Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (38 page)

He went on to compare Jefferson’s endorsement of Paine’s political philosophy to the violent incitements the younger Adams attributed to the Prophet Muhammad:

Negative caricatures of the Prophet had been circulating in America since the seventeenth century, and now the man who would become the sixth president was tarring the man who would soon be the third as the same sort of political rabble-rouser, an implication neatly distilled in John Quincy’s parody of the
shahada
, the Islamic creedal statement (“There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet”). Jefferson’s political assertions were derided as a new American religion—“the Islam of democracy”—whose prophet was Thomas Paine. And since both Jefferson and Paine were known to be Deists, the association with Islam would not have seemed strained, conforming to a hundred-year-old pattern of scurrilous political rhetoric in England.
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The younger Adams represented the very charge of “heresy” as an assault on the intellectual freedom of all Americans, reminding his readers that “the citizens of these States were possessed of a full and entire freedom of opinion upon all subjects, civil as well as religious; they have not yet established any infallible criterion of
orthodoxy
, either in church or state: their principles in theory, and their habits in practice, are equally averse to that slavery of the mind, which adopts, without examination, any sentiment that has the sanction of a venerable name.”
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By associating them with Islam, Publicola implied that Jefferson’s beliefs were not only un-American but anti-American. Thus did he carry anti-Islamic rhetoric to a new level in American political discourse. It was the first but not the last time Jefferson’s political opponents would so defame him.

When on July 17 Jefferson finally wrote to John Adams, explaining that he was “thunderstruck” to see his private note about Paine in print, he attributed the public furor not to his own words but to Publicola’s answer:

He concluded with a confession that “nothing was further from my intention or expectation than to have had either my own or your name brought before the public on this occasion,” adding that his explanation of the events was “required” because of the importance of the “friendship and confidence which has so long existed between us.”
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Adams responded “with great pleasure” twelve days later, though he complained that his friend’s words were “generally considered as a direct and open personal attack upon me, by countenancing the false interpretation of my Writings as favouring the Introduction of hereditary Monarchy and Aristocracy into this Country.”
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But he minced no words expressing injury: “The Question every where was, What Heresies are intended by the Secretary of State?” Adams described how papers in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia had picked up the story, with his local political enemies making much of the dispute. In Publicola’s defense, Adams allowed the author had “thought [him] innocent” and “came forward,” disingenuously attributing to the writer, whom he knew to be his own son, that he only “followed his own Judgment, Information and discretion, without any assistance from me.”
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By this time, Jefferson too had been informed of Publicola’s true identity, a fact John Adams would never admit to his friend.

By the end of August, Jefferson would still take no responsibility for the trouble caused by his “political heresies” comment, insisting instead that “not a word on the subject would ever have been said had not a writer, under the name of Publicola, at length undertaken to attack Mr. Paine’s principles,” which Jefferson persisted in calling “the principles of the citizens of the U.S.” (an indirect repetition of his original attack on Adams).
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For his part, Adams had earlier discounted Publicola as the source of the controversy, noting that “an unprincipled Libeller in the New Haven Gazette” had attacked him—and these lies had been repeated in numerous northeastern newspapers.
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But Jefferson wryly dismissed the “Libeller’s” importance with his own reference to Islam: “You speak of the execrable paragraph in the Connecticut paper. This it is true appeared before Publicola. But it had no more relation to Paine’s pamphlet and my note, than to the Alcoran. I am satisfied the writer of it had never seen either.”
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It was an attempt to denigrate Adams’s critic, but also perhaps a not-so-subtle dig at John Quincy Adams. One historian has suggested that Jefferson used the reference to the Islamic holy book merely as “an analogy for irrelevance” and a reflection of what was “alien to his
experience.”
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But Jefferson knew the Qur’an well, having owned a copy of it for more than a quarter century, and it seems likelier his reference to it was simply meant to suggest the ignorance of Adams’s critic.

With neither man much exerting himself to make amends, or even to tell the truth, serious and lasting damage was done to the friendship of Jefferson and Adams, and that damage is reflected in the vehemence of their later political battles.
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With the appearance of references to Islam, the acrimony had escalated to a point of no return in character assassination. Ironically, Thomas Paine, whose writing had provoked the rift, held his own distorted view of Islam, one that both John Adams and John Quincy Adams might have endorsed, even as they condemned much else that the author wrote.

Since Humphrey Prideaux’s 1697 polemic had arrived from England, American readers had been primed for the sort of negative stereotypes of the Prophet that John Quincy Adams presented.
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During the Revolutionary War, some might also have seen Voltaire’s play tying Muhammad to religious fanaticism and violence.
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Many others naturally considered him
and Islamic regimes to be the antithesis of American religious and political liberties, as depicted in
Cato’s Letters.
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John Quincy Adams would therefore have well understood the magnitude of his calumny, and the enmity behind it would not have been lost on Jefferson, despite his own views of Islam.

