Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an Islam and the founders

Denise A. Spellberg

Book - 2013

"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" -- from publisher's web site.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf 2013.
Language
English
Main Author
Denise A. Spellberg (-)
Edition
First Edition
Physical Description
viii, 392 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 303-373) and index.
ISBN
9780307268228
9780307388391
  • Preface and Acknowledgments
  • Introduction Imagining the Muslim as Citizen at the Founding of the United States
  • 1. The European Christian Origins of Negative but Sometimes Accurate American Ideas About Islam and Muslims, 1529-1797
  • 2. Positive European Christian Precedents for the Toleration of Muslims, and Their Presence in Colonial America, 1554-1706
  • 3. What Jefferson Learned-and Didn't-from His Qur'an: His Negative Views of Islam, and Their Political Uses, Contrasted with His Support for Muslim Civil Rights, 1765-86
  • 4. Jefferson Versus John Adams: The Problem of North African Piracy and Their Negotiations with a Muslim Ambassador in London, 1784-88
  • 5. Could a Muslim Be President? Muslim Rights and the Ratification of the Constitution, 1788
  • 6. Jefferson Wages War Against an Islamic Power; Entertains the First Muslim Ambassador; Decides Where to Place the Qur'an in His Library; and Affirms His Support for Muslim Rights, 1790-1823
  • 7. Beyond Toleration: John Leland, Baptist Advocate for the Rights of Muslims, 1776-1841
  • Afterword Why Can't a Muslim Be President? Eighteenth-Century Ideals of the Muslim Citizen and Their Significance in the Twenty-First Century
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

Since 9/11, there has been a heightened interest in the study of Islam in the US. Adding to this growing body of literature, Spellberg (Texas) examines the role that Islam played in the country's founding. Her jumping-off point is Thomas Jefferson's 1765 purchase of George Sale's two-volume English translation of the Qur'an. Spellberg does not argue that Islamic doctrines influenced the founding, but that the incorporation of Muslims into the civil body politic as equal citizens and, more theoretically, as elected officials through the elimination of religious test oaths for federal office holders, became a litmus test for religious freedom in the US. The author unpacks this systematically by tracing the historical development of disestablishment thought in British and American circles. However, American Protestants--much like their Protestant European counterparts--systematically denied Catholics and Jews religious equality. Less frequently, though no less passionately, was the practice of casting Muslim aspersions upon political opponents and thereby associating anything with Islam as un-American and hostile to American democratic institutions. In conclusion, this work provides a solid examination of the expansionary vision of the inclusion of religious minorities in the early US, and the projected role that future Muslim Americans would play in later decades. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries. M. S. Hill Gordon College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

DIVINING A MAN'S beliefs from the books in his library is a perilous business. And when that man happens to be Thomas Jefferson, it's like trying to staple vinaigrette to the ceiling. The third president, an omnivorous bibliophile, owned perhaps as many as 10,000 titles. He also was a reticent man of infinite contradictions, as well as a cunning politician. Could any one of this Delphic founder's many books account for his most enduring contributions to liberal democracy? The answer, it seems, is yes. In "Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an," her fascinating if somewhat meandering new book, Denise A. Spellberg traces the partial origins of American religious toleration to a single day in 1765 when Jefferson, then studying law at the College of William and Mary, acquired an English translation of Islam's sacred text. He never claimed that the Quran shaped his political orientation. Yet Spellberg, an associate professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin, makes a persuasive case for its centrality. To oversimplify: What began as an academic interest in Islamic law and religion yielded a fascination with Islamic culture, which disposed him to include Muslims in his expansive vision of American citizenship. The book charts the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in 16th-century Europe and migration to America a century later. Much of the popular animus toward Islam, she explains, originated in northern Europeans' fear of the Ottoman Empire (to say nothing of Barbary pirates trolling the Mediterranean for captives). But not everyone took a pejorative view of the faith or its adherents. John Locke, for one, preached toleration and "civic equality" for England's Muslim population in the late 1680s, as part of his daring argument for guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of Jews, Roman Catholics and nonconformist Protestants. Spellberg specifies Locke as Jefferson's inspiration and, in the book's finest pages, sketches a genealogy of his proudest accomplishments, especially the 1786 Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, which anticipated the First Amendment separating church and state. In a vexing plea for relevance, Spellberg strains to make "Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an" foremost a book for our troubled post-9/11 world. But her real achievement is in casting a coterie of founders - pre-eminently Jefferson, Madison and Washington - in the unlikely role of radicals in their tolerance of Islam. THIS IS REVELATORY stuff. But you would hardly know it: As if reluctant to render her subjects too sympathetic, Spellberg counters instances of their rousing liberality with deflating evidence to the contrary. We are told again and again, for example, that Jefferson and company championed Muslim rights, but only hypothetically, as an extreme test case. Moreover, they lacked "any inherent appreciation for Islam as a religion." Such qualifying asides rob the book of its power. To be fair, Spellberg tries throughout to chart a middle course between celebration and critique. Sometimes she succeeds. But, often as not, she alerts us to long-familiar incongruities, only to stop short of engaging them. To wit: At Mount Vernon, Washington "signaled openness to Muslim laborers in 1784." Like Jefferson, he "advocated Muslim rights." Yet both men may conceivably have owned slaves with Muslim roots. And unlike John Adams (who didn't own slaves), Jefferson refused to be persuaded of any connection between white captives taken by Barbary pirates and black chattel slavery. Spellberg is right: "What to us today seems hypocritical did not trouble Jefferson, or indeed most Americans of his day." Missing from these pages is any deeper sense of why Jefferson and his exceptional contemporaries felt and believed as they did. Alas, scholarly books about big ideas rarely take full measure of those who generate them. Someone better acquainted with Jefferson's and Washington's interior lives might have navigated their inconsistencies with greater finesse. Still, "Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an" breaks fresh ground and should, with any luck, inspire further elaboration. KIRK DAVIS SWINEHART is writing a book about Sir William Johnson, Britain's diplomat to the American Indians in the 18th century.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 24, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review

The English translation of the Qur'an that Thomas Jefferson purchased in 1765 made its most public appearance in 2007, when Minnesota congressman-electKeith Ellison used it for a photo-op reenactment of his taking the oath of office. Jefferson's Qur'an is, Spellberg shows in this fresh and timely account, important not because it directly influenced Jefferson's thought it is not clear how much of the two-volume work he read or what he learned from it but because its presence in Jefferson's library reminds us of his progressive positions on religious tolerance, and the extent to which the Founding Fathers' ideas were shaped by their ideas about Muslims, even though most of the Founders had probably never actually met a Muslim. Spellberg illustrates her thesis in part by describing the slight but significant ways in which colonial Americans came into contact with Muslims, who were thought to reflect the outer limits of a diverse American population. She scours Jefferson's writings and draws inferences from, among other things, where in his library Jefferson shelved his Qur'an. But Jefferson's political and diplomatic dealings, which reveal a thoughtful if complicated approach to Islam, are perhaps more revealing. And we are reminded that, in a messy election campaign against John Adams, Jefferson may have been the first presidential candidate to be maliciously accused of being a Muslim.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Spellberg, a professor of history and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas, Austin, presents for the reader a comprehensive survey of attitudes toward Islam in Europe and America in the 17th and 18th centuries, detailing Thomas Jefferson's vision of a religiously pluralist society and his positive answer to the question of whether a Muslim could be a full citizen of the new United States. The book's focus is often undecided, though, as it wanders away from Jefferson to explore prominent early political figures such as John Adams and John Leland, and even the question of Islam among African-American slaves; it doesn't provide enough in-depth material on other founders to fully justify the subtitle or turn the main spotlight from Jefferson himself. In its stronger moments, the book explores some fascinating topics relevant to the modern political landscape, such as the First Barbary War, and accusations by Jefferson's political opponents that he was a secret Muslim, and makes a convincing case that Muslims have always served as the Other in American discourse. In its weaker moments, however, its dry tone and dense lists of facts, often without full context or analysis, will make it more appealing to academics with a specialty in the subject than to the lay reader. