Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders by Denise A. Spellberg Read Free Book Online

reflect Islamic heritage even though
salam
is the word in Arabic for peace. “Salem” as a surname might instead refer to Salem, Massachusetts, an important seacoast town north of Boston. This speculation has not been found in other academic treatments; see “Collections of Stories of American Muslims: Presenting America’s Islamic Heritage, the 1700s,” http://www.muslimsinamerica.org . For the unverifiable assertion that Crispus Attucks, shot by the British in 1770 during the Boston Massacre, had Native American, black, and Muslim roots, see Jerald F. Dirks,
Muslims in American History: A Forgotten Legacy
(Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 2006), 206.
    15. Gomez,
Black Crescent
, 3–184. For the earliest compendium of these encounters, see Allan D. Austin,
African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook
(New York: Garland, 1984). In Spanish New World territories, Muslims outwardly professing to be Christians and known as Moriscos were present earlier than the seventeenth century; see Karoline P. Cook, “Forbidden Crossings: Morisco Emigration to Spanish America, 1492–1650” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008).
    16. Quoted in Marilyn C. Baseler,
“Asylum for Mankind”: America, 1607–1800
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 330–31, quote on 331; Kambiz GhaneaBassiri,
A History of Islam in America
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 152.
    17. A contemporary observer, SenatorWilliam Plumer of New Hampshire, after meeting with the Tunisianambassador wrote that he described himself as “a Turk,” and observed of this man that “his complexion is about as dark as that of a Molatto [mulatto],” whereas others in the ambassador’s entourage were “large black men”; see
William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States, 1803–1807
, ed. Everett Somerville Brown (New York: Macmillan, 1923), quotes on 358–59.
    18. This is emphasized as a general American perspective by Allison,
Crescent Obscured
, 35–60. The idea that Jefferson’s view of the North African pirates was directly linked to his negative view of Islam, an argument more reflective of John Adams’s opinion, is asserted by Michael Oren,
Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to Present
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 17–70. Jefferson did not focus on the religion of Islam as the main North African foreign policy problem, which is a position correctly asserted but not documented in a brief article by Sebastian R. Prange, “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an,”
Saudi Aramco World
62, no. 4 (July/August 2011): 7.
    19. Quoted in Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6.
    20. John Esposito,
What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 228, 172 (quote).
    21. For a breakthrough survey of the experience of American Muslims, see Jane Smith,
Islam in America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). A second edition of this work appeared in 2009. The most expansive history of Muslims in America and their agency, with a focus on “living Muslims in colonial and antebellum America,” is by GhaneaBassiri,
A History of Islam in America
, quote on 13. A recent attempt to analyze the concept of citizenship in Western political theory and Islamic law may be found in Andrew F. March,
Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). March offers a cogent analysis of the issue that does not include American historical precedents. For a very different view of Islamic law and the place of the Qur’an in recent American political discourse, see Kathleen M. Moore,
The Unfamiliar Abode: Islamic Law in the United States and Britain
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 81–101.
    22. Important works that find evidence for this assertion include Allison,
Crescent Obscured
, xv–xviii, 35–59, 61–106;