Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (8 page)

Unlike Voltaire’s imagined account of the distant past,
The Algerine Captive
dealt with an urgent contemporary issue through the experience of a fictive New Hampshire native taken captive by Algerian pirates.
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The main character, Dr. Updike Underhill, though appalled by his exposure to slavery in the southern United States, nevertheless participates in the African slave trade, as did many seafaring New Englanders: “I execrated myself for even the involuntary part I bore in this execrable traffic: I thought of my native land, and blushed.”
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One day, the unfortunate Yankee is captured at sea by Algerian pirates. The pirate commander is impractically decked out for a corsair: “the captain, glittering in silks, pearl, and gold, sat cross-legged upon a velvet cushion to receive me.”
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As Underhill suffers from vermin, thirst, and hunger, he is befriended by a West African slave who, in a
display of profound humanity, feeds the man who had helped enslave him.
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The former American slaver, ashamed, and now himself a slave, vows that if he were “once more to taste the freedom of my native country,” then “every moment of my life shall be dedicated to preaching against this detestable commerce” of the American slave trade.
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Neither Tyler nor his readers were aware of the double irony of American slavery: Muslims were among those West Africans seized and sold to Americans as slaves.

In 1788, the year of Underhill’s capture, the Constitution of the United States had just been ratified after heated debate. Underhill declares yearningly, “Let those of our fellow citizens, who set at nought the rich blessings of our federal union, go like me to a land of slavery, and they will then learn how to appreciate the value of our free government.”
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By contrast, he depicts the dey of Algiers as an Islamic despot, with “a diamond crescent” upon his turban, surrounded by prisoners literally “licking the dust as a token of reverence and submission.”
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In this regard, Tyler’s novel echoes earlier political theory distinguishing British and American liberty from Islamic tyranny.
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Stripped of everything, Underhill remains captive in Algiers for six years, unable to pay his own ransom or obtain help from his government, like so many real-life American captives. Eventually, he becomes the private property of a former Turkish military officer, who has only one wife, as was common, despite the allowance for four, akin to “the patriarchal manners described in Holy Writ.”
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In other words, the author here refuses the stereotype of supposedly unbridled sexuality among Muslim males while also reminding readers of the similar behavior of the Old Testament prophets. This was to challenge the general consensus in Europe and the United States that polygamy was a decadent, uniquely Islamic practice.

After defending himself against an overseer, Underhill is sent to work in a stone quarry, often the lot of real Christian captives. Debilitated by harsh treatment, he is urged by a British Muslim convert to forsake Christianity and join Islam to gain his freedom.
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In fact, many Europeans and a few American captives in North Africa were thus converted to Islam.
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To aid in Underhill’s conversion, his friend arranges a meeting for him with “the mollah,” a term for a Muslim cleric more common in Turkey, Iran, and India than in North Africa. With the promise of rest from hard labor during this proselytizing attempt, Underhill agrees to listen to arguments in support of Islam. The author
assures the reader that his American hero will resist any attempt at conversion to a faith long held in contempt on both sides of the Atlantic. He wonders “what could be said in favour of so detestably ridiculous a system as the Mahometan imposture.”
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But as Underhill listens to a series of persuasive arguments about the positive aspects of Islam and Christianity’s history of religious intolerance toward fellow Christians and Muslims, his reaction surprises.

The Muslim cleric is a former Greek Christian from Antioch, also captured by Algerian pirates, who assures Underhill that conversion to Islam will involve only persuasion through discussion. This the cleric presents in contrast to “the church of Rome and its merciless inquisitors,” who in contrast employ “all the honour and profit of
conversion by faggots, dungeons, and racks.” Tyler’s predictable anti-Catholicism is thus expressed by his Muslim character who favors “rational argument” over torture.
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In his compelling speeches, the Muslim asserts that religious affiliation is a geographical and cultural accident rather than a choice: “Born in New England, my friend, you are a Christian purified by Calvin. Born in the Campania of Rome, you had been a papist.”
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Having mapped out the possibilities that Underhill might have wound up as a Hindu, a follower of the Dalai Lama, Confucius, or Zoroaster, the cleric continues, “A wise man adheres not to his religion because it was that of his ancestors. He will examine the creeds of other nations, compare them to his own, and hold fast that which is right.” When Underhill remains quietly skeptical, the cleric urges him to “Speak out boldly” and without fear, acknowledging that Christians have understood Islam as “the Mahometan imposture.” The cleric then goes on to compare the relative merits of Christianity and Islam by posing four questions:

The cleric then argues that the “Alcoran” was “written by the finger of the Deity himself,” but the Bible was “written by men.” When Underhill weakly protests that he has “good evidence” of the “truth” in the Bible, the cleric also asserts the same for Islam, declaring that the Prophet “received the sacred volume from the hand of Gabriel.”
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Although this does not accurately represent the Muslim belief that the Angel Gabriel conveyed divine directives orally over time, Tyler’s intent here is clear: to depict Islam’s revelation as a direct communication from God, rather than from a human “impostor,” a position that supports Islamic tradition rather than Christian polemic.

Underhill goes on to argue that the truth of Christianity is proved “from its small beginnings and wonderful increase.” The Muslim counters that Mahomet was an “illiterate,” and adds, “Could he, who could not read or write, have published a book, which for its excellence has astonished the world?”
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Underhill the Christian recoils, fuming: “My blood boiled to hear this infidel vaunt himself thus triumphantly against my faith.”
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The Yankee then insists that the spread of the faith was not accomplished by coercion, in contrast to Islam: “Our religion was disseminated in peace; yours was promulgated by the sword.” The cleric retorts, “The history of the Christian church is a detail of bloody massacre,” citing the persecutions of the first Christian Roman emperor Constantine, the expulsion of the Muslims from Catholic Spain, and “the dragooning of the Huguenots” from Catholic France.
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The violence within Christianity is confirmed by the protagonist’s own past; Underhill’s ancestor had been banished from Puritan Massachusetts in the seventeenth century because “his ideas of religious toleration” were “more liberal than those around him”; Underhill also notes sympathetically that “the celebrated Anne Hutchinson” and “good Roger Williams” suffered the same fate.
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And so the protagonist comes around to Tyler’s own view that Christian religious history is one of violent persecution of fellow Christians and Muslims.