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The intriguing story of Thomas Jefferson and his reading of the holy book of Islam. Spellberg (History and Middle Eastern Studies/Univ. of Texas; Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of Aisha bint Abi Bakr, 1994, etc.) is straightforward about Jefferson's numerous contradictions of thought throughout his political career. On one hand, the cosmopolitan bibliophile purchased George Sale's translation of the Quran more than a decade before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, examining it carefully as he formulated his thoughts on religious freedom in the new nation. On the other hand, Jefferson "remained rather tenaciously a man of his times," carrying the biases of his day about Muslims (and slaves). In this fascinating and timely study, Spellberg exposes the early American views about Muslims. While the early Americans inherited many biases from Europe, others intimately acquainted with religious persecution, like Roger Williams, embraced a view of "liberty of conscience" that logically had to tolerate the views of all religions--Jews, Catholics and Muslims alike. Jefferson, whose great Enlightenment hero was John Locke, drew on Locke's seminal A Letter Concerning Toleration as he refined his ideas about toleration for non-Anglican Protestants in the Virginia Commonwealth. Judiciously, he urged for religious toleration of dissenters to keep them from fomenting "seditious conspiracies." Spellberg reveals Jefferson's tortuous thought processes regarding religious freedom, as he could not envision how the "universal" legislation regarding liberty of conscience could extend to the West African slaves, who happened to be the only Muslims in America at the time. The victim of a presidential smear campaign, Jefferson recognized personally the danger in hurtful rhetoric about the "infidel." Meticulous research and a well-structured text combine in this important study of the early American political leaders and their convictions regarding religious and social tolerance.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Introduction Imagining the Muslim as Citizen at the Founding of the United States [He] sais "neither Pagan nor Mahamedan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion." --Thomas Jefferson, quoting John Locke, 1776 At a time when most Americans were uninformed, misinformed, or simply afraid of Islam, Thomas Jefferson imagined Muslims as future citizens of his new nation. His engagement with the faith began with the purchase of a Qur'an eleven years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson's Qur'an survives still in the Library of Congress, serving as a symbol of his and early America's complex relation- ship with Islam and its adherents. That relationship remains of signal importance to this day. That he owned a Qur'an reveals Jefferson's interest in the Islamic religion, but it does not explain his support for the rights of Muslims. Jefferson first read about Muslim "civil rights" in the work of one of his intellectual heroes: the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke. Locke had advocated the toleration of Muslims--and Jews-- following in the footsteps of a few others in Europe who had considered the matter for more than a century before him. Jefferson's ideas about Muslim rights must be understood within this older context, a complex set of transatlantic ideas that would continue to evolve most markedly from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Amid the interdenominational Christian violence in Europe, some Christians, beginning in the sixteenth century, chose Muslims as the test case for the demarcation of the theoretical boundaries of their toleration for all believers. Because of these European precedents, Muslims also became a part of American debates about religion and the limits of citizenship. As they set about creating a new government in the United States, the American Founders, Protestants all, frequently referred to the adherents of Islam as they contemplated the proper scope of religious freedom and individual rights among the nation's present and potential inhabitants. The founding generation debated whether the United States should be exclusively Protestant or a religiously plural polity. And if the latter, whether political equality--the full rights of citizenship, including access to the highest office--should extend to non-Protestants. The mention, then, of Muslims as potential citizens of the United States forced the Protestant majority to imagine the parameters of their new society beyond toleration. It obliged them to interrogate the nature of religious freedom: the issue of a "religious test" in the Constitution, like the ones that would exist at the state level into the nineteenth century; the question of "an establishment of religion," potentially of Protestant Christianity; and the meaning and extent of a separation of religion from government. Resistance to the idea of Muslim citizenship was predictable in the eighteenth century. Americans had inherited from Europe almost a millennium of negative distortions of the faith's theological and political character. Given the dominance and popularity of these anti-Islamic representations, it was startling that a few notable Americans not only refused to exclude Muslims, but even imagined a day when they would be citizens of the United States, with full and equal rights. This surprising, uniquely American egalitarian defense of Muslim rights was the logical extension of European precedents already mentioned. Still, on both sides of the Atlantic, such ideas were marginal at best. How, then, did the idea of the Muslim as a citizen with rights survive despite powerful opposition from the outset? And what is the fate of that ideal in the twenty-first century? This book provides a new history of the founding era, one that explains how and why Thomas Jefferson and a handful of others adopted and then moved beyond European ideas about the toleration of Muslims. It should be said at the outset