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

Marr,
Cultural Roots
, 1–114; Kidd, “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?,” 766–90, and more recently, Kidd,
American Christians and Islam
, 11–36; Shaban,
Islam and the Arabs in Early American Thought
, 1–81; Obeidat,
American Literature and Orientalism
, 3–40. Slightly more mixed views of Muslims in literary sources about North Africa are presented by Johar Schueller,
U.S. Orientalisms;
Paul Baepler, introduction to
White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1–51; Costello Brezina, “A Nation in Chains,” 201–19; Jacob Rama Berman, “The Barbarous Voice of Democracy: American Captivity in Barbary and the Multicultural Specter,”
American Literature
79 (March 2007): 1–27; James Lewis, “Savages of the Seas: Barbary Captivity Tales and Images of Muslims in the Early Republic,”
Journal of American Culture
13 (Summer 1990): 75–84; Battistini, “Glimpses of the Other before Orientalism,” 446–74. New work on European and American captives may be found in Lawrence A. Peskin,
Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 137–214; and Ann Thompson,
Barbary and Enlightenment: European Attitudes toward the Maghreb in the 18th Century
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 11–92. Counterevidence for entirely negative and/or oppositional sets of cultural premises about Islam is offered in sobering economic terms by Frank Lambert,
The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 3–13. For more complicated British views of Islam and Muslims before 1750, see Linda Colley,
Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 99–113.
    23. Allison,
Crescent Obscured
, xvii, 3–106; Marr,
Cultural Roots
, 1–81. For echoes of both Allison and Marr’s definition of American views of North Africa as “a kind of inverse mirror of their own democracy, probity, and enlightenment,” see Michael Oren,
Power, Faith, and Fantasy
, quote on 32.
    24. For a survey of cultural views of Islam, American domestic political rhetoric and, most in depth, an analysis of the Barbary Wars and their “legacy,” see Allison,
Crescent Obscured
, xiii–59; Marr,
Cultural Roots
, 1–114. A focus on inter-Protestant uses ofIslam and early American sermons in provided by Kidd, “Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet Than the Devil?,” and Kidd,
American Christians and Islam
, 10–11, 18.
    25. Quoted in Esposito,
What Everyone Needs to Know
, 1st ed., 172.
    26. James Hutson wrote a two-page argument in 2002 that Jefferson and other Founders intended to include Muslims “in their vision of the future republic”; see “The Founding Fathers and Islam.” Jefferson, Washington, and Madison are identified as supporting pluralism, which is attributed to “their ethnic backgrounds” by Akbar Ahmed,
Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010), 58–61.
    27. Those who study Jews and Catholics in founding discourse sometimes refer to Muslims in relation to sources that link the three groups, but either dismiss these references without historical context or see Muslims as ways of making Jews and Catholics even farther from normative Protestants. Arthur Hertzberg casts references to Muslims in relations to Jews as “outlandish”; see Hertzberg,
The Jews in America
, 15. Morton Borden makes multiple references to Muslims in his important study of Jews, but never explains them; see Borden,
Jews, Turks, and Infidels
, 14, 16, 33. Naomi W. Cohen, like Hertzberg, sees Muslims as markers that place Jews beyond Christian norms; see Cohen,
Jews in Christian America
, 24–25. Gerard V. Bradley refers to Muslims as “totally behind the horizon of civility”; see Bradley, “The No Religious Test Clause,” 702. References to Muslims appear in