Welcome to Founding Encounters, a new MBN series about the lesser known stories of the relationship between the Middle East and America in its earliest years. To mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, our series will take you through the harbors of Morocco, the narrow bazaars of Tunis, the tobacco fields of Virginia, the naval battles in the distant seas, and much more. These experiences shaped the newly-formed nation’s perception of the Middle East and its people, and as you’ll see from this first episode – on Jefferson’s Quran – the region also helped shaped the new nation coming to life in 1776 in ways that aren’t fully appreciated. Today the Middle East is itself in the midst of a historic transformation, with the U.S. playing an inordinately large role. History helps give us some important perspective.
On an October day in 1765, a young law student entered the printing office of the Virginia Gazette on Duke of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Printing offices were the nerve centers of any major colonial city in those days: part newsroom, part post office, part bookstore. The air inside them was thick with the smell of ink, hot wax, and bookbinding glue. On any given afternoon, merchants, lawyers, and burgesses – the colonial lawmakers of the time – moved through its narrow space collecting letters, buying pamphlets, and debating current events. In printing offices, Virginians met the wider world.
The law student had been here before — many times, in fact. The records kept by the shop’s account book show he had visited at least 30 times in two years – picking up stationery, settling accounts, or buying books.
Tall and lean with a shock of red hair, he was a voracious reader. Reading, for him, was a passion and a necessity – a tool to make sense of the crises around. America was burning. His fellow colonists teetered on the edge of rage. The British had levied the Stamp Act – new taxes on paper, legal documents, pamphlets: almost everything that passed through a printing office.
On this particular visit, he paid 26 shillings to purchase a leather-bound set of books which had recently arrived from London. The gold-embossed title on their spine read: The Quran. This was an unusual purchase for a Virginian, or any colonial American. But the purchaser was unusual, too. He was Thomas Jefferson.
At this time, most colonial Americans feared Islam – or Mahometans, as they called Muslims. In their minds, Muslim meant the Ottoman Turks, or the Barbary pirates – people leading dangerous lives in a dangerous world beyond the Atlantic.
On the evening of December 9, 1805 — “precisely at sunset” — America’s third president hosted senators, congressmen, diplomats and an envoy of the Barbary States for the first Iftar dinner ever held by a U.S. president.
The Quran Jefferson bought that afternoon would travel with him through revolution, through the presidency, through the rest of his long and complicated life. It would eventually take its place on his vast book shelves under the category of “law.” This, along with other texts, helped him devise some of his most consequential ideas for the country that he would help found.
By the 1770s, Thomas Jefferson was already a statesman and a member of the Virginia bar. But away from the public eye, he was also a designer of household objects, like the swivel chair. His hands were always busy making or remaking things. Monticello, the residence he was building for himself, eventually became a lifelong architectural project. But it all paled in comparison to his most important project: the republic he was building for his nation, one that did not borrow its legitimacy from a king or a church. Instead, from something else.
But what exactly? That was the question Jefferson had to answer.
And whatever that answer, it needed to address the question of faith in a country that was already home to so many religions and Christian denominations. From early in his youth, Jefferson was a religious skeptic – a deist, to be exact. He believed in a rational creator who set the universe in motion but did not intervene in human affairs. Jefferson distrusted organized religion, and he spent years dissecting the New Testament, saving the passages he found credible and discarding those about miracles and supernatural elements. He compiled this material into a new publication of its own: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, better known as the Jefferson Bible.
He pored over countless other texts and compared systems of governance. He had what one historian called “an abiding interest in world religions.” His dog-eared Quran was heavily stained with ink from his annotations.
It was a book he read the way an engineer reads a blueprint – for structure rather than faith. Islam, for him, was not only a tradition of belief. It was also a legal system. It governed war, commerce, inheritance, and private life. For a man trying to create a new set of laws for his own society, it was invaluable to learn how others were governing. Besides, one issue in particular was becoming urgent: religious freedom.
In colonial Virginia, the Church of England had been the established religion, and Baptists, Quakers, Methodists – anyone outside the official church – could be fined, harassed, and even imprisoned. Jefferson not only believed that was unjust, he thought it irrational. Belief, he argued, couldn’t be forced. You can compel someone to attend a church. You can punish them for dissent. But you cannot make them believe something in their heart. Anyway, if belief isn’t genuine, then what is it worth?
