Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders Read Online Free PDF
Author: Denise A. Spellberg
Tags: Religión, United States, General, History, Islam, Political Science, Civil Rights
notwithstanding this liberty, the commander of the ship ought to command the ship’s course, yea, and also command that justice, peace and sobriety, be kept and practiced, both among the seamen and all the passengers. 140
    In Williams’s ideal, religiously plural society, passengers might even refuse to come to prayers. 141 In a swipe at Puritan Massachusetts, he described his model as “the true picture of a commonwealth,” a society whose “weal and woe” is common to all.
    In reality, no Muslims, Jews, or Catholics applied to join Williams’s experiment in religious liberty and pluralism. In 1656 or 1658, a few Jews from Spain and Portugal arrived in Newport, only to leave before a second group arrived in 1678. 142 But they lived outside of Williams’s Providence jurisdiction. There is thus no way to know whether the political equality for those non-Christians who figured so consistently in his writings ever would have worked in practice. 143 Still, it seems likely that at the very least he would have offered the adherents of Islam safe harbor in Providence. He had despised, debated, and vilified the beliefs of the Quakers by comparing them to Muslims, and yet in practice, Williams had continued to offer Quakers a protected place in his colony.

4

Jefferson Versus John Adams

    The Problem of North African Piracy and Their Negotiations with a Muslim Ambassador in London, 1784–88
    Would it not be better to offer them an equal treaty. If they refuse, why not go to war with them? Spain, Portugal, Naples and Venice are now at war with them. Every part of the Mediterranean therefore would offer us friendly ports. We ought to begin a naval power, if we mean to carry on our own commerce. Can we begin it on a more honourable occasion or with a weaker foe?
    —Thomas Jefferson supports war against
North African pirates, November 1784
    The policy of Christendom has made Cowards of all their Sailors before the Standard of Mahomet.
    —John Adams to Thomas Jefferson,
July 1786                                   
    “T HERE IS A Tripolitan Ambassador with whom I have had three conferences,” wrote John Adams from London on February 21, 1786, inviting Thomas Jefferson, then serving as a diplomat in Paris, to help negotiate a treaty with the Muslim envoy from Tripoli, the North African coastal city in what is today Libya. Jefferson would comply the next month. 1
    In March 1786, three months after the landmark legislation onreligious freedom in Virginia was passed in his absence, Jefferson would for the first time encounter a real Muslim, one of only two he ever knowingly met. The month before had been Adams’s first time meeting a Muslim too.
    In London, Jefferson and John Adams listened as the ambassador from Tripoli referred to the Qur’an to justify naval attacks against American shipping in the Mediterranean, which the two Americans duly noted in their joint communiqué. It is possible that the Muslim ambassador’s invocation of specific passages in the sacred text caused Jefferson to consult his own copy, perhaps even presenting the occasion when the Founder saw fit to mark the book with his initials. To judge by Jefferson’s single reference to the Qur’an in the context of Adams’s three earlier meetings with the Muslim ambassador, as well as the fourth, at which Jefferson was present, it is clear that religion, however convenient a rationale for “Islamic piracy,” was not the paramount issue in American negotiations with Tripoli. Still, in this earliest face-to-face cultural encounter, it would be Adams, not Jefferson, who emphasized religion in his perceptions of the enemy.
    This chapter traces the evolution of Jefferson’s thinking about the piracy problem from 1784 to 1788. His strategy was, from the first, governed not by religious but political and economic considerations. These drove his early, somewhat duplicitous attempt to solve the problem by military means without
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