America’s Founders And The Quran: A Forgotten Legacy Of Religious Freedom
(ANALYSIS) John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both owned Qurans that have survived. The “Adams Quran” — known by its call number Adams 281.1 — is preserved at the Boston Public Library.
Judging the book by its unadorned, leather cover and unassuming call number, the Adams Quran in the library’s special collections stacks located on Boylston Street doesn’t appear very exceptional.
Yet turning to the compact volume’s title page, its publication details offer intriguing details about the origins and importance of America’s cherished, albeit contentious, dedication to religious liberty and the separation of church and state.
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“This is the first Quran published in the United States, printed in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1806 for publisher Isaiah Thomas, and was owned by President John Adams,” said Jay Moschella, the BPL’s curator of rare books.
While several hundred copies of the Thomas Jefferson Quran — an English version of an earlier French translation — still exist in other collections across the country, this particular copy, part of the BPL’s John Adams Library, is the only one known to be owned by a U.S. president, a fact that Moschella finds very enlightening.
“It makes sense that Adams would have owned a Quran,” Moschella said. “He was a bibliophile and a lifelong book collector and a very heterogenous reader. I can’t tell you how closely he read the Quran, but I think he was certainly aware of Quranic law as the result of his diplomatic career and as a Founding Father was very interested in philosophy and law.”
At a time when the Trump administration has renewed a travel ban on various Muslim majority countries in Africa and the Middle East, Adams’ Quran is but one indication that our nation’s founders regarded Islam, as well as other, non-Western, non-Christian faiths, as worthy of respect and protection under the law. Additionally, as Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice Theophilus Parsons, one of the drafters of the state’s constitution, put it in 1810, those freedoms included the right of “every man, whether Protestant or Catholick, Jew, Mahomaten [Muslim] or Pagan” to take part in the political process.
The earliest advocate for freedom of religion in colonial America was Providence, Rhode Island, founder Roger Williams. Son of a London merchant, Williams likely encountered Muslims at an early age on the cosmopolitan docks of London where he may have picked up a little Arabic. Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635 for his radical thoughts on religious liberty, it was Williams who first proposed “a wall or hedge of separation” between the “wilderness of the world” and “the garden of the church.”
The concept would later inspire the likes of Jefferson, who argued for a “wall of separation between the church and state,” and James Madison, whose respect for religious liberty was enshrined in the Bill of Rights that states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
While Williams regarded Muslims (as well as Jews and non-Christians) to be deeply misguided in their beliefs, he nonetheless defended their rights to worship freely as citizens.
“And I ask, whether or no … Jews, Turks [Muslims], or anti-Christians, may not be peaceable and quiet subjects, loving and helpful neighbours, fair and just dealers, true and loyal to the civil government? It is clear they may,” Williams wrote in 1644.
“What he is saying is that every single person should have the full, unfettered right to do what they feel their conscience is telling them to do, publicly, so long as it doesn’t disturb the civil peace,” said historian Linford Fisher of Brown University, co-author of “Decoding Roger Williams.”
Like Williams, Jefferson had guarded views about the Muslim faith, and organized religion in general — though from a political, as opposed to theological, viewpoint.
“What most alarmed him about Islam, and Catholicism, were the dangers of each as the basis of a single state religion, which would impose religious conformity on its citizens,” said Denise Spellberg, author of “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders.”
A copy of the Quran owned by John Adams housed at the Boston Public Library. (Photo by Tom Verde)
Yet Jefferson “absolutely separated these negative views of Islam from his defense of the future rights of individual Muslim citizens,” Spellberg emphasized.
Like Adams, Jefferson owned a Quran, which he bought in 1765 while a law student in his early 20s in Williamsburg, Virginia. Jefferson’s Quran, translated directly from Arabic into English — though Jefferson spent some time teaching himself Arabic — was published in London in 1764, decades before the Springfield, Massachusetts, edition, and is considered to be a superior translation. What likely intrigued the erudite and worldly Jefferson about this particular edition was a lengthy introductory section that “detailed the beliefs, rituals and legal views of Muslims” said Spellberg.
