Edited: Israr Hasan July
4, 2015
ihasanfaq@yahoo.com
When I was checking my emails a couple of weeks
ago, I found a mail from one of my friends telling me about ‘Thomas Jefferson’s
Qur’an’. It struck my deep fascination and attention when I read some
paragraphs about it. I had a strong feeling since years long as to how and why
the Constitution of the United States has so much in align with the Qur’anic
precepts of justice and human freedom. When I read details of my friend’s email
about Jefferson’s Qur’an it immediately responded to my long-searching quest.
And it resulted in the following writeup.
I ordered the book, referenced in my friend’s
email, from Broward Public Library, titled “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam
and the Founders”, written by Denise A. Spellberg and published by Alfred A.
Knoff New York, 2013; got the book in few days, read it and learnt the multi-dimensional
political, religious and social currents going in the 18th century
United States and Europe. What was the most
peculiar and singular in the life and work of the founding fathers, as depicted
in the book, was unique in the Christian world then. The first founding fathers
like George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were determined to
go against the European hate-tradition in respect of Islam and Muslim and
fought for individual freedom for all citizens of the United States without any
discrimination of color, race, and religion.
The subject of relationship of Muslims and
Islam in the United States from the 18th century till today in the 21st
has a wide spectrum and hundreds of books have been written on the subject. My
purpose of this writing is just to investigate how and why the founding fathers
of the United States went against the then religious-political norms in the 18th
century Christian Europe and the United States.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was the principal
author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) of the United States and the
nation’s first secretary of state (1789-94), second vice president (1797-1801),
and third president (1801-09). Jefferson was an early advocate of the total
separation of church and state (Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom), and
the most eloquent American proponent of individual freedom as the core meaning
of the American Revolution.
In a religious biography of Thomas Jefferson,
Edwin Gaustad, one of his biographers, writes: “Jefferson would gather ideas as
a reaper gather corn, selecting and retaining the most delectable, ignoring or
discarding the unsuitable to his taste. He sought ideas from all sorts of
philosophers from all different times. Jefferson seemed to have a special
ability to decipher right from wrong and useful from useless.” He showed that
in so many different spheres of life. Jefferson liked books as they gave him
new and good ideas. He was a great collector of books.[1]
Thomas Jefferson had a vast
personal library. Among his collections was a two-volume Qur’an in English
translation by George Sale. He ordered this Quran in 1765, eleven years before
he wrote the Declaration of Independence. He was a law student then, and he had
the book shipped from England to Williamsburg, Virginia. George
Sale (c.1696-1736) a lawyer and an Anglican, described the Prophet Muhammad on
the first page of his translation as “the legislator of the Arabs,” words that
would have appealed to Jefferson as lawyer. When he bought the QUR’AN in 1765,
Jefferson was engaged in criticizing the recently passed British Stamp Act. The
immediate reason to study the QUR’AN seemed to gain an insight into Islamic law
and religion. The added reason to know the QUR’AN and Islam would have been
seeking legal precedents for local Virginia cases for which he was often
looking to other cultures around the world.[2]
According a State
Department document, Jefferson’s knowledge
about Islam “likely came from his legal studies of natural law.” The State
Department document continued: “In 1765, Jefferson purchased a
two-volume English translation of the Qur’an for his personal library, a
collection that became, in 1815, the basis of the modern Library of Congress.”[3]
Jefferson’s Qur’an survives still in the
Library of Congress, serving as a symbol of his and early America’s complex
relationship with Islam and its adherents. That relationship remains of signal
importance to this day.
The only fear at the time for the United States
and Europe, depicted by Islam, was the antithesis of the true faith of
Protestant Christianity, as well as the source of tyrannical governments of
Ottoman Turks. To tolerate Muslims—to accept them as a part of a Protestant
Christian society—was to welcome people who professed a faith most 18th
century Europeans and Americans believed false, foreign, and threatening.
Catholics would be similarly characterized in American Protestant founding
discourses. Indeed their faith, like Islam, would be deemed a source of tyranny
and thus antithetical to American ideas of liberty.[4]
Jefferson was unique in many ways. He criticized Islam as he criticized
Catholic Christianity and Judaism. He talked about Islam as a religion that
repressed scientific inquiry. A strange idea he got from Voltaire that made him
able to separate his principles about Muslim religious liberty and civil rights
from the inherited European prejudices about Islam.
The Founders of this nation explicitly included Islam in their
vision of the future of the republic. Freedom of religion, as they conceived
it, encompassed it. Adherents of the faith were, with some exceptions, regarded
as men and women who would make law-abiding, productive citizens. Far from
fearing Islam, the Founders would have incorporated it into the fabric of
American life.”
What the
supporters of Muslim rights were proposing was extraordinary in the 18th
century. America citizenship—which had embraced only free, white, male
Protestants—was in effect to be abstracted from religion. Race and gender would continue as barriers,
but not so faith. “In fact, Jefferson, Washington and James Madison worked
toward this ideal of separation of religion from state affairs throughout their
entire political lives. Jefferson and others despite their negative, often
incorrect understanding of Islam, pursued that ideal by advocating the rights
of Muslims and all non-Protestants.”[6]
Thomas Jefferson would be the first in the
history of American politics to suffer the false charge of being a Muslim, an
accusation considered the ultimate Protestant slur in the 18th
century. That a presidential candidate in the twenty-first century should have
been subject to much the same false attack as the one in the 18th
century demonstrates the importance of examining how the multiple images of
Islam and Muslims first entered American consciousness and how the rights of
Muslims first came to be accepted as national ideals. Ultimately, the status of
Muslim citizenship in America today cannot be properly appreciated without
establishing the historical context of its 18th century origins.
