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

prophet.”
    —John Quincy Adams on Thomas Jefferson, 1791
    As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
    —Article 11, first U.S. peace treaty with Tripoli, ratified 1797
    I N 1790, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson reported to President Washington and Congress that since the peace with the British in 1783, America’s lucrative prewar trade in the Mediterranean had not “beenresumed,” owing to North African piracy. 1 It was something of an exaggeration. Despite the threat and lack of naval protection, American merchants did indeed continue to risk their ships, their freedom, and even their lives plying the waters of the Mediterranean. By 1785, Algiers had seized two American merchant vessels and twenty-one sailors. 2 By 1793, eleven more American merchant vessels and over a hundred sailors would be seized by the same power. Release for these captives in Algiers would not come until treaty and ransom negotiations succeeded in 1796–97. 3
    A solution to this crisis would elude Jefferson during his tenure as secretary of state, as vice president, and into his presidential term, until 1806.
    In 1801, Jefferson would become the first executive of the United States to go to war with an Islamic nation. He would also be the first American holder of high office whose political opponents defamed him with accusations of being a Muslim. This experience notwithstanding, he would be the first president to entertain a Muslim ambassador in the nation’s new capital, and in correspondence with Muslim rulers ofNorth Africa he would repeatedly invoke a shared belief in one God. In the conduct of foreign relations, Jefferson had relied on his study of Islam, and when after leaving office he returned to his library at Monticello, he would choose a telling final place in his collection for the Qur’an that had informed his understanding of the Muslim faith. Let us now consider the arc of that understanding and its part in his political career.

    Portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1791) by Charles Willson Peale. ( illustration credit 6.1 )

J EFFERSON, THE G OLDEN R ULE, AND THE C IVIL R IGHTS OF M USLIMS
    A year before his death, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend’s son. The young man’s father had urged him to do so in order to “have a favorable influence.” Contemplating his own mortality, “as one from the dead,” Jefferson advised, “Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself.” 180 His final reference to the Golden Rule is as clear a signal as we have of its irreducible importance and universal application in his personal ethics, as well as its centrality to his conception of patriotism.
    On the very day of his swearing-in upon Jefferson’s Qur’an in 2007, Representative Ellison also invoked the Golden Rule as a pointed admonition to fellow citizens. In the editorial he wrote entitled, “Choose Generosity, Not Exclusion,” Ellison argued that the Christian majority had a pivotal decision to make about religious pluralism, based on their understanding of the New Testament. Was the Golden Rule applicable only to Christians—or all Americans, no matter their religion?
    Will the preacher tell our young couple, “God loves you—but only you and people like you”? Or will the preacher say “God loves you and you must love your neighbors of all colors, cultures, or faiths as yourselves”? One message will lead to a stinginess of spirit, an exclusion of the “undeserving,” and the other will lead to a generosity of spirit and inclusion of all. 181
    Even Ellison’s