'Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an,' by Denise Spellberg
Published 5:54 pm, Friday, November 8, 2013
Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an
Islam and the Founders
By Denise A. Spellberg
(Knopf; 392 pages; $27.95)
One of the strangest symptoms of our diseased political culture is the stubborn belief of some, despite all the contrary evidence, that President Obama is a Muslim. Slander and calumny are hardly new features of American politics. Usually it takes the form of an accusation that so-and-so is a socialist, or even a "commie" - another fervid charge frequently leveled at our current president. But as it turns out, the accusation that he is a Muslim is a quality that Obama shares with one of his most illustrious predecessors, Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson's politics are not easily pigeonholed. The author of the Declaration of Independence and defender of individual liberty, of course, famously owned many slaves. The charge that he was a Muslim, however, grew out of one of the more admirable stands he took during a career at least as controversial, and as maddening to his political opponents, as that of our current chief executive.
In the formative years of the republic, Jefferson found himself in the thick of debates over what it meant to be a citizen of the United States. One of the central questions concerned the relationship of citizenship and religious identity. Most of the newly independent states limited citizenship, or the right to hold political office, to Protestants, although the precise sects privileged and the nature of that privilege varied from state to state.
Jefferson championed the principle that citizenship should be available to anyone, regardless of religious identity. The issue first arose when he authored a bill in the Virginia Legislature that provided for complete religious tolerance. It re-emerged in the debate over the federal Constitution, in particular Article VI, which provides that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
Many engaged in this debate opposed jettisoning religious tests for public office. Doing so would, in the words of one opponent of the new Constitution, open the door "for Jews, Turks [i.e., Muslims], and Heathens to enter into publick office, and be seated at the head of the government of the United States."
Not that there were many Jews, or any Muslims at all, living as (potential) citizens in the states of the Union. But there were others who offended the religious sensibilities of the Protestant majority, including Catholics and Deists, and they too found themselves the objects of efforts to limit citizenship to white, Protestant men.
It is the rhetorical presence of Muslims, of the possibility that they might one day hold political office, that intrigued Denise Spellberg, a professor of medieval Islamic history at the University of Texas, and led her to write "Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an," a wonderful book in a field quite distant from her own area of expertise.
What she shows is that the question of the place of Muslims was integral to debates about American identity and political life from the very beginning. Post-9/11 anxieties over the presence and position of Muslims in the United States turn out to have a long pedigree.
Not that Jefferson was sympathetic to Islam itself. The nation's third president shared the anti-Muslim prejudice of his political opponents, a prejudice that had deep roots in European, Christian culture. The suggestion that Jefferson might be a Muslim - leveled by John Quincy Adams, defending his father in a public debate with Jefferson over Thomas Paine and the lessons to be drawn from the French Revolution - was designed to capitalize on the almost universal contempt for Islam among early Americans.
Nonetheless, Jefferson and his allies, such as the North Carolina lawyer James Iredell, "were able to divorce the idea of [potential] Muslim citizenship from their dislike of Islam, as they forged an 'imagined political community' inclusive beyond all precedent." Tea Party "patriots" who idolize Thomas Jefferson and the Founders, take note.
As a historian of Islam, Spellberg brings to the story an eye for the ironies that cross-cultural encounters can often bring. She notes, for example, that while Jefferson, Iredell and others played with the idea that Muslims might one day be citizens of the United States, they were apparently oblivious to the fact that thousands of Muslims already lived within the nation's borders, since a significant portion of African slaves were of Muslim origin.
She notes the irony, too, that Jefferson was the first American president to go to war against a Muslim state - although Jefferson, unlike his rival John Adams, downplayed the specifically religious component of the tensions between the U.S. and the "Barbary" states.
Jefferson and his allies won the immediate battle over religious tolerance: Article VI remained in the American Constitution. Recent events, however - controversies over the construction of mosques in New York, and in Murfreesboro, Tenn. - demonstrate that the larger struggle for religious tolerance and inclusion continues. Spellberg provides valuable historical context for that struggle. In itself, her book constitutes a step toward inclusiveness in the ongoing construction of American history.
Jonathan P. Berkey is an associate professor of history at Davidson College and the author of "The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800" (Cambridge University Press). E-mail: email@example.com