Jefferson’s Qur’an grabbed the national
spotlight in January 2007 when Keith Ellison, the country’s first Muslim
congressman, chose to swear his private oath of office on the Jefferson’s
Qur’an.
Jefferson declares in the Bill for Establishing
Religious Freedom, drafted in 1777; proposed in Virginia in 1779 and made state
law in 1786:[7]
“That
our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions…. That therefore the proscribing any citizen
as unworthy of the public confidence
by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce
this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those
privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has
a natural right.”
Between 1776 and 1779 Jefferson drafted over
one hundred pieces of legislation for the state of Virginia, but until his
dying day he would remain most proud of “A Bill for Establishing Religious
Freedom”, which would be called “the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom.”[8]
The time was not the 2000s but the
1790s, and the presidential candidate was Thomas Jefferson, who was, in Denise
Spellberg’s words, “the first in the history of American politics to suffer the
false charge of being a Muslim, an accusation considered the ultimate
Protestant slur in the eighteenth century.”[9]
Jefferson had a skeptical outlook to every
religious scripture. The Quran was no
different than the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. But he placed his Quran
he bought in a selected place in his library, called “a blueprint of his own
mind.”[10]
Jefferson had urged his nephew to make a
logical examination of all assumed truths in religion: “Fix reason firmly in
her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.” Jefferson
believed that each scripture frequently failed his rationalist test. Of the Old
Testament, he wrote: “Those facts in the Bible which contradict the laws of
nature must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you
must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from God. Examine
upon what evidence his pretensions are founded.”[11]
Respecting the New Testament, Jefferson urged
his nephew to consider “the opposite pretensions” of key Christian doctrines
regarding Jesus’s divinity, virgin birth, and whether he “ascended bodily into
heaven.” He also advised the lad not to fear if his analysis “ends in a belief
that there is no God.” …. Your own reason is the only oracle given you by
heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the
decision.”[12]
His perceptions of Islam in his political life
remain, at the very least, ambiguous, even enigmatic. Only in the later evolution of his private
religious beliefs does Jefferson’s diplomatic appreciation for Islam’s central
tenet seem sincere. He privately affirmed a much more pointed approval of the
faith in Islam in one letter to Tripoli and in four to Tunis in 1806 wherein he
assured his “great and good friend” of the mutuality of their beliefs in a
single supreme being.[13]
‘It was
impossible’, Jefferson wrote to John Adams, ‘for the human mind not to perceive
and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in
every atom of its composition.’[14]
In 1815 Jefferson sold his treasured
6700-volume library, then the country’s largest private collection, to the US
government for $23,950. Jefferson had
doubled the size of his holdings by frequenting London and Paris booksellers,
where he purchased most of his volumes on the Middle East. Among his boos, which would become the
nucleus of America’s national library (what is now the Library of Congress),
was his copy of the Qur’an.[15]
Whatever his ambivalence about Islam,
Jefferson’s position on Muslim rights and potential for citizenship remained
consistent from his days as a law student in the 1760s until the end of his
life. In fact, in his thinking about American citizenship, Jefferson subscribed
an even more expansive and at the time, unusual idea, borrowed from John Locke
in 1776: “neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the
civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.”[16]
While looking back upon his efforts to advance
his Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786, he would proudly
recall his lifelong intent “to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection,
the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and Infidel of
every denomination.”[17]
These words affirm Jefferson’s belief in the free exercise of religion in
America, and the principle of American civic inclusion irrespective of faith
and religion.
A year before his death, Thomas Jefferson wrote
to a friend’s son. Jefferson advised, “Love
your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself.”[18]
His final reference to the Golden Rule is as clear a sign as we have its importance
and universal application in his personal ethics as well as its centrality to his
concept of patriotism. The same inclusive precedents for the practice of the Golden
Rule existed in the Hebrew Bible (Lev.19:18), New Testament (Matt. 22:39), and the
Qur’an (2:256; 10:19).
[1] Denise A. Spellberg’s “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an”,
pub. Alfred A. Knoff, New York, 2013.
[2] Ibid. p.83.
[3] www.iipdigital.usembassy.gov.
[4] Thomas S. Kidd:
“God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution”; New
York Basic Books, 2010; pp.16-20.
[5] James H. Hutson, chief of the Manuscript Division, Library
of Congress, his book: "Religion and the Founding of the American
Republic," 1998.
[6] Denise A. Spellberg; Thomas Jefferson’s Quran; p.7.
[7] Denise A. Spellberg; Thomas Jefferson’s Quran; p/x.
[8] http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mssmtj.mtjbibo24905; Thomas
Jefferson Paper Series 1651-1827, Library of Congress image 1135.
[10] Thomas
Jefferson’s Library: A Catalog with the Entries in His Own Order (Washington,
DC: Library of Congress 1989).
[11] “Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr” Aug.10, 1787 in Life and Selected Writings,
p.399.
[13] Ibid. p.237.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid. Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an; Denise A. Spellberg;
p.233.
[16] Ibid. p.238.
[17] “Jefferson’s Autobiography” in “Life and Selected
Writings”, p.46.
[18] Ibid. Denise A. Spellberg; p.301.
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