over a decade later, the Baptist Thomas Helwys echoed him from the London prison in which he would die, still proclaiming, “Let them be heretikes, Turcks, Jewes, or whatsoever it apperteynes not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.”
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After a little more than thirty years, this same belief in the separation of religion from government and the individual’s absolute right to “soul liberty” would be expressed for the first time in North America by Roger Williams, who asserted:

Aspects of Christian thought, often articulated as dissent by those the ruling majority decreed heretical, contained the roots of an end to religious persecution and the seeds of pluralism. These same inclusive precedents for the practice of the Golden Rule existed also in the Hebrew Bible.

Now, as in the eighteenth century, American Muslims symbolize the universality of religious inclusion and equality promised at the nation’s founding by Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Leland, and others, an ideal still in the course of being fully realized more than two centuries later. Any attack upon the rights of Muslim citizens should be recognized for what it remains: an assault upon the universal ideal of civil rights promised all believers at the country’s founding. No group, based on religion, should be excluded from these rights. To do so now would betray both our hard-won national legacy and the genius of those who conceived it.