America’s Founding and Fabricated Islamic History

For CNN’s W. Kamau Bell, Islam has always been present in the United States. Mr Bell has devoted an entire episode of his series United Shades of America to explore Muslim communities throughout the US. “Islam has always been part of the American fabric,” one Muslim person in Detroit tells him at an anti-Trump event. “A lot of people think that Islam is from a foreign country, or is a foreign religion. It’s not—it’s very American.”

Of course, it was Barack Obama, when he was President of the United States, who told the Muslim world in Cairo in 2009: “Islam has always been a part of America’s story.” He offered as proof the Treaty of Tripoli, which was described as “essentially an agreement to pay a bribe to Muslim pirates who had made a practice of kidnapping Americans”.

In 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson attempted to negotiate an agreement with the envoy of the Sultan of Tripoli. The envoy’s reply, as recorded by Jefferson, fulfilled the Americans’ worst suspicions about the religious motivations of those Islamic states:

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

The vast majority of the American founders who signed the Declaration of Independence, who attended the Constitutional Convention, and who framed the First Amendment to the US Constitution, agreed with the premise that morality and religion are the bedrocks of a stable society. They believed that education, morality and religion went hand in hand, so they expressed the general view that “Providence” had a special plan for the early republic. This is why those founders were so keen to enact the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, a statute which declared that “Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, Schools and the means of education, shall forever be encouraged.”

In George Washington’s famous 1796 Farewell Address one finds the explicit conviction that religion, morality and good government are fundamentally intertwined, so that morality can never be maintained without religious sentiment. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” President Washington declared, “religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

However, when Washington and the other founders highlighted the importance of religion for society, they were not talking about religion per se. While they constantly referred to religion as a positive force in terms of social development and personal freedom, those founders thought of “religion” primarily as a Judeo-Christian religion. For example, Patrick Henry, who is famous for the cry, “Give me liberty or give me death”, famously declared: “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The American founders were particularly sceptical of the social benefits of the Islamic religion. For example, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard wonders: “Is it worse to follow Mahomet than the Devil?” This was a rhetorical question because Franklin (and all the American founders) thought they actually knew the answer: “to follow the former meant following the latter”.

To put it mildly, the US founders did not hold Islam in a high esteem. They often associated the Muslim nations with the world’s worst examples of political tyranny and barbaric oppression that in themselves magnified the threat they meant to fight. According to Thomas S. Kidd, “defenders of the Revolutionary ideas pointed regularly to Muslim states as models of tyranny that crushed essential freedoms”. They interpreted Islam as a tyrannical religion that was propagated by a “false prophet” who promoted deeply irrational ideas often requiring the backing of tyrannical government to survive.

Curiously, one of the principal arguments against the establishment of an official religion in the United States was that this would be more appropriate for an Islamic nation, rather than a Christian nation. After all, so those founders argued, “Mahomet called in the use of law and sword to convert people to his religion; but Jesus did not, does not.”

This anti-Islamic sentiment so deeply held by the founders did not diminish during the post-Revolutionary era. To the contrary, such anti-Islamic sentiment actually intensified due to the renewal of Muslim piracy in the Mediterranean. One of the results of the American Revolution, therefore, was the establishment of a republican government in which sovereignty was placed in the hands of the people. Further, the American structure was based on a rigid separation of government powers between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, an arrangement that remains fundamental to the American constitutional order even to this day.

The separation of government branches, which the drafters of the US Constitution designed, is commonly traced to the work of the French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu. Published in 1748, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws soon received widespread public acclamation. Its first English translation in 1750 became very popular in America, particularly during the ratification debates for the US Constitution. Those who supported the ratification, and those who argued against it, relied quite heavily on Montesquieu to justify their positions.

James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and others consciously tried to apply his principles in creating a new political system. He was quoted by them more than any other modern author (only the Bible trumped him). As Russell Kirk noted, “at the Constitutional Convention, no man was quoted more frequently than Montesquieu … It was from Montesquieu … that the Framers obtained a theory of checks and balances and of the division of powers.” The constitutional drafters deliberately based their new political system heavily on Montesquieu’s idea of separation of powers, with clear distinctions between the legislative, executive and the judicial branches of government.

Montesquieu was convinced that civil institutions are not abstractly ordained or agreed at any one moment; instead, laws grow slowly out of people’s experiences with one another, out of social customs and habits. In his words, “when a people have pure and regular manners, their laws become simple and natural”.

