Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders Read Online Free PDF

informing Adams, who believed that payment for peace was the nation’s better course. As early as 1784, Jefferson preferred a military response to what he considered piratical extortion, but not until 1801, when he was president, would he act on this impulse. Until then, his diplomatic efforts were doomed to failure, since the United States had neither a navy to protect its ships nor even a central government authorized to collect taxes that might be used to pay tribute for peace or the ransom of American captives held in North Africa. 2 Piracy, as this chapter documents, was not an exclusively Muslim practice in the Mediterranean, but the taking of captives did provoke difficult questions in America about individual liberty and freedom in the face of what was essentially a faith-based form of slavery. 3 Ironically, throughout the effort to end this bondage of their fellow citizens, most Americans, including Jefferson, would never connect it to the contemporaneous American practice of race-based slavery inflicted on captured West Africans.

C OULD A M USLIM B E P RESIDENT ? T HE B IRTH OF AN E IGHTEENTH -C ENTURY A MERICAN I DEAL OF P OLITICAL E QUALITY
    In constitutional history, Muslims are not traditionally associated with definitions of American citizenship, but for one day in 1788 the adherents of Islam came to symbolize the aspiration of political equality, irrespective of religion, in the new Republic. The lives of America’s actual Muslim inhabitants, slaves from West Africa, like Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman and Omar ibn Said, could not have been more remote from the possibility that any Muslim could conceivably seek the presidency one day. And they remained invisible to the delegates, just as Omar’s words written in Arabic after the vote, his plaintive plea, “O, People of North Carolina,” would remain unread.
    Nevertheless, it was in North Carolina’s debate on religious tests that Muslims—albeit imaginary ones—stepped directly onto the American political stage for the first time. At a time when fearful visions of Islamas a fanatical religion and foreign threat prevailed, two Federalists in North Carolina promoted the simultaneous establishment of religious and political equality for Muslims as potential American citizens, meeting a predictable response from the majority of delegates, whose negative monolithic vision of Islam would persist and prevail. And yet a new vision of Muslims as individual believers, people who might yet enjoy a full membership in the new polity, was born. Iredell and Johnston created this possibility in debate, without believing or wishing that the rights they advocated in principle would ever come to be practically tested by real Muslims. Nevertheless, in the absence of a religious test, Federalists would be forced to concede the possibility of a Muslim president when they managed to win ratification for their Constitution in 1788. That they did so, however reluctantly, suggested that Americans might depart from inherited European prejudices in realizing their national ideals.
    Thomas Jefferson was not in the United States during debates about the Constitution and Muslim rights, remaining in France until November 1789. The next month, he accepted the post of secretary of state and, returning to the United States, took up the problem of North African piracy once again. He did not expect that even on the domestic political scene references to Islam would figure in attempts to defame him.

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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 Supportfor Muslim Rights, 1790–1823

    The expressions, indeed, imply more; they seem, like the Arabian prophet, to call upon all true believers in the
Islam
of democracy, to draw their swords, and, in the fervour of their devotion, to compel their countrymen to cry out, “There is but one Goddess of Liberty, and Common Sense is her