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Islam and the Founding FathersDr. Abbas MilaniDirector, Iranian StudiesResearch Fellow, Hoover Institution

In a smear campaign before the election for President of the United States, one candidate was accused by his opponents of secretly being a Muslim. America at this time faced a hostage crisis, as well as a nagging problem of piracy off the coasts of North Africa. A “social Christian,” hoping to preserve “a purely Protestant Christian America,” (P. 159)1 was worried that aliens might take over the reins of power in the country and opined that “the few…Jews, Mahomedans [Muslims], Atheists or Deists among us” must, in the name of prudence and justice be excluded “from our public offices.” (P. 160) It wasn’t Captain Phillips who had been taken hostage by Somali pirates, and the presidential candidate in question was actually Thomas Jefferson, “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.” (P. 9) A new book on America’s first encounters with Islam, by the University of Texas scholar Denise Spellberg, titled Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an, is an account of those troubled times, and the remarkable efforts by people like Jefferson to draft a constitution that would, at least in theory, allow anyone who swore allegiance to it to

1 All page numbers in the article refer to pages from Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an. Parts of this article are from my much longer review of Denise Spellberg’s Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founding Fathers (New York, 2013). The review will be published in The New Republic.

become not just an American citizen, but even the nation’s president.

Admittedly, for Jefferson, the idea of a Muslim (or as he called it, a “Mahamdean”) for president, or even just a Muslim-American citizen was a mere abstraction. He apparently did not know that there were at the time many Muslims already living in America. All of them had been “seized and transported from West Africa “as slaves],” thus suggesting, “The first American Muslims may have numbered in the tens of thousands.” (7)

Despite limited contact with Islam, early America certainly wasn’t alien to it – a surprising fact is that “the first play about Islam performed in America was written by Fancois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire.”(27) Long before “cultivating his garden,” Voltaire had written a blistering attack on Islam and the Prophet called “Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete.” Initially staged in Paris in 1742, by 1776 “a revival of the play in London” had become a hit and by 1780, the play would be performed in America. While the Founding Fathers might not have known how many Muslims lived in their new nation, they were certainly aware of the polemics such as these against Islam, most of them originating in Europe at the time. For centuries, most Christian theologians refused to even accept Islam as an Abrahamic religion – they stubbornly refused to call Muslims by their chosen

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name, instead insisting on labeling them as “Mahometans” or some other iteration of the Prophet Muhammad’s name. Saracens, another pejorative used to refer to Muslims, was also commonly used and essentially equated all Muslims with Arabs.

The thought behind Jefferson’s call for inclusion of Muslims is particularly remarkable “given the dominance and popularity” at the time of many ideas, books and even plays that were not just critical of Islam but refused to accept it anything more than an exotic cult. In fact, the dominant Catholic and Protestant paradigms of Islam were particularly critical of the Ottoman Turks. The Turks, then still posing a serious challenge to European power, were invariably regarded as the only Muslims in the world – other major Islamic powers in Iran and India at the time had only a marginal presence in such critical depictions of Islam. For example, German Protestant woodcuts from the sixteenth century showed “Luther’s vision of the Anti-Christ as a beast with two heads—one a mitered pope and the other a turbaned Ottoman Sultan.” (P. 15) In Luther’s vision, “Muslim souls were already forfeit, condemned to hell for all eternity,” though long before Luther, many Catholic theologians had dismissed Islam “as the summit of all heresy.” (P. 47) In their views, the Qur’an, Islam’s holy book, was nothing but a mere repetition of the Bible, and its claim of new divine origin from God was a form of “ blasphemy.” (P. 16).