that these exceptional men were not motivated by any inherent appreciation for Islam as a religion. Muslims, for most American Protestants, remained beyond the outer limit of those possessing acceptable beliefs, but they nevertheless became emblems of two competing conceptions of the nation's identity: one essentially preserving the Protestant status quo, and the other fully realizing the pluralism implied in the Revolutionary rhetoric of inalienable and universal rights. Thus while some fought to exclude a group whose inclusion they feared would ultimately portend the undoing of the nation's Protestant character, a pivotal minority, also Protestant, perceiving the ultimate benefit and justice of a religiously plural America, set about defending the rights of future Muslim citizens. They did so, however, not for the sake of actual Muslims, because none were known at the time to live in America. Instead, Jefferson and others defended Muslim rights for the sake of "imagined Muslims," the promotion of whose theoretical citizenship would prove the true universality of American rights. Indeed, this defense of imagined Muslims would also create political room to consider the rights of other despised minorities whose numbers in America, though small, were quite real, namely Jews and Catholics. Although it was Muslims who embodied the ideal of inclusion, Jews and Catholics were often linked to them in early American debates, as Jefferson and others fought for the rights of all non-Protestants. In 1783, the year of the nation's official independence from Great Britain, George Washington wrote to recent Irish Catholic immigrants in New York City. The American Catholic minority of roughly twenty- five thousand then had few legal protections in any state and, because of their faith, no right to hold political office in New York. Washing- ton insisted that "the bosom of America" was "open to receive . . . the oppressed and the persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges." He would also write similar missives to Jewish communities, whose total population numbered only about two thousand at this time. One year later, in 1784, Washington theoretically enfolded Muslims into his private world at Mount Vernon. In a letter to a friend seeking a carpenter and bricklayer to help at his Virginia home, he explained that the workers' beliefs--or lack thereof--mattered not at all: "If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans [Muslims], Jews or Christian of an[y] Sect, or they may be Atheists." Clearly, Muslims were part of Washington's understanding of religious pluralism--at least in theory. But he would not have actually expected any Muslim applicants. Although we have since learned that there were in fact Muslims resident in eighteenth-century America, this book demonstrates that the Founders and their generational peers never knew it. Thus their Muslim constituency remained an imagined, future one. But the fact that both Washington and Jefferson attached to it such symbolic significance is not accidental. Both men were heir to the same pair of opposing European traditions. The first, which predominated, depicted Islam as the antithesis of the "true faith" of Protestant Christianity, as well as the source of tyrannical governments abroad. To tolerate Muslims--to accept them as part of a majority Protestant Christian society--was to welcome people who professed a faith most eighteenth-century Europeans and Americans believed false, foreign, and threatening. Catholics would be similarly characterized in American Protestant founding discourse. Indeed, their faith, like Islam, would be deemed a source of tyranny and thus antithetical to American ideas of liberty. In order to counter such fears, Jefferson and other supporters of non-Protestant citizenship drew upon a second, less popular but crucial stream of European thought, one that posited the toleration of Muslims as well as Jews and Catholics. Those few Europeans, both Catholic and Protestant, who first espoused such ideas in the sixteenth century often died for them. In the seventeenth century, those who advocated universal religious toleration frequently suffered death or imprisonment, banishment or exile, the elites and common folk alike. The ranks of these so-called heretics in Europe included Catholic and Protestant peasants, Protestant scholars of religion and political theory, and fervid Protestant dissenters, such as the first English Baptists--but no people of political power or prominence. Despite not being organized, this minority consistently opposed their coreligionists by defending theoretical Muslims from persecution in Christian-majority states. As a member of the eighteenth-century Anglican establishment and a prominent political leader in Virginia, Jefferson represented a different sort of proponent for ideas that had long been the hallmark of dissident victims of persecution and exile. Because of his elite status, his own endorsement of Muslim citizenship demanded serious consideration in Virginia--and the new nation. Together with a handful of like-minded American Protestants, he advanced a new, previously unthinkable national blueprint. Thus did ideas long on the fringe of European thought flow into the mainstream of American political dis- course at its inception. Not that these ideas found universal welcome. Even a man of Jefferson's national reputation would be attacked by his political opponents for his insistence that the rights of all believers should