Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an Quotes

“So, if they hold aloof from you and wage not war against you and offer you peace, Allah alloweth you no way against them” (Qur’an 4:90).”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

“Thomas Jefferson would be the first in the history of American politics to suffer the false charge of being a Muslim, an accusation considered the ultimate Protestant slur in the eighteenth century.”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

“Scholars of conspiracy theory in American politics point out false claims are spread rather than debunked by repetition.128”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

“As Americans, the vast majority of us might recall that our ancestors began here as outsiders, immigrants and strangers, not citizens; an even more compelling reason to remember the Golden Rule. Jefferson would do so at the end of his life, following a pronounced pattern in those who had fought before him against the persecution of Muslims.”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

“At the time, I thought that the outrage expressed by some toward Congressman Ellison’s election and private swearing-in on the Qur’an might have been averted if only more Americans had known their own founding history better, a past that had prepared an eventual place for Congressman Ellison, not in spite of his religion, but because of it.”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

“many Americans in the founding era, despite the tenacious legacy of misinformation from Europe, refused to yield to contemporary fears promoting the persecution of Muslims.”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

“In Massachusetts, an Anti-Federalist from Worcester in the western part of the Commonwealth wrote in February 1788, expressing fear that without a bill of rights, freedom of conscience would be imperiled. But the anonymous author only worried about religious freedom for Christians. Without a religious test in the Constitution, he wrote, “There is a door opened for Jews, Turks, and Heathens to enter into publick office, and be seated at the head of the government of the United States.”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

“Everywhere in the world, church and state were united, and dissenters from the one true faith—the established religion—while they might be tolerated, suffered numerous pains and penalties. Jefferson proposed a revolutionary change based on two principles: first, absolute freedom of religious conscience and opinion; and second, the separation of church and state. Each principle was dependent on the other, in his view. True religious freedom cannot exist as long as the state is a party to or adopts as much as an opinion about religion; and the state cannot be disentangled from religious quarrels and hatreds except under conditions of freedom, wherein no church or sect is dominant.236”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

“Thomas Bailey, a diplomatic historian, has asserted that the dey of Algiers might deserve “indirect” credit as one of the “Founding Fathers” of the United States because the plight of the imprisoned Americans did so much to prove the need for a new federal Constitution, with a system of taxation that could raise the funds to pay for their ransom.”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

“They continued smoking until coffee was brought in. Adams wrote Jefferson that he “alternately sipped at his coffee and whiffed at his tobacco.”96 One of the two standing secretaries, reported the American, “appeared in raptures,” over Adams’s behavior until “the superior of them who speaks a few words of French cryed out in extacy, ‘Monsieur votes etes un Turk,’ ” or “Mr., you are a Turk!”97 This was meant as the highest form of praise for the American, but one wonders whether Adams appreciated the attendant irony of what was a common pejorative in early American political rhetoric being turned on its head in his honor. With the serving of tobacco and coffee, products from the New World and the Old, “the necessary civilities” had concluded.98 It was time to negotiate.”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

“German Protestant woodcuts from the sixteenth century depict Luther’s vision of the Antichrist as a beast with two heads—one a mitered pope and the other a turbaned Ottoman sultan.”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

“Now, in comparing the Turk with the pope, if a question be asked, whether of them is the truer or greater Antichrist, it were easy to see and judge, that the Turk is the more open and manifest enemy against Christ and his church. —John Foxe, English compiler of    Protestant martyr accounts, 1570”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

“The liberty I contend for is more than toleration. The very idea of toleration is despicable; it supposes that some have a pre-eminence above the rest, to grant indulgence; whereas, all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians. Test oaths and established creeds, should be avoided as the worst of evils. —John Leland, “Virginia Chronicle,” 1790”
― Denise A. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders