Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (43 page)

It would be wrong to suggest that personal belief in monotheism led Jefferson to anything like consistent admiration for the precepts of the Qur’an or the example of the Prophet. Indeed, not long after his letters to Tunis and his embrace of Unitarianism, from 1809 to 1822 he continued to write about the sacred book and the Prophet in quite disparaging terms.

In 1809, in an unsent draft of a letter to a Baptist minister, Jefferson describes the “bitter schisms of Nazarenes, Socinians, Arians, Athanasians in former times, and now of Trinitarians, Unitarians, Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers &c.” He then adds a peculiar—and false—comparison to schisms in Islam: “Among the Mahometans we are told that thousands fell victims to the dispute whether the first or second toe of Mahomet was longest; and what blood, how many human lives have the words ‘this do in remembrance of me’ cost the Christian world!”
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By way of this possibly fanciful analogy did Jefferson decry religious persecution as a universal problem.

The next year, in 1810, Jefferson refers to the Qur’an in a discussion of
William Blackstone’s
Commentaries
, the foundational British legal compendium published in 1765, the same year in which Jefferson had purchased his Qur’an.
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While acknowledging the Qur’an as the source of Islamic law, Jefferson takes to task both American lawyers, whom he describes as “us,” and “Mahometans,” an implicit “them,” for the same blinkered practice of relying on only one book as the fount of all law: “I have long lamented with you the depreciation of law science. The opinion seems to be that Blackstone is to us what the Alcoran is to Mahometans, that everything which is necessary is in him, and what is not in him is not necessary.”
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He might have asserted more parochially that “Blackstone is to us lawyers what the Bible is to Christians,” but such a division between lawyer and Christian might have offended the letter’s recipient, a judge who was certainly both.

Jefferson apparently did not recall George Sale’s
introduction to the Qur’an in which he mentions the four Sunni schools of Islamic law and the Muslim jurist al-Shafi‘i, who had “reduced that science into a method.”
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Indeed he seems never to have been aware of the extrascriptural sources of Islamic law, including the Prophet’s utterances and example, scholarly consensus, and human reason.
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Likewise unbeknownst to Jefferson, by the eighteenth century, Muslims had been analyzing the Qur’an with the aid of a number of other sources for more than a millennium. But such historical particulars would have mattered less to Jefferson than the intellectual imperative to question all faiths, including Islam. What he objected to among Muslims he also faulted among both Jews and Christians: the dangers of a literal adherence to revealed truth.

Twenty-three years earlier, 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.” This rational, even scientific approach he extended to the Bible, by which he meant the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, as well as the New. Jefferson believed that each book frequently failed his rationalist test. Of the Old Testament, he wrote:

He could not believe, for example, that Joshua could make the sun stand still.
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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.” Jefferson already lived by the words of his final exhortation: “Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness, but uprightness of the decision.”
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It was therefore necessary to read “all the histories of Christ,” because even Christians should not simply rely on one sacred book. In requiring of a reasonable man such a skeptical outlook, then, the Qur’an was no different than the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament.

Jefferson’s 1821 autobiography describes events witnessed at the outset of the
French Revolution in 1789 by way of a final, negative analogy to Islam. On July 13, the day before the storming of the Bastille, Jefferson notes what amounted to a coup in the replacement of the king’s key ministers. He blames the unscrupulous new advisors for the precipitation of violence that would provoke the Revolution. The weak king was now “completely in the hands” of men who, wrote Jefferson, “had been noted through their lives, for the Turkish despotism of their characters.”
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It was by now a rather timeworn image of political repression in the form of the Ottoman Empire that Jefferson used to condemn French royal officials he believed cared nothing for justice—or what his friend Lafayette had just proclaimed as “The Rights of Man.”
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A similar stereotyping is evident in an 1822 letter to a professor of medicine at Harvard, wherein Jefferson offers a critique of
Calvinism by way of Islam. He rejects as “demoralizing dogmas” five propositions he attributes to Calvin, of which the fourth is particularly relevant to his view of Islam: “4. That reason in religion is of unlawful use.”
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The suggestion that Calvin made reason “unlawful” to use in religion is the very same criticism of Islam he had derived from Voltaire. In the categories of “impious dogmatists” and “false shepherds,” Jefferson
places the Protestant reformer Calvin, together with the early father of the church Athanasius, comparing their distance from true Christianity to that of the Prophet: “They are mere usurpers of the Christian name, teaching a counter-religion made up of the
deliria
of crazy imaginations, as foreign from Christianity as is that of Mahomet.”
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Here, Jefferson’s views of Islam appear particularly derogatory; with no redeeming affinity with Unitarianism, it is reduced to something like a Christian heresy. What is perhaps more remarkable, however, is that even privately Jefferson should so freely compare something so “foreign” to the theology subscribed by most of his Protestant countrymen. In attributing the “
deliria
of crazy imaginations,” to both Athanasius and Calvin, Jefferson implicitly invokes the standard charge of Christian theologians—and most Americans—that the Prophet was subject to fits of either epilepsy or madness. Yet his intent is to malign not the Prophet but the originators of faulty Christian dogma in a style of doctrinal denigration well established in earlier battles between Catholics and Protestants as among various forms of Protestantism.
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For all Jefferson had suffered from scurrilous claims that he was a Muslim, he would, since the Virginia debates of the 1770s, never cease to find easy recourse to such rhetoric. However forward-looking he may have been about individual Muslim rights, and sympathetic to Islam’s largest theological claim, in his general view of the faith, he remained rather tenaciously a man of his times. The final placement of his Qur’an in the library that he would term “a blueprint of his own mind” does, however, point the way, belatedly, to a more generous vision of Islam.
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In 1815, President Madison definitively ended North African piracy in the Mediterranean and Jefferson sold his treasured 6,700-volume library, then the country’s largest private collection, to the U.S. 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.
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Among his books, which would become the nucleus of America’s national library (what is now the
Library of Congress), was his copy of the Qur’an.
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Inspired by categories drawn from the philosopher Francis Bacon, the unusual complexity of the catalog remained uniquely Jefferson’s. He
divided it into three sections: Memory, Philosophy, and Fine Arts.
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Arabic, along with other languages, he placed under Fine Arts; history under Memory. Religion, the division in which he placed the Qur’an, he considered as a subcategory of Philosophy.

