How come the original Arabic version of the Treaty of Tripoli does not contain the well-known Article XI (“As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion…”)?
Speculation says the translator, a staunch non-Christian, added it for his own purposes (although there is no conclusive evidence for this hypothesis). To quote the Infidels website:
"The Treaty of Tripoli was signed in Tripoli on November 4th, 1796. The English text of the treaty was approved by the U.S. Senate on June 7, 1797 and ratified by President John Adams on June 10, 1797. It was recently discovered that the US copy of the Arabic version of the treaty not only lacks the quotation, it lacks Article XI altogether. Instead it seems to contain the text of a letter to the Pasha of Tripoli from the Dey of Algiers.
The person who translated the Arabic to English was Joel Barlow, Consul General at Algiers, a close friend of Thomas Paine – and an opponent of Christianity. It is possible that Barlow made up Article XI, but since there is no Arabic version of that article to be found, it’s hard to say. It seems unlikely, however.
In 1806 a new Treaty of Tripoli was ratified which no longer contained the quotation. The 1815 Treaty With Algiers contains a similar article, but does not state that the US government is not founded on religion, only that it is not incompatible with any religion."
It was not discovered that the Arabic text lacked Article XI until the 1930’s, and at this point it’s hard to say what might have happened to it; whether the Arabic version always lacked our Article XI or if what’s there now in the Arabic-language text was substituted for an Arabic version of our Article XI at some point during the 130-odd years between the treaty’s ratification by the United States and the discovery of the mislaid article.
It seems slighty farfetched to me that Joel Barlow was carrying out some secret plot. For one thing, I am given to understand that the Arabic text that takes the place of Article XI doesn’t make really make a whole lot of sense, especially not smack dab in the middle of a treaty; wouldn’t he have had something substituted which actually would have made sense to the Arab readers of the treaty? Nor is it clear why the article would be more controversial in Tripoli, as on its face it is written specifically to allay Muslim concerns about a potential source of prejudice against them, than it would be in the United States, where presumably supporters of Christian establishment might take offense at it. In fact, there does not seem to have been any controversy over the matter in the U.S., where the entire (rather short) treaty was passed (unanimously) by the Senate, and was in fact printed in its entirety in newspapers of the day, without any reports of sectarian riots.
Of course supporters of Christian establishment may not have cared much about the treaty simply because it wasn’t really saying anything new, or anything they hadn’t already realized and protested about. The secular basis for the government of the United States wasn’t laid down by a treaty with Tripoli, but by the United States Constitution; this was perfectly clear to supporters of Christian establishment at the time, who protested against the Constitution’s godlessness at the time of its adoption.