Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives: The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, Their Arabic Letters, & an American President by Jeffrey Einboden

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives: The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, Their Arabic Letters, & an American President by Jeffrey Einboden Kambiz GhaneaBassiri (bio) Islam, Thomas Jefferson, Slavery, North Africa Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives: The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, Their Arabic Letters, & an American President. By Jeffrey Einboden. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 352. Cloth, $29.95.) Did Thomas Jefferson have knowledge of the presence of Muslims in the territories over which he presided? Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives is an admirable attempt to decisively answer this question with a "Yes." While digging in various archives for Arabic writings from antebellum America, Einboden discovered two Arabic manuscripts that had been written by "runaway" slaves detained in rural Kentucky. A "frontier pioneer" named Ira P. Nash carried the manuscripts to Washington and handed them to the president on October 4, 1804. Based on his communications with Nash, Jefferson thought that these manuscripts "'contained' the Africans' own 'history, as stated by themselves'" (178). He thus sought to have them translated so that "if practicable," he "may procure the release of the men if proper" (156). Unfortunately, the specialists who were consulted on Jefferson's behalf were not able to decipher the Arabic writings in these manuscripts. Einboden reads one of them as Surat al-Nas, the last chapter of the Qur'an, and the other he identifies as illegible but likely to contain "verses from [End Page 184] discrete chapters of the Qur'an" (305, n13). He argues that their exact content is not as significant as their context. They "represent intentional acts of authorship, embodying a deep 'history,' while also seeming to articulate anxieties particular to . . . their [authors'] present enslavement" (178). Much of Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives aims to narrate this deep history of Jefferson and other American elites' interactions with Islam by tethering their biographies to the unpublished Arabic writings that Einboden discovered in the course of his years of research. This resulting story is significant for Einboden because it challenges the widespread assumption that the presence of enslaved Muslim Africans was invisible to the Founders. The question that Einboden sets out to answer, "How could these two pages—authored in Arabic by fugitive West Africans—have stayed submerged for more than two centuries?" (6), is all the more perplexing given that nearly every week of Jefferson's political life has been documented and analyzed. By bringing Jefferson's biography into conversation with contemporary Arabic writings, Einboden hopes to expand the canon of early American history and to integrate Muslims into how we imagine the political formation of the United States today. While I wholeheartedly applaud Einboden's aim, Jefferson's Fugitive Muslims falls short of realizing it in a compelling way. It is overwritten and under-theorized. For example, in a chapter discussing the signing of a treaty between Morocco and the United States, Einboden writes, Instead of December 1786, Jefferson waited until January 1, 1787, to trace his signature on the treaty. Mirroring the Ramadan autograph of Morocco's emperor—who had ratified the treaty on the first day of Islam's holiest month—Jefferson signaled his own approval on New Year's Day. Not a season of fasting in Paris, but a feast (32). One wishes that rather than resorting to such rhetorical associations between Jefferson and the Arabic documents he encountered, Einboden would have spent more time exploring the theoretical and historical ramifications of translating such emerging political concepts as "Citizens of the United States" into Arabic. What does this written exchange tell us about how citizenship in a nation–state was understood by Americans and Moroccans at this time, and how was it projected to shape international and diplomatic relations? Elsewhere, while discussing Jefferson's efforts to have the abovementioned manuscripts translated, Einboden writes, [End Page 185] Twenty-two years before, in 1785, O'Brien had petitioned Jefferson's help to save him from Muslim imprisonment [in North Africa]; now in 1807, Jefferson was petitioning O'Brien to help save two Muslims from American incarceration [by translating their Arabic writings]. In 1785, Jefferson had advised O'Brien to keep quiet and discreet in Muslim lands; now, Jefferson was asking O'Brien to divulge...