Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (50 page)

Eighteenth-Century Ideals of the Muslim Citizen and Their Significance in the Twenty-First Century

T
O MANY
of his political opponents, Thomas Jefferson may have been our first Muslim president. That a Muslim might legally have attained the office in the eighteenth century was not out of the question, insofar as the U.S. Constitution affirmed the possibility in theory. Jefferson was no practitioner, and his views of Islam, while mostly negative, remained mixed, based on his positive appreciation for the faith’s central tenet of absolute monotheism. Nevertheless, he had been defamed and denigrated as a Muslim since 1791—especially during the vicious presidential campaign of 1800—as an infidel and atheist.

The accusation that Jefferson was a Muslim placed him, unknowingly, in the same category as his intellectual hero John Locke, who was charged with professing “the faith of a Turk,”
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and even
George Sale, the British translator of his Qur’an, derided as “half a Musulman.”
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These three (and others before them) became, as this book documents, victims of a long-standing tradition of anti-Islamic defamation perpetrated in the name of Christianity. The provocations were various. Sale had refused to sanction violence toward Muslims and had not vilified the Prophet Muhammad as thoroughly as his fellow Anglican Protestants would have wished. Political opponents condemned both Locke and Jefferson for advocating religious toleration, including civil rights for Muslims, as well as embracing Deism and Unitarianism.

The same charge made against Jefferson in the campaign of 1800 would be used in the twenty-first century against American citizens—some actually Muslim, some not—seeking national political office. In either case, the tactic is part of a strategy attempting to discredit legitimate candidates, whether for Congress or the presidency, by casting them as un-American and even anti-American. As in Jefferson’s case, each candidate labeled a Muslim, whether accurately or not, would prevail when the votes were counted. Yet such defamations have persisted as political weapons. In fact, they have evolved into a broader campaign by a well-funded few to disenfranchise American Muslim citizens, denying them the civil rights granted them by the Founders.

This afterword briefly explores the practical life of Muslim civil rights as defended in theory by Jefferson and others—a defense that set the parameters of religious freedom and civic inclusion for all non-Protestants. Today, as in the eighteenth century, the civil rights of American Muslims symbolize the universality of religious pluralism in
the United States. Thus challenges to Muslim civil rights continue to represent threats to the rights of all Americans. How the nation responds to these threats against this signal religious minority will determine whether or not founding ideals of inclusion will survive in practice or succumb to rank fear, prejudice, and discrimination.

In his
first inaugural address of 1801, Jefferson attempted to unite the country after a polarizing presidential campaign. Characteristically, he argued for the rights of the minority in a democratic system, reminding his fellow Americans that “though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” While asserting that Americans had “banished from our land religious intolerance,” the president knew that the legal and social reality remained well short of the constitutional ideal.
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In 1802, Jefferson was reminded by his ally the Baptist leader John Leland and his followers of the very real religious intolerance and political inequality they and all other non-Congregational Protestants continued to suffer in New England. Contemplating “a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions,”
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Jefferson had reason to fear that the bigotry he had fought his whole life to extirpate might never disappear from the nation. For if Protestants still faced intolerance from other Protestants, what hope for non-Protestants in America?

Three years after his election, fears of Jefferson’s ungodly and possibly Islamic presidency persisted. In January 1803, a Walpole, New Hampshire, newspaper editor observed that “every candid friend of religion must … be convinced from Jefferson’s own writings that he is an infidel.”
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It was the third time Jefferson’s religious beliefs had been indicted by way of such an accusation. But he was adamant in his convictions, writing privately to a friend that same year, “I will never, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.”
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That code he would maintain until the end of his days.