The Muslim cleric offers a final argument reflecting on the worldwide diffusion of Islam and the practice of allowing Christians and Jews to retain their faith in Islamic lands. The Muslim emphasizes the Qur’anic principle that there is to be no coercion in religion (Qur’an 2:256). In addition, he invokes the Qur’anic command to deal gently with slaves and, on their conversion, to manumit them (Qur’an 5:89). According to this tenet, even a slave would be received “as a brother” once he “pronounces the ineffable creed” of Islam.
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To this Muslim tolerance, the cleric contrasts “the Christians of your southern plantations” who “baptize the unfortunate African into your faith, and then use your brother Christians as brutes of the desert.” And Underhill is unable to defend his compatriots’ inhumane practice of slavery.
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The cleric judiciously admits, “Your Scriptures contain many
excellent rules of life,” but he regrets that it does not forbid “gaming” and “the use of wine,” both prohibited in Islam.
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Underhill listens to a final entreaty to convert and “learn the unity of God,” which Tyler rightly identifies as the “fundamental doctrine” of the Qur’an.
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He would not be required to “renounce” his “prophet,” Jesus, whom Muslims “respect as a great apostle of God, but only to acknowledge that Mahomet is the seal of the prophets.” In the end, the American refuses to convert, though he offers no brilliant retort to the powerful arguments of the “artful priest.”
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Outwardly silent, the protagonist reveals his confusion in an inner monologue, admitting that he was “disgusted with [the cleric’s] fables, abashed by his assurance, and almost confounded by his sophistry.”
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Underhill also concedes that the Muslim cleric spoke Latin with “fluency and elegance,” but without the “proper” pronunciation used at Harvard.
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(Here the author, a graduate of Harvard, class of 1776, cannot resist a bit of chauvinism.)
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Still, in the face of the overwhelming polemic against Islam circulating in America, the dominance of the Muslim cleric in this religious exchange is not only unexpected but curious.

When Underhill becomes ill, the same Muslim cleric visits him in the infirmary. The captive resists renewed attempts to convert him, saying, “The religion of my country is all that I had left of the many blessings I once enjoyed in common with my fellow citizens.” This is a ringing endorsement of the nation, but not an effective argument for Christianity’s superiority. Underhill admits that the mullah had impressed him: “I was charmed with the man, though I abominated his faith.”
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Underhill thus acknowledges having found a Muslim worthy of respect in spite of his religion, though he concludes with a standard Christian polemic about the Prophet’s “ambition” and his invention of a “new religion.”
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The novel’s apparent sympathy for Islam does not extend to either Catholicism or Judaism. Jews are described as a “cunning race” that “solace themselves with a Messiah whose glory is enshrined in their coffers” and “wallow in secret wealth.”
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Underhill describes the Jewish quarter of Algiers and accurately portrays the importance of the Jews as intermediaries in North African rulers’ banking and diplomacy.
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He is befriended by an elderly Jew, who kindly (but against type) helps raise money for him to buy his freedom when his countrymen fail to do so; but his chance of release is dashed when the old man suddenly dies and
the benevolent Jew’s son pretends not to know about his father’s beneficence.
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Underhill, who’d been a doctor, saves the younger Jew’s life, but the ingrate sells him into slavery a second time.
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Now he is put aboard a ship, and only a serendipitous intervention by the Portuguese navy returns the captive of Algiers to freedom.
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The most striking display
of Tyler’s universalism occurs as Underhill derides the “bigoted aversion” of both George Sale, the translator of the Qur’an, and the anti-Islamic polemicist Humphrey Prideaux.
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Underhill declares that he will “endeavour to steer the middle course of impartiality,” and though he was not always objective, his mere attempt proved controversial.
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A reviewer for a Boston magazine would object to the Muslim cleric’s argument for Islam’s superiority, in contrast to Underhill’s inability to make a compelling case for Christianity.
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The novelist was forced to rebut the charge of “infidelity.” In his defense, Tyler admitted that he had intended “to do away the vulgar prejudices against Islamism,” and that, contrary to what his protagonist had said about Sale’s “bigoted aversion,” he himself had deliberately adopted “the liberality of the good Sale.” Despite these intentions, Tyler was forced to publicly traduce Islam again in favor of the “truths of Christianity,” writing apologetically:

Tyler should not have been surprised at the public outrage in eighteenth-century America at a failure to espouse Christianity’s absolute superiority over Islam. The charge of “infidelity” implies that Tyler was seen as not just an unbeliever but a Muslim, for that had been a significant part of the Christian definition of the word “infidel” in English since the fifteenth century.
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Tyler was not the first American to attempt to introduce a more positive view of Islam. Six years earlier, in 1791,
New York Magazine
had included a story entitled “Mahomet: A Dream.”
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In it, the Prophet is first called “an impostor,” but then upheld as “a great man,” and Islam is defined as a faith promising salvation and morality.
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Later, in 1801,
a few years after the publication of
The Algerine Captive
, another novel entitled
Humanity in Algiers
would depict a Muslim who frees an American captive and leaves a bequest to do this annually.
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But these three works were exceptions among contemporary texts that remained overwhelmingly hostile to Islam.