American Muslims

Kirk Davis Swinehart reviews Denise Spellberg’s Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders in the NYTBR this week. Spellberg “”traces the partial origins of American religious toleration to a single day in 1765 when Jefferson, then studying law at the College of William and Mary, acquired an English translation of Islams sacred text. He never claimed that the Quran shaped his political orientation. Yet Spellberg, an associate professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin, makes a persuasive case for its centrality. To oversimplify: What began as an academic interest in Islamic law and religion yielded a fascination with Islamic culture, which disposed him to include Muslims in his expansive vision of American citizenship.”

According to Swinehart, “her real achievement is in casting a coterie of founders pre-eminently Jefferson, Madison and Washington in the unlikely role of radicals in their tolerance of Islam.”

This thesis would severely damage a claim frequently made on the religious right, to the effect that the religious freedom advocated by the Founders extended only to diverse Christian denominations. Some of the Founders who had the most direct hand in formulating American church-state arrangements had something broader in view.