Denise A. Spellberg. Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders. 1 ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. 416 p. ISBN: 978-0307268228

Year 2014, Volume: 55 Issue: 1, 187 - 194, 01.04.2014

Hugh Jefferson Turner

https://doi.org/10.1501/Ilhfak_0000001411

Cited By: 1

Abstract

of the development of and the major themes in the Western pluralist tradition, especially in regards to America. To those unfamiliar with the philosophical and historical background of religious freedom in the West, Spellberg lays out how numerous thinkers and activists in Renaissance Europe campaigned for toleration of religious difference, and often paid for it with their reputations or even their lives. She focuses more specifically on how this tradition reached its zenith in the thought of John Locke (16321704), and how early Americans, especially Thomas Jefferson, embraced it in their own effort to move beyond mere toleration of religious difference to a full-fledged religious freedom in the form of a state policy of equal treatment of all religions. Spellberg’s account is a good one, but, at least as far as America is concerned, it relies quite heavily on the previous work in the field, including Kevin J. Hayes’ “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an” (Early American Literature 39:2 (2004), pp.247-61) and Robert Allison’s The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), along with Thomas S. Kidd’s article “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet than the Devil?: Early American Uses of Islam” (Church History 72:4 (2003), pp.766-790) and book American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), as well as Timothy Marr’s The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). She does differ from these authors on certain points. For example, she differs from Hayes in her analysis of the significance of Thomas Jefferson’s placement of his copy of the Qur’an in his library. The section on religion in Jefferson’s library followed a generally chronological organization, beginning with books on Greek, Roman, and Zoroastrian polytheism and proceeding to Judaism and then Christianity. Jefferson placed his copy of the Qur’an between polytheism and Judaism, in violation of any sort of chronological order. Hayes’ asserts that Jefferson’s placement of the Qur’an in his library reflected the idea that it marked a midpoint, ideologically, between heathenism and the true faith of Christianity . Spellberg instead argues that Jefferson’s placement of the Qur’an indicated that he appeared “to recognize an affinity between the Jewish and Muslim varieties of monotheism and that of the Deism and Unitarianism that he would espouse,” meaning that Jefferson’s placement of the Qur’an indicated an affinity for Islam perhaps greater than that which he felt for Christianity (p.236). But aside from a few such differences, the merits of which are debatable, most of what her book covers is as well covered in these other texts. All of these works concern themselves with uncovering popular perceptions and treatment of Islam and Muslims in American discourse, from colonial times through to the 19th, 20th, or even 21st centuries. And they tend, more often than not, to focus on the generally unflattering images of Islam that have dominated this discourse. As Spellberg herself admits, American treatment of Islam has been generally negative, frequently superficial, and often little more than a foil used to criticize existing American practices with little regard for the actual Islamic religion (p.4). The reason why existing studies in the field have focused overwhelmingly on the negative images of Islam in the US is that American images of Islam have been overwhelmingly negative. Positive treatments of the religion are few and far between, with some exceptions. Timothy Marr, for example, notes how discussions of Islamic practice served as a foil against which Americans could critique the practice of slavery in the US, and Islamic prohibitions against alcohol were used to help advance the temperance cause in the country as well (Marr, p.135). But American use of Islam in these contexts was not necessarily flattering to the religion. More often than not, those who held up Islamic examples did so not to establish positive precedent for more enlightened practice, but rather to show just how benighted contemporary American was; the American practice of slavery was so bad that even the Turks treated their slaves better, and alcohol so evil that even the heathen nations forbade it. That negative images of Islam have dominated the US since even before the nation’s founding is not entirely surprising. America inherited much from Europe’s broadly negative Orientalist discourse. Spellberg notes, following Hayes, that after independence, America’s first foreign war was with a group of Muslim powers, the Barbary States, that offered a specifically religious justification for capturing American vessels and enslaving their crews.1 The United States did not sign a treaty with the Ottoman Empire, the largest Muslim power of the day, until 1830, and did not establish a full embassy in the country until the 20th century.2 These facts, combined with the lack of any significant Muslim population in the US, meant that negative stereotypes largely dominated public discourse. American missionary activity in the Middle East, coupled with periods of severe (though not necessarily always one-sided) violence against various Christian minorities in Muslim lands through the 19th and into the 20th