Jefferson purchased six volumes in the Arabic language, with a few in Farsi and Turkish, all of these texts including translations into Latin or some other European language. Kevin Hayes has suggested that Jefferson used these books to further his study of Arabic, but if that is true there is no evidence of any actual familiarity with the tongue.
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It is clear, however, that in his earlier planning for the curriculum to be taught at his alma mater, the College of William and Mary, Jefferson did not include Arabic.
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Among the languages he classified as “Oriental,” he urged students to study Hebrew, Chaldean, and Syriac, all standard in the study of biblical exegesis, and all represented by grammars in his library.
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Jefferson’s collection of Egyptian and Ottoman history
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included a book about the revolt of Ali Bey in Egypt,
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Rycaut’s history of the Ottoman Empire, and a chronicle of the great Muslim conqueror Timur Lenk, or Tamerlane (d. 1405).
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The histories of Syria, Arabia, and Iran are not represented, but he included European travelers’ tales of these places as a division of Philosophy, under which he placed geography.
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These travelers’ accounts of the Islamic world ranged across three continental categories: Europe, Asia, and Africa.
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There was, for example, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s (d. 1762) report of her stay in Istanbul as a British diplomat’s wife, wherein she challenges the then common erotically charged fantasies of European men concerning Muslim women, many of them written by male authors who, unlike Montagu, had never met a Turkish woman.
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Not surprisingly, eight volumes were of North African history, the largest concentration in Jefferson’s collection on the Middle East. Half were general regional histories, written by European diplomats; the remaining four texts were more focused on piracy and the plight of European captives.
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The single American account, written by William Ray and published in 1808, depicted the captivity of the U.S. frigate
Philadelphia
’s crew during Jefferson’s undeclared war against Tripoli.
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The president had received the book as a gift from the author, who sent it with fawning compliments, also soliciting a presidential donation of one hundred dollars. Jefferson refused, directing Secretary Madison to secure the author some remuneration.
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Jefferson’s ultimate placement of the Qur’an in his library exemplifies his understanding of Islam in relation to other world religions.
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In the catalog’s seventeenth chapter on Religion,
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the Qur’an was the fourth book, after three on polytheism (Greek, Zoroastrian Iranian, and Roman deities), and just before several copies of the Old Testament.
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These Old Testaments were followed by volumes containing both the Old and New Testaments and an even greater number containing versions of the New Testament alone.
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Jefferson described the order of his catalog as “sometimes analytical, sometimes chronological & sometimes a combination of both.”
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The placement of the Qur’an certainly defies chronology. According to Islamic tradition, the revelations it comprises occurred between 610 and 632 CE, while a single definitive, written Arabic version was not codified until the mid-seventh century. This means that the Qur’an dates historically to a time millennia after the polytheist deities of the ancient world, but also long after both the Old and New Testaments.
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One explanation of Jefferson’s choice for his Qur’an’s position suggests that Jefferson’s Religion section was predicated on a notion of “progress”
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and that in his view Islam was “an improvement over the pagan religions yet fell short of the belief system Christianity represented.”
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But could Jefferson plausibly have considered Islam “at a halfway point between paganism and Christianity”?
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Certainly his express view of certain essential tenets of Christian orthodoxy would suggest otherwise.

Jefferson had a less than ideal view of both the New Testament and the Christian faith. That is why, beginning in 1804, while he was still president, and resuming in 1819–20, he privately undertook to create by excision his own version of the New Testament Gospels.
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Omitting all miracles, the virgin birth of Jesus, his divinity, and his resurrection, this version would be known after his death as the
Jefferson Bible.
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It was his own private edition of the New Testament he endorsed, not those numerous other volumes on his shelves. Perhaps for this reason the version of the Gospels he created stayed among his private papers, never placed among his library collection.