President Obama created controversy in a recent speech when
he asserted that “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its
founding.” He followed this statement with rather generic statements about
Muslim immigrants coming to America and finding economic opportunity and
freedom.
The point of the president’s comments is, of course, that
millions of Muslims live and prosper in America, and that they, not ISIS,
Al-Qaeda, or other jihadists, are representative Muslims. America, and the
American government, welcomes these Muslims here as friends and fellow citizens.
This, in my opinion, is correct, and is just the sort of thing that the
president needs to emphasize over and over.
But what about the idea that Islam has been “woven into the
fabric” of America since the founding? What role did Islam, and Muslims, play in
colonial and Revolutionary America?
Part of the reason that the president gave few details about
Islam and the founding era is that most of Islam’s role at that time was either
in negative associations, or in real Muslim slaves. Neither gives much fodder,
I’m afraid, for positive examples that the president might cite.
As I noted in a chapter on Islam which I contributed to
Daniel Dreisbach and Mark David Hall’s book Faith and the Founders of the
American Republic,
There were actual Muslims living in America during the
Founding period, but the vast majority of them were toiling as slaves in the
South. Of course, Muslim traders and sailors also passed through American ports
on occasion, but most American Muslims were Africans forcibly imported to work
on American plantations. The exact number of Muslims, of course, is hard to
discern, but historian Michael Gomez has estimated that perhaps 200,000 slaves
came from African regions with significant Muslim influences. This does not
mean that all of these were Muslims, but it does suggest that hundreds of
thousands of slaves may have been at least marginally familiar with Muslim
beliefs.
But the typical Muslim appearing in Anglo-American writing
during the Revolutionary period was not an African slave; more likely he would
have been a Barbary pirate or a Middle Eastern despot. A close look at the uses
of Islam in the Founding period and early republic shows reveals a
well-established political and literary tradition: citing the similarities
between an opponent’s views and the “beliefs” of Islam as a means to discredit
one’s adversaries. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Americans’ uses
of Islam became increasingly secularized. Early in the century, Islam was
typically used for religious purposes in religious debates, while later
commentators often implemented knowledge of despotic Islamic states to support
political points. Real fears of Islam as a religion continued, however,
appearing in episodes such as the ratification debates of the late 1780s, when
the lack of a religious test in the Constitution theoretically opened a door to
the election of Muslims to American political offices. Although one should
hesitate to describe early Americans as conversant with Islam, they certainly
conversed about Islam regularly.
Thus, African slaves were the most likely people in early
America to have a Muslim background, but they did not shape most
European-Americans’ views of Islam. These came from popular writings such as
stories of people suffering captivity at the hands of the Barbary pirates, and
biographies of the Prophet Muhammad (English-language biographies or
translations that typically presented him as the epitome of a religious
impostor).
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is seen here (left) during Congressman Ellison’s Swearing In Ceremony with Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an (2007); Michaela McNichol, Library of Congress; Wikimedia Commons. |
Perhaps the most furious public debate about Islam came
during the ratification process, when many critics of the no-test oath clause
of the Constitution said that it opened the door for atheists, or even
“Mahometans” to serve in public office. Defenders of the ban on religious tests
for national public service (evangelical Baptists were among the strongest
advocates of the ban) argued that the government should play no role in
policing people’s religious beliefs, and that if it came to pass that the
American people wanted to elect a Muslim, then the will of the people should
prevail.
It took quite a long time, but of course the ban on a test
oath did ultimately lead to the election of Congress’s first Muslim, Keith
Ellison, in 2006. Ellison swore his oath of office on Thomas Jefferson’s copy
of the Qur’an (translations of which were also widely available at the time of
the nation’s founding). Internet rumors about President Obama’s faith
notwithstanding, we have yet to have a Muslim serve as president.
Credit to Thomas Kidd
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