Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (10 page)

Stuart Schwartz has documented numerous other instances in Inquisition records of religious universalism
in Spanish and Portuguese dominions on both sides of the Catholic Atlantic in the sixteenth century.
²³
In Spain in 1535, for instance, there was a public disputation between a Catholic clergyman and
Joseph Arabigo, who spoke for the Moriscos, Muslims who often secretly maintained Islam after forced conversion. Arabigo, whose own name would seem to indicate a Morisco identity, asserted, “Some of the learned men among the
Moors say that each can be saved in his own law,” including “the Jew in his, the Christian in his,” and “each will find happiness in his law and believe it is the truth.” His Catholic opponent declared such ideas “false, mad, and stupid.”
²⁴
In 1582, two years before Menocchio’s first trial by the Inquisition, a pastry chef in Mexico named
Tomé de Medina, suggested that the individual’s salvation was God’s will, regardless of one’s faith. He was denounced by Catholic Spanish authorities, as Menocchio would be two years later, for what the church termed the heresy
of Pelagius (d. c. 418–20). The English monk had first proposed the idea that all people were essentially good and could be saved on merit.
²⁵

Menocchio’s views of Muslims were not drawn entirely from
popular oral peasant tales. Unlike most peasants, the miller was literate. He had access to an Italian translation of the Bible, and he was accused of possessing almost a dozen other works. Among his treasured tomes inventoried by the Inquisition was an Italian translation of the
Travels
of
Sir John Mandeville, written originally in fourteenth-century France.
²⁶
The book contained both real and imaginary geographies of the Holy Land and points as far east as China.

Islamic beliefs were also described in this work. The miller may have found his own doubts about the divinity of Jesus confirmed by the Qur’an’s definition of him as a human prophet, who had never been crucified but ascended into heaven while another died in his place (Qur’an 4:157–58).
²⁷
Indeed, Menocchio would assert that “it seemed a strange thing to me that a lord would allow himself to be taken in this way, and so I suspected that since he was crucified he was not God, but some prophet.”
²⁸
The medieval work of Mandeville nevertheless maintained the supremacy of Christianity over Islam and Judaism, which Menocchio did not. The miller would be denounced by a local innkeeper as “worse than a
Turk.”
²⁹

There is tantalizing but not definitive evidence that Menocchio may have read the Qur’an, which had been translated into Italian in 1547, forty years before his first trial. The record of his second trial in 1599 mentions “an unidentified book” that may or may not have been the Qur’an.
³⁰
A mysterious figure named Simon, a Jewish convert to Catholicism Menocchio met in Venice, testified that the miller described a “most beautiful book”—one he lost. And though Menocchio never confirmed the assertion, Simon “judged [this] was the Koran.”
³¹
Geographically and linguistically the text was within the miller’s reach, if not his grasp. Menocchio might have even met with real Ottoman Turkish merchants in Venice. Indeed, despite a war between Venice and the Ottomans in 1570, more Turkish Muslim traders resided there in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries than any other European city.
³²

At his second and final trial that began in 1599, the miller Menocchio stood accused of sliding back into his original heretical beliefs. When pressed to implicate others who might share his views, he refused and suffered torture.
³³
Menocchio had his arms tied behind his back. He was then hoisted in the air by his wrists, an Inquisition technique designed to dislocate the shoulders. When the miller, hanging by his bound wrists in midair, would not answer the inquisitors, they jerked
the rope again. Still, Menocchio would not implicate anyone else. After a half hour, the torture ceased.
³⁴

Two years later, in 1601, Menocchio received a death sentence from the Inquisition. Branded a heretic, he would die for his unorthodox tolerant beliefs, claiming to the last that they were no one’s but his own.
³⁵
Although it is impossible to prove, the miller’s ideas about the toleration and salvation of Muslims may have been influenced by so-called heretical Protestant sects such as the
Anabaptists, who took up covert residence in northern Italy.
³⁶
Thomas Muntzer (d. 1525), an Anabaptist leader, insisted that “even if someone were born a Turk he still has the beginning of the same faith, that is, the movement of the holy spirit.”
³⁷
Meeting in Venice in 1550, the Anabaptists of northern Italy also promoted the idea Menocchio espoused that Jesus was not divine but human.
³⁸
But whatever their origin, Menocchio’s ideas about Muslims, Jews, and heretics would remain buried in the records of the Inquisition until they were unearthed by a historian in the twentieth century. They changed no one’s mind in the sixteenth century.

By contrast, almost fifty years before the death of the obscure Italian miller, reaction to the immolation of the Protestant heretic
Michael Servetus would prompt the first systematic written challenge to the state-sponsored killing of Christian heretics. Toward this end, the text also contained a sampling of the first Protestant attempts to promote an attitude of religious tolerance toward Muslims and Jews in Europe.
³⁹
There were strong precedents for including Muslims in these debates on heretics, because by the twelfth century Islam was often described in Catholic teaching as the “summit of all heresy.”
⁴⁰
Outside of Catholic Spain, where the final expulsion of Muslims would occur between 1609 and 1614, discussions in Western Europe about the treatment of Islamic inhabitants, though still largely theoretical, were increasingly important.

Michael Servetus burned at the stake in 1553 before the gates of Geneva, aged approximately forty-two.
⁴¹
His 1531 treatise on
The Errors of the Trinity
was condemned by both Protestants and Catholics.
⁴²
Caught earlier by the
Catholic Inquisition in France, Servetus fled to the Swiss city
of Geneva, where the Protestant reformer
Calvin ultimately accused him of two heresies: rejection of the Trinity and infant baptism.
⁴³
It was common at the time for European religious authorities and the state to collaborate in exacting the death penalty for heresies against Christian doctrine. Most Christians in Europe, whatever their denomination, agreed with these theocratic proceedings. But a few did not.