And yet, there are other significant passages in his celebrated book assuring the influence of the Christian religion on his philosophy. For instance, Book XXIV, Chapter 3, states: “The Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power, because the mildness so frequently recommended in the Gospel is incompatible with despotic rage with which a prince punishes his subjects, and exercises himself in cruelty.” By comparison, he describes Islam in a rather uncomplimentary light:

From the characters of the Christian and Mahometan religions, we ought, without any further examination, to embrace the one, and reject the other: for it is much easier to prove that religion ought to humanize the manners of men, than that any particular religion is true. It is a misfortune to human nature, when religion is given by a conqueror. The Mahometan religion, which speaks only by the sword, acts still upon men with that destructive spirit with which it was founded.

In that very chapter, where Montesquieu compares the Christian and Islamic religions, one also finds this bold statement:

While the Mahometan princes incessantly give or receive death, Christianity renders their princes less timid and consequently less cruel. The Christian princes consequently have more humanity: they are more disposed to be directed by laws, and more capable of perceiving that they cannot do whatever they please.

Montesquieu’s great admiration and appreciation for the fundamental legacy of Christianity as a force for good governance is also evident in numerous other passages of The Spirit of the Laws, such as this:

How admirable the religion, which, while it seems only to have in view the felicity of the other life, constitutes the happiness of this! … We owe to Christianity, in government a certain political law, and in war a certain law of nations, benefits which human nature can never sufficiently acknowledge.

Political order, structure and authority are necessary but they too demand limitation. Thus a political ruler’s authority must always be placed under the rule of law. Resting on this basic premise, it was logical for Montesquieu to conclude that society can only be protected from political tyranny if the power of the state does not entirely repose in the same political ruler. With the power of the state effectively divided, if one branch becomes too evil or corrupt, then the others must remain righteous and be able to check the wayward influence. This doctrine of the separation of powers is actually rooted in the biblical concept found in the book of Jeremiah, chapter 19, where one finds the statement that human rulers tend to become corrupt if their powers are left unchecked.

Relying on this belief, particularly in the biblical concept of sinful nature, Montesquieu concluded that it is “necessary from the disposition of things that power should be a check to power”. According to Nick Spencer, the basic reason why Montesquieu was able to more fully elaborate his famous theory of checks-and-balances:

lies in that fundamental Christian conviction of inherent human fallibility. Perfect freedom and perfect order are unrealisable because our very nature makes them unrealisable. Put another way, because humans are sinful, we are apt to abuse our freedom in a way that harms others. Although we should use our freedom for the common good, we tend not to, preferring instead, even if unconsciously, to deploy it for our own ends, even when those ends damage others. We need political order to keep us in check.

The American founders wholeheartedly agreed with this general premise of Christianity. This is found, for instance, in Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Paper No. 15:

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint … the infamy of a bad action is to be divided among a number [rather] than … to fall singly upon one.

Above all, the American founders assumed that applying Montesquieu’s doctrine of the separation of powers was absolutely vital to counteract the inherent problems associated with our sinful ambitions for power and glory. They believed in the inherent corruptibility of human nature and societies. As George Washington once explained, “A just estimate of that love of power and proneness to abuse it which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us for the truth of this position.” Thus Washington concluded: “the importance of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power by dividing and distributing it into different depositories … has been evinced”.

Ultimately, as Mark David Hall pointed out:

America’s founders believed that because humans are sinful it is dangerous to concentrate political power. The Constitution thus carefully separates powers and creates a variety of mechanisms whereby each institution can check the others. Critically, the power of the national government itself was limited by Article I, section 8. Indeed, the very notion of federalism … was itself modelled after Reformed approaches to church governance (especially Presbyterianism) and New England civic arrangements which … were themselves heavily influenced by Calvinist political ideas. It is noteworthy that the authors of the Connecticut compromise, Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, were both serious Reformed Christians who were leaders in their Congregational Churches. Enlightenment thinkers, on the other hand, generally embraced unicameralism and the centralization of power in a national government.

The efforts of Barack Obama and CNN at historical revisionism ultimately discourage any awareness or criticism of the more problematic aspects of Islamic ideology that directly clash with the constitutional protection of fundamental human rights as well as the preservation of liberal democratic principles. This is a clash that, in extremis, can even pose a terrorist threat to the American community.

Above all, any claim that Islam was part of the American founding history is nothing but a historical fabrication. Americans are tolerant enough to accept the integration of peaceful and law-abiding Muslims into the fabric of their pluralistic society, without being taught blatant lies about the role Islam might have played in their great history. To the extent that the religion of Islam was a part of early American history, it was a negative force, clearly an external enemy.