Was Jefferson a "Closet Muslim?"

That is what his political opponents accused him of being when he ran for President in 1800. Jefferson was accused of many other things as well, including miscegenation, in what was a highly contested election that saw him and Aaron Burr evenly split in electoral votes, which Burr could have challenged in Congress but chose not to.

Jefferson's Qu'ran has gotten quite a bit of attention in recent years, notably when Keith Ellison chose to take his oath of office on the Qu'ran in 2007. Of course many evangelicals were curious why Jefferson had a Qu'ran, so their resident historian, David Barton, came up with the specious claim that he bought one in the 1780s in an effort to better understand his enemy in the conflicts taking place off the Barbary Coast. Barton has since been forced to amend his comments.

Jefferson had purchased a Qu'ran back in 1765, the same year he passed his bar exam. He was apparently curious if there was room for tolerance of Muslims in an emerging Democratic society, which John Locke had advocated in Great Britain. Denise Spellberg tackled the subject in her recent book, Thomas Jefferson's Qu'ran. Ms. Spellberg is an associate professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Texas.

She got into a bit of hot water a few years ago, when she actively pushed for Random House to not publish a racy romance novel entitled The Jewel of Medina. Abbas Milani covers the subject in his review of Spellberg's book. She had published a book on A'isha Bint Abi Bakr, and asked to write a review since A'isha was the subject of the novel. Spellberg considered the romance a "deliberate misinterpretation of history," and alerted members of the Muslim community to the book. As a result, Random House took a pass, but Beaufort Books picked it up the title and the novel became a brief flash point, with none other than Salman Rushdie defending its publication and castigating Spellberg for her attempts at censorship.

Milani argues that Jefferson wouldn't have bothered with a book like The Jewel of Medina, as he made no effort to stop the publication of books that offended his sensibility. After all, Deism was seen in an equally bad light by most Protestants who firmly believed in the Holy Trinity. The net result is that Spellberg called more attention to this "bad romance" than it deserved, with Sherry Jones relishing the attention the book received.

But, that's all water on the bridge. Spellberg has recovered from that incident and has now tackled the subject of Islam in early America. Jefferson's Qu'ran is more a jumping off point for a study of the religious attitudes at the time and how the Founding Fathers responded to these attitudes. Apparently, Jefferson and Washington discussed whether Muslims had a place in American society. Spellberg notes with irony that they were blithely unaware of the number of Muslims they had as slaves, including one slave Fatimer, which Spellberg felt was obviously derived from Fatima.

The book has piqued my curiosity. If others are interested we can make Thomas Jefferson's Qu'ran the subject of our long dormant reading group. Any takers?

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

AnonymousFebruary 24, 2015 at 7:21 PM
I own a copy of the Quran as well as a few books on Islam. That doesn’t make me a Muslim.

Jefferson was a true renaissance man with a curiosity for the world of thought and diverse ideas. It should come as no shock that his library included a copy of the Quran. His Deism and well known anti-clerical sentiments incurred the ire of the clergy of his day. He was a man whose intellectual disposition was to think for himself on all matters, religious or secular.

Craig
TripplerApril 1, 2015 at 8:30 PM
I also have a copy of the Koran and use it to refute the idiotic ideas of so many bigoted Islamophobes during online debates.

Dispatches from Vilnius

Search This Blog