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JEFFERSON'S JIHAD? Denise A. Spellberg. Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. 384 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.95.
In the autumn of 1765, as he completed his legal studies, Thomas Jefferson bought a copy of George Sale's translation of the Qur'an: The Koran; Commonly Called the Aleman of Mohammed (1734). Jefferson had been led to the Qur'an by Samuel Pufendorf's Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1716 ), which referred to the Qur'an as the foundation of law in the Muslim world. Jefferson bought a second copy sometime after 1770, when a fire destroyed his house and books. This copy now resides with the rest of Jefferson's books in the Library of Congress. Congressman Keith Ellison took his oath of office on Jefferson's Koran in 2007. The very existence of this book-a translation of the Qur'an Jefferson owned-sparked Denise Spellberg, a professor in the Middle Eastern Studies Department at the University of Texas, to begin her meditation on the American republic's Founders and their engagement with Islam.
More than any of his contemporary Founders, Jefferson was engaged with Islam and the Muslim world. As American minister to France in the 1780s, he was the first line of contact for American prisoners in Algiers, and he advocated using military force-even building a navy-to fight the Barbary States; as president he conducted a war against Tripoli. Jefferson also had much to say on religious liberty, as his Statute for Religious Freedom (one of three things he wanted carved on his grave) guaranteed religious freedom, in his words, to "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Ffindoo, and Infidel of every denomination" (p. 119).
Jefferson's pluralistic inclusion, his Enlightenment vision of freeing indi- viduals, is for Spellberg a shade different: "To many of his political opponents, Thomas Jefferson may have been our first Muslim president" (p. 271). She adds, "many of his own countrymen considered their president an atheist, an infidel, or even a Muslim outright" (p. 224). Spellberg does not name those political opponents or tell us how many of his countrymen thought Jefferson "a Muslim outright." For those unnamed opponents, Jefferson's affinity for Islam was a negative; for Spellberg it is a positive....