An Anglican clergyman named Humphrey Prideuax (1648-1724), used a boorishly long titled narrative called The True Nature of Imposture Fully Displayed in the Life of the Mahomet: With A Discourse Annexed For the Vindicating of Christianity from the Charge Offered to the Consideration of the Deists of the Present Age(18) to attack

Muslims for their belief “in a unitary God” (19) and their denial of the Christian tenet of the Holy Trinity. In these religious polemics, incidentally, Islamic theologians were generally handicapped by the fact that Jesus (and Moses) are repeatedly and reverentially mentioned in the Qur’an, and Mary has a whole chapter of Islam’s holy book named after her. Thus Moses, Jesus, and Mary could not be subjected to nasty attacks similar to those hurled at Islam and the prophet Mohammad. Nevertheless, in words borrowed from John Locke, Jefferson insisted on the need for a constitution wherein “neither pagan nor Mahamedan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion” (3, my emphasis).

After the Crusades, however, the tenor of these polemics began to change. The West had to come to terms with Islam as a rapidly rising religion and Western academia began to offer programs in Islamic and Oriental studies. The rise of the Renaissance and the advent of humanism prompted efforts to earnestly understand Islam, beginning with an accurate translation of the Qur’an.2 Some enlightened Westerners, like Englishman Henry Stubbe (1671) actually wrote pro-Islamic arguments and both denied the “charge that Islam was spread by the sword” and “portrayed the Prophet [Muhammad] in a uniquely positive light.” (22). Though Stubbe’s book could not initially find a publisher, it “circulated widely in manuscript form.” (22) When the book was eventually reprinted in 1911 in London, it was in fact based upon a copy of the 1705 manuscript.3

2 For a fascinating account of these translations as a “most political act,” see Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oxford, 2009). The quote is from the first line of the preface.3 Henry Stubbe, An Account of the Rise and Prog-ress of Mahometanism (London, 1911).

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But aside from Stubbe, new scholarly translations of the Qur’an as well as other important works by Islamic Aristotelian philosophers had begun to appear in Europe. The third edition of the best of these new translations of the Qur’an by George Sales was the one bought and at least partially read by Jefferson. Indeed, some of the critical components of Locke’s and Jefferson’s views of toleration were developed precisely in their attempts to defend the rights of Muslims—not because they necessarily believed in the righteousness of Islam, but more importantly because they believed in the right of liberty for, and the indispensible necessity of, toleration for others.

As is often the case, only a few degrees separate the works of famous Muslim scholars like Avicenna from these early efforts to use critical rational faculties to understand the divine, transcend dogma, and solve problems in nature and society using human—and humane—reason. Several years ago, Stephen Greenblatt, an eminent scholar of the Renaissance, argued in his Pulitzer-prize winning book Swerve that a poem by Roman author Lucretius, long-lost since Antiquity, played a critical role in the rise of the modern age.4 The rational skepticism in the poem, its insistence on a kind of atomistic structure to the universe, and its aversion to dogma,

4 Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerved: How the World Became Modern (New York, 2011)

were in Greenblatt’s view the harbingers of modernity and its new epistemology. Likewise, one could also make the argument that many early Western pioneers of modernity were equally influenced Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yagzan (translated into Latin as Philosophous Autodidactus).5 It is a rich metaphoric tale of seven stages in the “progressive development” of a lonely man, on an equatorial island, using reason to make sense of the world and of the divine. Not only the iconic “Cogito” of Descartes’s “Cogito Ergo Sum” might owe some debt to Tufayl’s philosophical novel, but a number of important works of Western fiction—including Robinson Crusoe and Emile—have fascinating affinities with Hayy Ibn Yagzan. As scholars of Ibn Tufayl have shown, and scholars of Avicenna already know, the original story of Hayy Ibn Yazgan in fact belonged to Avicenna—it was a brief allegorical sketch about the travails and triumphs of human reason. In other words, six degrees separate Avicenna from Jefferson’s curiosities about the Qur’an, proving that early America and Islam may be more closely connected than previously thought.

5 For a new English translation of this remark-able work, see, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale, translated by Lenn Evan Good-man (Chicago, 2009). The first English translation was published by Edward Pocock, in 1671. For an attempt to underscore the influence of Ibn Tufayl’s novel, see, Samar Attar, The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl’s Influence on Modern Western Thought (New York, 2007)

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Engraved tablet, Grand Mosque, Cordoba, Spain (photo by Ayesha Rasheed ’14)