In 1834, eight years after Jefferson’s death, his Baptist supporter John Leland recalled the dire predictions made in the wake of Jefferson’s 1800 election but that never materialized:

By this time, Leland, who had also defended the rights of Muslims and all other believers, revealed that he too had been “advertised in the newspapers, through the states, as an infidel and outcast.” In response to being thus condemned with the same epithet applied to both Locke and Jefferson, Leland replied humbly, “May the Lord increase my faith and make me more holy, which will be the best refutation of the libel.”
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Although the ideal that citizenship would one day extend to American Muslims existed in the founding discourse, the eighteenth century remained a time when ignorance and fear about Islam predominated among Protestants. Because of racism and slavery, the earliest known American Muslims were never granted equal rights. It would not be until a century later, in the wake of the Civil War, that the
Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship status to American-born former slaves of African descent, a population that still included practicing Muslims.
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We do not know how many of the descendants of these first American Muslims, a scattered minority under pressure to conform to Protestantism prevalent among slaves, retained their faith into the twentieth century. Most could not create sustained communities of believers or pass down their religious beliefs over generations.
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But there were exceptions to this pattern.
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In
Georgia, for example, in the 1930s, the grandson of a former Muslim slave described aspects of Islamic prayer and ritual observance practiced in his family for two generations. His descendants continued to name their children Mahomet and Fatima.
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By then, however, religion was no longer the chief impediment to the full rights of citizenship faced by Muslims in America.

The first American citizens to be legally defined as Muslims were not born in the United States; they were immigrants from the Middle East. Since 1790, they could not lawfully be denied citizenship based on their religion. But the Naturalization Act of that year, in addition to requiring “good moral character,” limited citizenship among new arrivals to “free white persons.”
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Most Muslims, thought to be not
white but either black or Asian, were excluded on that basis. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau would classify Middle Easterners from Syria, Palestine, Armenia, and Turkey as non-white “Asiatics” as late as 1910.
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An estimated sixty thousand Muslim immigrants arrived in the United States between 1890 and 1924.
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Most hailed from what is today Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey, but a few others came from Eastern Europe and South Asia.
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They were mostly young, uneducated male laborers, who sent money back to their dependents in their countries of origin.
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By 1870, a new Naturalization Act had overridden the 1790 act’s requirement that naturalized citizens be white, thus expanding the ranks of the qualified to include “aliens of African nativity and … persons of African descent.”
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This allowed for the immigration of
Muslims from Africa in principle, but race and ethnicity would continue to be common reasons for denying citizenship to many of the first Muslim immigrants.

The arrival of these Muslims from abroad newly tested the limits of American national identity. As
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri argues in his pathbreaking history of Islam in America, Muslim immigrants arrived in the nineteenth century to find a national ideal that was still very much white and Protestant.
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And despite the influx during this same period of millions of immigrant Jews and Catholics, this ideal continued to be identified with the hope for national progress.
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As their numbers increased, each non-Protestant group would be branded as foreign and a threat to the government of the United States. Eventually, Jews and Catholics would win acceptance, but Muslims would be the last to struggle for inclusion from among the founding triad of non-Protestant outsiders.

At the turn of the century, the stigma of being a Muslim immigrant in the United States prompted some aspirants to citizenship to change their names. For example, in 1903 Mohammed Asa Abu-Howah be- came A. Joseph Howar.
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Many Jews did likewise, lest their names announce their religion.
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Non-Protestant arrivals from Eastern and Southern Europe also changed their names for similar reasons. Muslims, however, faced discrimination based on race, not just religion.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to end legalized “discrimination and segregation of any kind on the ground of race, color, religion or national origin,”
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but before its passage, most Muslim immigrants, whether from Africa, Asia, or Europe, were at pains to insist that they were “white.”
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Most Americans would not have been prepared to see them that way, and religion certainly figured into their perceptions. In 1915, for instance, a federal judge would rule immigrants of Syrian origin to be officially “white,” largely because most arrivals from Syria were Christian.
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The ruling therefore offered no useful precedent for Muslims of other ethnicities. And Americans would continue to view Muslims as “not-quite-black, not-quite-white, not-quite American.”
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