Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders Author: Denise A. Spellberg | Language: English | ISBN:
0307268225 | Format: EPUB
Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders Description
In this original and illuminating book, Denise A. Spellberg reveals a little-known but crucial dimension of the story of American religious freedom—a drama in which Islam played a surprising role. In 1765, eleven years before composing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson bought a Qur’an. This marked only the beginning of his lifelong interest in Islam, and he would go on to acquire numerous books on Middle Eastern languages, history, and travel, taking extensive notes on Islam as it relates to English common law. Jefferson sought to understand Islam notwithstanding his personal disdain for the faith, a sentiment prevalent among his Protestant contemporaries in England and America. But unlike most of them, by 1776 Jefferson could imagine Muslims as future citizens of his new country.
Based on groundbreaking research, Spellberg compellingly recounts how a handful of the Founders, Jefferson foremost among them, drew upon Enlightenment ideas about the toleration of Muslims (then deemed the ultimate outsiders in Western society) to fashion out of what had been a purely speculative debate a practical foundation for governance in America. In this way, Muslims, who were not even known to exist in the colonies, became the imaginary outer limit for an unprecedented, uniquely American religious pluralism that would also encompass the actual despised minorities of Jews and Catholics. The rancorous public dispute concerning the inclusion of Muslims, for which principle Jefferson’s political foes would vilify him to the end of his life, thus became decisive in the Founders’ ultimate judgment not to establish a Protestant nation, as they might well have done.
As popular suspicions about Islam persist and the numbers of American Muslim citizenry grow into the millions, Spellberg’s revelatory understanding of this radical notion of the Founders is more urgent than ever. Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an is a timely look at the ideals that existed at our country’s creation, and their fundamental implications for our present and future.
- Hardcover: 416 pages
- Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (October 1, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0307268225
- ISBN-13: 978-0307268228
- Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
We are still trying to figure out the place of Islam and of Muslims in America. We shouldn’t be going through this; the Founding Fathers considered the rules for Muslims to participate in the new government. They did so even though the Muslims they were considering were hypothetical, since there was little visible Muslim presence in the new nation. The enlightening _Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders_ (Knopf) by historian Denise A. Spellberg shows how Jefferson and his fellows worked out how the nation would solve the knotty problems of religious toleration. It also shows that the admirable solution is still being imperfectly applied.
Jefferson and the founders knew about Islam but they didn’t know Muslims. This was partly due to uncaring blindness; many of the slaves brought from Africa were of course Muslims, but this would have made little impression on the founders. What they knew about Muslims was that they were vastly different. Many Americans, if they thought of the issue at all, suspected that Muslims were dangerous threats to America and to the Christian religion. This enabled those championing religious toleration in the new nation, like Jefferson, Madison, and Washington, to use Muslims as a bogey, a worst-case scenario, and to show that even then, there ought to be no restrictions on either their ability to practice their religion or to participate fully as citizens. Given the historic introduction Spellberg gives, Jefferson’s views were breathtakingly radical. Jefferson himself, like many of the founders, was a deist, one who saw God at work at the inception of the universe but who denied the role of miracles, and the divinity of Jesus, within it.
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