be protected from government interference and persecution. But he drew support from a broad range of constituencies, including Anglicans (or Episcopalians), as well as dissenting Presbyterians and Baptists, who suffered persecution perpetrated by fellow Protestants. No denomination had a unanimously positive view of non-Protestants as full American citizens, yet support for Muslim rights was expressed by some members of each. What the supporters of Muslim rights were proposing was extraordinary even at a purely theoretical level in the eighteenth century. American citizenship--which had embraced only free, white, male Protestants--was in effect to be abstracted from religion. Race and gender would continue as barriers, but not so faith. Legislation in Virginia would be just the beginning, the First Amendment far from the end of the story; in fact, Jefferson, Washington, and James Madison would work toward this ideal of separation throughout their entire political lives, ultimately leaving it to others to carry on and finish the job. This book documents, for the first time, how Jefferson and others, despite their negative, often incorrect understandings of Islam, pursued that ideal by advocating the rights of Muslims and all non-Protestants. A decade before George Washington signaled openness to Muslim laborers in 1784 he had listed two slave women from West Africa among his taxable property. "Fatimer" and "Little Fatimer" were a mother and daughter--both indubitably named after the Prophet Muhammad's daughter Fatima (d. 632). Washington advocated Muslim rights, never realizing that as a slaveholder he was denying Muslims in his own midst any rights at all, including the right to practice their faith. This tragic irony may well have also recurred on the plantations of Jefferson and Madison, although proof of their slaves' religion remains less than definitive. Nevertheless, having been seized and transported from West Africa, the first American Muslims may have numbered in the tens of thousands, a population certainly greater than the resident Jews and possibly even the Catholics. Although some have speculated that a few former Muslim slaves may have served in the Continental Army, there is little direct evidence any practiced Islam and none that these individuals were known to the Founders. In any case, they had no influence on later political debates about Muslim citizenship. The insuperable facts of race and slavery rendered invisible the very believers whose freedoms men like Jefferson, Washington, and Madison defended, and whose ancestors had resided in America since the seventeenth century, as long as Protestants had. Indeed, when the Founders imagined future Muslim citizens, they presumably imagined them as white, because by the 1790s "full American citizenship could be claimed by any free, white immigrant, regardless of ethnicity or religious beliefs." The two actual Muslims Jefferson would wittingly meet during his lifetime were not black West African slaves but North African ambassadors of Turkish descent. They may have appeared to him to have more melanin than he did, but he never commented on their complexions or race. (Other observers either failed to mention it or simply affirmed that the ambassador in question was not black.) But then Jefferson was interested in neither diplomat for reasons of religion or race; he engaged them because of their political power. (They were, of course, also free.) But even earlier in his political life--as an ambassador, secretary of state, and vice president--Jefferson had never perceived a predominantly religious dimension to the conflict with North African Muslim powers, whose pirates threatened American shipping in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic. As this book demonstrates, Jefferson as president would insist to the rulers of Tripoli and Tunis that his nation harbored no anti-Islamic bias, even going so far as to express the extraordinary claim of believing in the same God as those men. The equality of believers that Jefferson sought at home was the same one he professed abroad, in both contexts attempting to divorce religion from politics, or so it seemed. In fact, Jefferson's limited but unique appreciation for Islam appears as a minor but active element in his presidential foreign policy with North Africa--and his most personal Deist and Unitarian beliefs. The two were quite possibly entwined, with their source Jefferson's unsophisticated yet effective understanding of the Qur'an he owned. Still, as a man of his time, Jefferson was not immune to negative feelings about Islam. He would even use some of the most popular anti- Islamic images inherited from Europe to drive his early political arguments about the separation of religion from government in Virginia. Yet ultimately Jefferson and others not as well known were still able to divorce the idea of Muslim citizenship from their dislike of Islam, as they forged an "imagined political community," inclusive beyond all precedent. The clash between principle and prejudice that Jefferson himself overcame in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains a test for the nation in the twenty-first. Since the late nineteenth century, the United States has in fact become home to a diverse and dynamic American Muslim citizenry, but this population has never been fully welcomed. Whereas in Jefferson's time organized prejudice against Muslims was exercised against an exclusively foreign and imaginary nonresident