Did the elder Adams concur in his son’s dark view of Islam? Not in 1776, when in
Thoughts on Government
he cast the faith in a considerably more positive light. In promoting “virtue” as the end of government, Adams listed a range of non-Christian exemplars, including the Prophet, whom he identified as one of the “sober inquirers after truth,” all of whom, “ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue. Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, Mahomet, not to mention authorities really sacred, have agreed in this.”
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By 1790, however, the elder Adams was envisioning Muhammad as a violent impostor and Islam as a source of despotic governments, views he included in
Discourses on Davila
, the tract to which Jefferson had objected. There, he warned of “anarchy” and “fanaticism” as “the
blessings” “of the first mad despot, who with the enthusiasm of another Mahomet, will endeavor to obtain them.”
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It was a view that would survive even this rupture with his friend: Long after their relations had been mended, in July 1816, John Adams wrote to Jefferson describing Napoleon as “a Military Fanatic like Achilles, Alexander, Caesar, Mahomet.”
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Almost forty years after his attack on Jefferson, in the wake of his presidency (1825–29), John Quincy Adams would continue to deride Islam and the Prophet in an unsigned essay attributed to him.
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In 1827–28, he described the ongoing conflict between the Ottoman Empire and Russia this way: “The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God.” Once again he depicted the Prophet as violent, resorting to the very same distortions with which he had disparaged Jefferson: “but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it
can
be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.”
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It is worth noting that John Quincy Adams also frequently denigrated American Jews as “aliens” and the purveyors of unique “tricks.”
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Despite his own experience as the object of anti-Islamic slurs, Jefferson also believed and repeated the stereotype of a repressive religion, views his friend Thomas Paine also espoused in
Common Sense
, wherein he described the Prophet in relation to the evils of monarchy, founded on “some superstitious tale, conveniently timed, Mahomet like, to cram hereditary rights down the throats of the vulgar.”
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Such a view did not, however, prevent his endorsement in his
Rights of Man
of religious freedom for Muslims in the context of praising the 1789 French Constitution’s “universal rights of conscience.” Anything less was inadequate, as Paine deemed both “Toleration and Intolerance” to be “despotisms,” whereby the state could interfere with the individual’s religious freedom.
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Paine challenged his readers to respond to a bill he invented, entitled “AN ACT to tolerate or grant liberty to the Almighty to receive the worship of a Jew or a Turk,” or “to prohibit the Almighty from receiving it.” The point of this rhetorical coup was clear: “There would be an uproar” at such unthinkable “blasphemy.” In proposing that these rights be granted to God, Paine sought to expose what he considered the preposterousness of Protestants determining control over the proper bounds of toleration for non-Christians. “The presumption of toleration
in religious matters” he boldly charged, “would then present itself unmasked: worshipper and worshipped cannot be separated.” When humans undertook to judge the beliefs of others, they did so heedless of the truth that “no earthly power can determine between you.”
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A few years later, declaring in
The Age of Reason
his Deist belief “in one God, and no more,” Paine would simultaneously reject national establishments of Judaism, Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, Islam, and Protestantism as so many tyrannies.
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For now, however, he was content to assert that human governments should have no say in matters of conscience.

On June 10, 1797, President John Adams fulfilled his long-held ambition of signing a treaty of peace and friendship with Tripoli, eleven years after he and Jefferson failed to make one with the ambassador Abd al-Rahman in London. The treaty’s Article 11 unequivocally asserted that America’s government was neither officially Christian nor inherently anti-Islamic:

Adams left no public comments on the treaty, nor did Jefferson as his vice president. And there is no debate preserved regarding its ratification. The final vote on June 7, 1797, was twenty-three out of thirty-five in the U.S. Senate in favor, but no votes against were registered.
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Nevertheless, the assertion that the country had “no character of enmity against” Muslim beliefs was certainly a marked departure from prevailing anti-Islamic views. Article 11 attempted to excise officially any religious basis for conflict between the United States and Tripoli. To do this, both Christianity and Islam were overtly dismissed as grounds for war, a strategic move that distinguished the United States from the several Christian powers of Europe so long embroiled in what they described as a religious conflict with Islamic states.

Under the headline “Important State Papers,” President Adams took full responsibility for the treaty on the front page of newspapers from Pennsylvania to Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York.
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His introductory note to the treaty text informed readers that he personally “had caused to be published and issued this Proclamation, commanding a strict observance of the following Treaty; regularly negotiated and ratified.”
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