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

works on the relationship of religion to the state in the founding era but without explanation in Leonard Levy,
The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 10, 47, 55, 59, 68, and Michael McConnell, “The Origins and Historical Understanding of the Free Exercise of Religion,”
Harvard Law Review
103 (1990): 1473 n. 323.
    28. For the best history of this twentieth-century struggle for both Jews and Catholics, see Kevin M. Schultz,
Tri-Faith America
:
How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)
.
    29. Perhaps the first to note the continued exclusion of Muslims from “a tripartite pluralism” of “Protestants, Catholics, and Jews” in the twentieth century was the historian William G. McLoughlin,
Soul Liberty: The Baptists’ Struggle in New England, 1630–1833
(Hanover, NH: Brown University Press/University Press of New England, 1991), xi. For a study of the concept of Muslims as “not fully American,” see Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad,
Not Quite American: The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States
(Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004).
    30. Some scholars, myself included, have usedEdward Said’s model ofOrientalism to characterize Muslims as quintessential Others in eighteenth-century American thought, part of an unending binary of “Them” and “Us” that Said would have recognized in the American context. But my intent in this study is not to define or indicate new or old forms of Orientalism in America, but rather to document the more elusive opposition to these negative visions. For earlier work with an emphasis on Orientalism, see D. A. Spellberg, “Islam on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Voltaire’s
Mahomet
Crosses the Atlantic,” in
Views from the Edge: Essays in Honor of Richard W. Bulliet
, ed. Neguin Yavari, Lawrence G. Potter, and Jean-Marc Ran Oppenheim (New York: Columbia University Press for the Middle East Institute, 2004), 245–60, and Denise A. Spellberg, “Islam in America: Adventures in Neo-Orientalism,”
Review of Middle East Studies
43, no. 1 (Summer 2009): 25–35. Neither Said nor American specialists have ever documented what might be termed an anti-Orientalist pattern. A unique attempt to argue a form of philo-Islamic belief for England with a brief suggestion of its transfer to the early American Republic may be found in Humberto Garcia,
Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 1–29, 243 n. 28. Until now, historians of early America have not focused on correcting or explaining the distorted images of anti-Islamic materials. The result has been unquestioning acceptance of anti-Islamic references without attention to concocted distortions, errors, and caricatures. Emphasis on this negative data has inadvertently resulted in theacceptance of these distortions as normative. This type of analysis does not provide insight into what Muslims actually believed or why these misrepresentations became particularly problematic for Americans. Most important, historians of Islam in early America have not focused on exceptions to the predominant anti-Islamic rule of completely negative representations.

1. THE EUROPEAN CHRISTIAN ORIGINS OF NEGATIVE BUT SOMETIMES ACCURATE AMERICAN IDEAS ABOUT ISLAM AND MUSLIMS, 1529–1797
    1. Quoted in John Leland, “Extracts from Number Two, A Little Sermon Sixteen Minutes Long,” in
The Writings of the Elder John Leland
, ed. L. F. Greene (New York: G. W. Wood, 1845), 410.
    2. This is not a new idea. Anti-Islamic representations predominate in most historical works. For example, see Robert J. Allison,
The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 35–59; Thomas S. Kidd,
American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of