population, today political attacks target real, resident American Muslim citizens. Particularly in the wake of 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror, a public discourse of anti-Muslim bigotry has arisen to justify depriving American Muslim citizens of the full and equal exercise of their civil rights. For example, recent anti-Islamic slurs used to deny the legitimacy of a presidential candidacy contained eerie echoes of founding precedents. The legal possibility of a Muslim president was first discussed with vitriol during debates involving America's Founders. Thomas Jefferson would be the first in the history of American politics to suffer the false charge of being a Muslim, an accusation considered the ultimate Protestant slur in the eighteenth century. That a presidential candidate in the twenty-first century should have been subject to much the same false attack, still presumed as politically damning to any real American Muslim candidate's potential for elected office, demonstrates the importance of examining how the multiple images of Islam and Muslims first entered American consciousness and how the rights of Muslims first came to be accepted as national ideals. Ultimately, the status of Muslim citizenship in America today cannot be properly appreciated without establishing the historical context of its eighteenth-century origins. Muslim American rights became a theoretical reality early on, but as a practical one they have been much slower to evolve. In fact, they are being tested daily. Recently, John Esposito, a distinguished historian of Islam in contemporary America, observed, "Muslims are led to wonder: What are the limits of this Western pluralism?" Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an documents the origins of such pluralism in the United States in order to illuminate where, when, and how Muslims were first included in American ideals. Until now, most historians have proposed that Muslims represented nothing more than the incarnated antithesis of American values. These same voices also insist that Protestant Americans always and uniformly defined both the religion of Islam and its practitioners as inherently un-American. Indeed, most historians posit that the emergence of the United States as an ideological and political phenomenon occurred in opposition to eighteenth-century concepts about Islam as a false religion and source of despotic government. There is certainly evidence for these assumptions in early American religious polemic, domestic politics, foreign policy, and literary sources. There are, however, also considerable observations about Islam and Muslims that cast both in a more affirmative light, including key references to Muslims as future American citizens in important founding debates about rights. These sources show that American Protestants did not monolithically view Islam as "a thoroughly foreign religion." This book documents the counterassertion that Muslims, far from being definitively un-American, were deeply embedded in the concept of citizenship in the United States since the country's inception, even if these inclusive ideas were not then accepted by the majority of Americans. While focusing on Jefferson's views of Islam, Muslims, and the Islamic world, it also analyzes the perspectives of John Adams and James Madison. Nor is it limited to these key Founders. The cast of those who took part in the contest concerning the rights of Muslims, imagined and real, is not confined to famous political elites but includes Presbyterian and Baptist protestors against Virginia's religious establishment; the Anglican lawyers James Iredell and Samuel Johnston in North Carolina, who argued for the rights of Muslims in their state's constitutional ratifying convention; and John Leland, an evangelical Baptist preacher and ally of Jefferson and Madison in Virginia, who agitated in Connecticut and Massachusetts in support of Muslim equality, the Constitution, the First Amendment, and the end of established religion at the state level. The lives of two American Muslim slaves of West African origin, Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman and Omar ibn Said, also intersect this narrative. Both were literate in Arabic, the latter writing his autobiography in that language. They remind us of the presence of tens of thousands of Muslim slaves who had no rights, no voice, and no hope of American citizenship in the midst of these early discussions about religious and political equality for future, free practitioners of Islam. Imagined Muslims, along with real Jews and Catholics, were the consummate outsiders in much of America's political discourse at the founding. Jews and Catholics would struggle into the twentieth century to gain in practice the equal rights assured them in theory, although even this process would not entirely eradicate prejudice against either group. Nevertheless, from among the original triad of religious outsiders in the United States, only Muslims remain the objects of a substantial civic discourse of derision and marginalization, still being perceived in many quarters as not fully American. This book writes Muslims back into our founding narrative in the hope of clarifying the importance of critical historical precedents at a time when the idea of the Muslim as citizen is, once more, hotly contested. Excerpted from Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders by Denise A. Spellberg All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.