The Founders’ Original Problems with Islam Didn’t Prejudice Them
Jonathan Rowe on Sep 11th 2007 02:03 pm |
Chuck Norris’ recent column for WorldNetDaily brings to mind an irony: Folks hostile to Islam, have, of late, pointed out America’s problems with Islam are nothing new and point back to America’s founding era where the Barbary pirates, notably during the Adams and Jefferson Administrations, targeted European and American ships for looting and enslavement. As the story goes, the Muslim pirates felt the Americans’ and Europeans’ Christian or non-Muslim religion justified the attacks. I’ve scoured the Founders’ writings on Islam, and despite those problems, it did not lead Jefferson or Adams (or any of the other notable founders for that matter) to conclude there was anything in principle wrong with the Islamic religion. On the contrary, from what I’ve been able to glean, Adams and Jefferson thought Islam analogous to Christianity: It was a religion that was at heart true (because it, like most other religions, taught there is an overriding Providence and future state of rewards and punishments) but had been corrupted by dogma.
Here is Adams, well after retiring from the Presidency on Islam:
“It has pleased the Providence of the first Cause, the Universal Cause, that Abraham should give religion not only to Hebrews but to Christians and Mahomitans, the greatest part of the modern civilized world.”
– John Adams to M.M. Noah, July 31, 1818
And here is Jefferson who draws an equivalence between the bloodshed in Christianity and Islam while noting all religions (presumably including Islam) are valid:
Every religion consists of moral precepts, and of dogmas. In the first they all agree. All forbid us to murder, steal, plunder, bear false witness &ca. and these are the articles necessary for the preservation of order, justice, and happiness in society. In their particular dogmas all differ; no two professing the same. These respect vestments, ceremonies, physical opinions, and metaphysical speculations, totally unconnected with morality, and unimportant to the legitimate objects of society. Yet these are the questions on which have hung the bitter schisms of Nazarenes, Socinians, Arians, Athanasians in former times, and now of Trinitarians, Unitarians, Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers &c. 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!… We see good men in all religions, and as many in one as another. It is then a matter of principle with me to avoid disturbing the tranquility of others by the expression of any opinion on the [unimportant points] innocent questions on which we schismatize, and think it enough to hold fast to those moral precepts which are of the essence of Christianity, and of all other religions.
– Thomas Jefferson to James Fishback, Sept. 27, 1809.
Finally, here is an informative page from James H. Hutson and the Library of Congress noting how much public opinion of Islam during the founding era was positive.
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In the era of the Founding, any observer knew that both Islam and Christendom were violent and repressive. Christendom was no more associated with social progress than was Islam. Matching monarchy, slavery, poverty, markets, freedom, wars, most social indicators, the contrasts between Islam and Christendom weren’t that great. Islam and Christianity both tell us not to kill, not to steal, to be loyal to the truth, and so forth.
21sh Century Americans look at the Islamic countries and see repression and violence (much of it in the name of Islam). In Christian countries we see Liberalism or aspects of it. Islam doesn’t come out so well. So we look for those passages in the Koran and those aspects of Islamic belief that help explain the difference.
I realize that the effective end of Christendom is a major factor in the changes of the past few centuries. But I think the contrast in the societies is an important reason we have such a negative view of Islam. A similar case may be that of Catholicism in the early 20th century, when the Catholic countries were all monarchies and most of them dysfunctional at that, with U.S. opinion of Catholicism being very negative.
The Unitarian scientist and theologian whose work provided a foundation for Jefferson’s Christianity — the Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley — in the late eighteenth century “was dubbed ‘half a Mahometan’” for arguing that if Christians dispensed with the Trinitarian doctrine equating Jesus, a human being, with God, then a more rationale dialogue with monotheistic Islam could be expected to follow. See John Brooke, Joining Natural Philosophy to Christianity: The Case of Joseph Priestley, in JOHN HEDLEY BROOKE & IAN MACLEAN, EDS, HETERODOXY IN EARLY MODERN SCIENCE AND RELIGION 319, 328 (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Priestley believed the Trinitarian dogma that Jesus is God to be not only a corruption of sound Christian doctrine, but one that prevented adherents of the world’s great monotheistic traditions from perceiving the Christian religion’s fundamental truth. “It is remarkable,” Priestley wrote, “that about the time that the doctrine of the trinity came to be generally professed by learned Christians, we read of few or no converts to Christianity from the Jews; and, no doubt, the teaching of such a doctrine as this, so repugnant to the most fundamental principles of their religion, must have contributed not a little to this effect.” 1 JOSEPH PRIESTLEY, A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH: TO THE FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE 251 (Northumberland, Pennsylvania: Andrew Kennedy, 2d ed. 1803).
Eric Alan Isaacson
[...] Also check out Eric Alan Isaacson (who is participating in this very important conference on securities law) ask whether Jesus himself was a Unitarian, and discuss how Joseph Priestly’s Unitarianism made his creed friendlier to Islam. [...]