His enemies, the Federalists, vehemently condemned him for these ideas – especially after he famously said, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Other founding fathers were echoing similar ideas. Looking for a workman to make repairs in his home, Washington had said, “If they are good workmen, they can be Mohammedan, Jew, or Christian of any sects, or atheists.” In the same spirit, Benjamin Franklin declared, “If a Muslim came to pray in Philadelphia, he should be allowed to do so. A virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian.” And he backed his words with deeds, regularly making donations to all the houses of worship in his neighborhood, regardless of their affiliation.
For Jefferson, these were not mere sentiments. In 1779, he drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom — a precursor to the First Amendment’s promise that a person’s religious opinions are not the business of the government. The law, Jefferson argued, was meant to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”
There were few “Mahometans” in America at the time. But Jefferson was making a greater point. If religious freedom only protected familiar or majority beliefs, it wasn’t really freedom at all. True freedom had to include the “hardest” cases. Otherwise, it’s just preference masquerading as principle.
Some two decades later, Thomas Jefferson, the president, would double the size of the country through the Louisiana Purchase. But with the drafting of the Virginia Statute, he had already infinitely expanded his new country’s moral horizons and the possibilities of what an American nation could be.
The Quran Jefferson bought that afternoon would follow him through the Revolution, the presidency and the rest of his long and complicated life.
The Constitution took these ideas one step further. Article VI removed any religious test as a qualification for federal office. At the ratification debates, the question came up immediately and openly among skeptics of the Article: Could a Muslim, a “Turk” — the era’s common term for a Muslim — hold office?
The answer was yes. One delegate in North Carolina, William Lancaster, put it this way: “Let us remember that we form a government for millions not yet in existence. I have not the art of divination. In the course of four or five hundred years, I do not know how it will work. This is most certain, that Papists may occupy that chair, and Mahometans may take it.”
Although Jefferson made a valorous defense of “Mahometans” in writing, in real life, he had hardly encountered any.
But December 1805 brought Jefferson face-to-face with Muslims at last.
The United States was locked in a tense dispute with the Barbary States – the North African powers who controlled the Mediterranean sea lanes. Jefferson was president at the time, and it was his responsibility to solve this particular problem. So he invited Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, an envoy from Tunis, to negotiate with.
Jefferson frequently hosted working dinners at the presidential residence with lawmakers, diplomats, and politicians. These events usually began around 3:30 in the afternoon, after the House or Senate had adjourned.
So he sent Robert Smith, the Secretary of the Navy, to Mellimelli, who was staying at Stelle’s Hotel and City Tavern near the Capitol, with an invitation.
Mellimelli received the secretary courteously. He had been at his prayers. Rising from his mat, composed and unhurried, he listened to the secretary, then replied that he could not eat this month until after sunset. That year, Ramadan fell in December. When the secretary relayed Mellimelli’s answer to Jefferson, he understood that his guest was fasting.
He updated the invitations to read: “Dinner will be on the table precisely at sunset. The favour of an answer is asked.””
On the evening of December 9th, as the winter sun dropped behind the hills above the Potomac, the guests gathered. Senators, congressmen, diplomats. They had come expecting an ordinary political dinner. Instead, they found themselves attending an unprecedented event at the president’s table: an iftar, –the breaking of the Ramadan fast.
The meal arrived with the last light of the day. Outside, Washington was cold and dark. But inside, there was candlelight, and the warmth of the special reception Thomas Jefferson had given to his guest.
John Quincy Adams, who was there, noted it in his diary. The dinner, he wrote, was, “being in the midst of the Ramadan, during which the Turks fast, while the Sun is above the horizon.”
Because of Jefferson’s diligent study of religions, religious liberty became a cornerstone in the American founding. For decades, great European thinkers had debated whether a society of true religious liberty was ever possible. But Jefferson succeeded in actually implementing it, making it part of the bedrock of the United States of America. And it stands today as one of the most profound achievements of any revolution ever.
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Henri Reichman, Joshua Epstein and Luca Guerzoni contributed to the production of this story.
