Thomas Jefferson (b. 1743–d. 1826), author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom (1786), governor of Virginia (1779–1781), commissioner and US minister to France (1784–1789), first secretary of state (1790–1793), vice president (1797–1801), and two-term president (1801–1809), is famed in Americans history in each of these capacities. Less well known remains Jefferson’s lifelong interest in Islam and his personal contacts with its practitioners. This aspect of his public life and intellectual thought deserves to be included in standard histories of the United States as a unique window into ideas about religion and race during the nation’s founding era. A complex figure, Jefferson’s views of Islam and Muslims reflect his uniquely expansive views of religious freedom as well as his enduring engagement with issues of race and slavery.
Jefferson’s intellectual curiosity about Islam predates the founding of the United States. His early views of Muslims and their faith would be shaped first by transatlantic British scholarly publications as well as English diplomatic precedents with the Muslim kingdoms of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Books Jefferson ordered while a colonist in Virginia established the foundation for this bibliophile’s lifelong pursuit of knowledge about Islam and the Middle East. His direct encounters with Muslim officials resulted from Jefferson’s diplomatic and presidential engagement with North African Muslim kingdoms.
As an American intellectual, Jefferson’s views of race and slavery ultimately intersected with his capacious, radical, but minority view that Muslims should theoretically be granted religious freedom and political equality in his new nation—at some future point. He did not invent this position but rather borrowed and extended earlier English precedents for the religious toleration of Muslims, which he applied to legal precedents in his native Virginia at the outset of American independence. However, these theories would be contradicted by his personal practice of the enslavement of Black West Africans. Among those who arrived in bondage in North America from West Africa, a significant minority were persons of Islamic heritage.
The author of the Declaration of Independence knew well that enslaved Blacks toiling in North America would never be defined as “created equal” before the law. Among the West African Muslims swept up in the slave trade from 1619 to 1808, some may have labored unrecognized for their faith on Jefferson’s plantations. Although there is no proof of this, Jefferson learned of the presence of two enslaved West African escapees, both seemingly literate in Arabic, at the end of his second term as president. His response to their predicament reveals innate contradictions at the heart of his views of Muslim religious freedom and future citizenship. Ultimately, Jefferson’s remarkably inclusive precedents for his nation’s ideals of religious pluralism, which included Muslims theoretically, would be vitiated by his competing views of race and slavery.
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Jefferson, Thomas and Islam
Denise A. Spellberg
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Martin Luther, Islam, and the Ottoman Turks
Adam S. Francisco
The geographical extension of Islam into Christian lands generated a wide variety of responses and a tremendous amount of consternation amidst its subject and neighboring populations. This was the case in the early centuries of Islam as well as the age of Ottoman expansion into Europe at the time of the Protestant reformation. Just as the conflict between Martin Luther and the papacy was beginning, the issue of how Europe should respond to the military campaigns of the Turks in Hungary became increasingly paramount. Luther was initially aloof to the matter. But the farther the Turks moved up the Danube River basin toward Vienna, and the more he heard about the pope clamoring for a crusade and German preachers expressing ambivalence toward and sometimes preference for the Turk, the more he was pressed to address the issue of war with the Ottomans. Unsurprisingly, given his view of the secular realm, he came out strongly in favor of war, for in his mind it was just. He continued to support every preparation for it so long as it was not construed as a crusade. He also believed that physical warfare was not enough. It had to be accompanied by the spiritual disciplines of prayer and repentance. About the time of the siege of Vienna, Luther also began to view the Turkish threat as an apocalyptic threat. He was convinced that the rise of the Turks was foretold in the eschatological prophecies in scripture, especially Daniel 7. He also believed that, while the Turks would be successful for a time, their days were numbered as the last days were soon approaching. Until then, Christians needed to be warned about the dangers of Islam. He had heard and read that many Christians who ended up in the Ottoman Empire eventually became Muslims. So he spent most of his energy in writing about and inquiring into the theology and culture of the Turks for the purpose of encouraging and equipping Christians to resist it. Some of his work was practical and pastoral. His later work was polemical and apologetical. Throughout it all, he remained committed to making as much information on Islam available as possible. This culminated in his involvement in the publication of a Latin translation of the Qur’ān in 1543, a work that was included in the first collection of texts relating to Islam to ever be printed.
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Martin Luther as a Polemicist
Thomas Kaufmann
Luther was criticized for his polemics, particularly by his humanist contemporaries, and his writing did not in fact live up to the ideal of modestia (moderation). However, personal invective such as that engaged in by some humanists under cover of an incognito was not particularly evident in Luther’s work. Once he had sharply distanced himself from scholastic theology, especially in his academic lectures and series of theses, his polemical writing increased as a result of the dispute over indulgences (autumn of 1517). In his literary skirmishes with Tetzel, Luther first switched to using the vernacular German; it became characteristic of his polemical writing that he reacted quickly to enable the reading public to follow the controversy. From spring of 1520, as the number of defenders of the old faith (Prierias, Eck, Alveldt, Emser, Murner, Catharinus, and others) steadily grew, Luther was neither willing nor able to answer every written invective directed at him. The particular historical context, the prominence of his opponent, and the importance of the theme for further advancing the Reformation all played important roles in whom he chose to respond to. Since 1522 Luther was involved in numerous controversies with inner-Reformation opponents that centered on questions regarding how to conduct the Reformation, the sacraments, the external means of their administration, and how to treat members of congregations too weak or unprepared to accept change. Luther thought it important to draw clear lines with respect to opponents in his own camp, especially Karlstadt, Müntzer, and Zwingli. Of particular importance among his other writings are polemical texts against Turks and Jews. He found polemics in service of the truth of Christ’s teachings to be unavoidable.