Those legal views remain honored, symbolically anyway, in the nation’s highest court. A frieze in the courtroom of the Supreme Court features the Prophet Muhammad, holding an open copy of the Quran, as one of the “great lawgivers of history” alongside Moses, Hammurabi, John Marshall and others.
Though controversial from a Muslim perspective, as Islam traditionally prohibits images of the prophet, Muhammad’s legacy was respected enough to merit inclusion in the frieze, sculpted in the 1930s.
Whether or not Jefferson agreed with everything he read in the pages of Islam’s holy book was secondary to his position, shared by the likes of Adams, Madison and others, that “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination,” all be afforded equal protection under the law, as Jefferson wrote in his autobiography.
His views were clearly inspired by those of English Enlightenment-era philosopher John Locke, who in his 1689 “Letter of Toleration” wrote that “neither Pagan, nor Mahometan, nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.”
If Jefferson had a blind spot, Spellberg noted, it was that he failed to ascribe those same rights to African slaves in America, many of whom were Muslim. More forthrightly, he was aware of pushback on Article VI of the Constitution, which states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
During debates in the individual state legislatures over ratification of the Constitution in 1788, North Carolina’s governor, echoing concerns of other legislators throughout the colonies, raised the objection that, under the article, “Jews, Mahometans, pagans, &c., may be elected to high offices under the government of the United States,” including the presidency.
At the Massachusetts convention, Parsons bluntly dismissed the notion that a person’s prayer book was any indication of character.
“The only evidence we can have of the sincerity and excellency of a man’s religion, is a good life,” he declared.
Writing to George Washington in 1790, the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island — where Jews had worshipped since Roger Williams’ time — welcomed the establishment of a government which afforded “to All liberty of conscience . . . deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental Machine.”
Washington responded warmly: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people. … May the Children of the Stock of Abraham” – who theoretically included Muslims – “who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants.”
Politics being politics, there was a practical side to the founders’ interest in the Islamic world. Both Adams and Jefferson were well aware of the economic threats to American shipping in the Atlantic and Mediterranean posed by the Ottoman Empire and its piratical, North African Barbary states of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco.
Seeking to protect U.S. interests, Adams and Jefferson helped to negotiate the Moroccan–American Treaty of Friendship of 1786, America’s first treaty with an African, Muslim nation. Just over a decade later, Adams, then president, signed a treaty with Tripoli, in which he assured the Turkish governor that “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 Musselmen [Muslims].”
In 1805, Jefferson welcomed the first ambassador from a Muslim state — Tunisia’s Sidi Suleyman Mellimelli— for an official visit to the White House during what happened to be the holy month of Ramadan. Aware of Ramadan’s importance, possibly via his reading of the Quran, Jefferson scheduled the state dinner at sunset to accommodate his guest’s religious obligations.
The occasion was the first iftar dinner at the White House. While Jefferson never abandoned what Spellberg described as an “intellectual imperative to question all faiths, including Islam,” his respect for the rights of Muslims opened him up — just like President Barack Obama two centuries later — to accusations by reactionaries of being Muslim himself (an “infidel” in the parlance of the day). Heaving a sigh that still reverberates today, Jefferson remarked, in an 1801 letter to Joseph Priestly, a fellow champion of religious tolerance, “what an effort, my dear Sir, of bigotry in Politics & Religion have we gone through.”
More than two centuries later, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, faced similar backlash when he chose to take his oath of office with his hand on a Quran — Jefferson’s Quran — in fact.
The irony of the furor that erupted in the right-wing media is that elected officials swear to support and defend the Constitution — the very document that bans a religious requirement to serve in public office and permits government employees to be sworn in on any book they chose, or none at all.
“The United States has always been a country with an Islamic presence,” Ellison said. “Never not. Never not.”
Tom Verde is a freelance journalist, specializing in religion, culture and history.