Servetus had been denounced for his ideas by Calvin, but was ultimately condemned by the canton of Geneva, which imposed the capital sentence “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
⁴⁴
In his offending treatise, Servetus had argued that the concept of the Trinity could not be found in the New Testament. He did not deny the Trinity doctrine, only the validity of the extrascriptural scholarship on the subject. His work also emphasized the humanity of Jesus.
⁴⁵
But even to question the derivation of a doctrine accepted by both Catholics and Protestants was enough to condemn Servetus in either Christian sphere.

As a Spaniard, Servetus knew that hundreds of thousands of Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism and accept the Trinity had been expelled from his country in 1492.
⁴⁶
In addition, thousands of former Muslims and Jews who had nominally adopted Catholicism, often under duress, had been burned at the stake by the
Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for covertly retaining their own brand of monotheism.
⁴⁷
Based on logic alone, Servetus asked why Muslims and Jews should be so persecuted for refusing a concept not found in Christian scripture, and whose abstruse nature remained a barrier to the ultimate Christian aim of the conversion of both Muslims and Jews.
⁴⁸

Those who attacked Servetus’s religious views also impugned his character by inventing tales of his associations with Muslims. They falsely charged that he had visited North Africa to learn Arabic among the local Muslims, a claim based only on the references Servetus made to the Qur’an in his book.
⁴⁹
According to another accusation made by both Catholics and Protestants, Servetus was the secret ally of the Ottoman sultan.
⁵⁰
Thus for his doctrinal questioning Servetus was branded a secret Muslim and a political traitor, a supporter of the final Islamic conquest of Europe.

A year after the public immolation
of Servetus,
Sebastian Castellio composed a treatise entitled
Concerning Heretics: Whether They Are to Be Persecuted and How They Are to Be Treated: A Collection of the Opinions of Learned Men Both Ancient and Modern.
A French Protestant biblical scholar whose work had been condemned by Calvin, Castellio was also
known as Sébastien Châteillon, but it was under the pseudonym Martin Bellius that he published his work against the persecution of heretics and Muslims in Basel, Switzerland, in 1554.
⁵¹
He argued that the violent behavior of Christians toward those individuals was, ultimately, unchristian and ineffective. “Therefore, to kill a man,” he wrote, “is not to defend a doctrine. It is simply to kill a man.”
⁵²
Although Castellio admitted that he felt “hate” for heretics, he also worried that those who had been killed did not deserve their fate:
⁵³

Ultimately, Castellio believed heresy was in the eye of the flawed human accuser. He admitted that divergent religious opinions abounded, but violence toward heretics had not produced the desired end of Christian theological unity. To prove his point, he collected attitudes of religious tolerance among Christian thinkers, from ancient times to those of his own era.

Castellio’s knowledge of Islam is notable because most of it was accurate. He identified a commonality of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian belief in the idea that there was “but one God.” He noted that “the
Turks share with the Christians a higher regard for Christ than that of the Jews.” The scholar also knew that “the Turks disagree with the Christians as to the person of Christ, and the Jews with both the Turks and Christians, and the one condemns the other and holds him for a heretic.”
⁵⁵
(Muslims actually did not consider either group as heretics, but rather
People of the Book. According to Islamic tradition, Jews and Christians each possessed a divinely revealed scripture—the Torah and Gospels, respectively, but humans had corrupted the true message over time.)

Like Menocchio, Castellio endorsed an attitude of Christian tolerance toward Muslims, but unlike the Italian miller, he believed in the superiority of Christianity over all other, false religions. Muslims, for him, were neither equal as believers nor worthy of salvation. Yet strife among religions did nothing to further the salvation of non-Christians
through their conversion to Christianity: “Let not the Jews or
Turks condemn the Christians, nor let the Christians condemn the Jews or Turks, but rather teach and win them by true religion and justice.”
⁵⁶

Castellio implored his fellow believers to lead by noncoercive example: “let us, who are Christians, not condemn one another, but, if we are wiser than they [Muslims and Jews] let us also be better and more merciful.” Paramount in his argument was what appeared to be the Golden Rule, an ideal of mutual respect found in both the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels.
⁵⁷

When violence happened between Christians, Castellio argued, “[w]‌e degenerate into Turks and Jews” and cannot convert them.
⁵⁸
Yet here was the inversion of Menocchio’s egalitarian view of the Golden Rule. For Castellio, not only were Muslims and Jews subordinate and degenerate in their beliefs relative to Christians, but their nonviolent treatment was a matter of Christian sufferance, a view that assumed a perpetual Christian majority in power. In fact, missionary efforts, as opposed to martial conflict with Islam, had been debated for centuries in Europe by Christian theologians, with advocates of the peaceful conversion of Muslims dating from the twelfth century.
⁵⁹

In the previous chapter we observed both
Luther and
Calvin’s abhorrence of Islam, but in pleading for an end to the state’s death penalty for differences in religious doctrine, Castellio’s method was to draw upon the scattering of antiviolent, nonpersecutory statements of these men and many others. In Luther, for instance, he found this experience of lenience with regard to non-Christians: “If all the Jews and Turks were killed or tormented none thereby would be overcome and converted to Christ.”
⁶⁰
(Luther would later abandon such practical pacifism, endorsing the death penalty for heretics and others in 1530.
⁶¹
Three years before his death, he declared the conversion of the Jews impossible and urged rulers to destroy synagogues as well as Jewish houses and books.)
⁶²