Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders

by Denise A. Spellberg

  A coalition of American Muslim organizations issued a joint statement immediately after 9/11:

  American Muslims utterly condemn what are vicious and cowardly acts of terrorism against innocent civilians. We join all Americans in calling for the swift apprehension and punishment of the perpetrators. No political cause could ever be assisted by such immoral acts.59

  The Muslim Students’ Association’s national headquarters, representing seven hundred organizations on campuses across the United States, issued press releases about their “grief and support for the larger American community.”60 But these statements were largely ignored, a response since described as “selective deafness.”61 As a result, American Muslims continue to be criticized for their supposed failure to denounce terrorism.62

  Sixty American Muslims perished in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but this fact was not remembered by most non-Muslim Americans. American Muslims were in fact victimized twice by the attacks: once by the criminals who profaned their faith by their violent actions, and a second time by many of their fellow citizens who suspected their loyalty.63 The case of Talat Hamdani is striking: As a New York City police cadet and emergency technician trainee, the Pakistani-born Hamdani, a U.S. citizen since 1990, had raced into the World Trade Center to render aid. With his disappearance at the site of the attack, accusations against him as a potential terrorist persisted until his body was recovered in 2002 under the North Tower—in thirty-four pieces.64 Only then was his name cleared. The New York City police commissioner “called him a hero.” But his mother’s bitterness about the slander of her son remains: “My anger comes from his own country casting suspicion on him.” She concluded of all those killed on 9/11, “They died for one reason. Not because they were Muslims or from Pakistan or anywhere else. They died because they were Americans.”65

  It is notable how much the anti-Islamic invective inflamed by 9/11 resembles the denigration of Islam in America as far back as the seventeenth century. The evangelical Protestant minister Franklin Graham’s assertion that Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion”66 could have equally been uttered by any number of Protestant leaders over the centuries. Perhaps this is because while there have been few encounters with the Islamic world since the founding, the limited experience of the twentieth century tended only to reinforce negative impressions.

  Lack of knowledge about Islam and the Middle East ensured that twentieth-century media coverage of major news events involving U.S. interests in the region portrayed the Muslim world as the inevitable adversary of the West. These include the 1973 oil embargo; the 1979–80 Iranian Revolution and seizure of American hostages; the 1983 car bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut with the death of hundreds of marines; the hijacking of a TWA flight to Beirut; the murder of Leon Klinghoffer during the seizure of the Achille Lauro cruise ship; and the First Gulf War of 1990–91.67 Adding to this steady stream of images of anti-American violence in the news, according to Jack Shaheen, were hundreds of American movies depicting Arabs negatively, mostly as terrorists.68 As Shaheen asserts, Hollywood has “indicted all Arabs as Public Enemy #1—brutal, heartless, uncivilized, religious fanatics and money-mad cultural ‘others’ bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners, especially Christians and Jews.”69 Television also promoted the story line of American Muslims as enemies within.

  This negative imaging did not begin with 9/11.70 After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City, one poll found that 43 percent of Americans defined their fellow Muslim citizens as “religious fanatics” and associated them with violence.71 It is therefore not surprising that in 1995 most Americans assumed the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma that killed 168 must be the work of foreign Muslims. The devastation was, of course, perpetrated by two white, homegrown American terrorists. One, Timothy McVeigh, was associated with the white supremacist “radical Christian Identity Movement,” but there was no backlash against Protestant Christians as a result of his violent acts.72 In contrast, after 9/11 American Muslims “immediately feared for their lives.”73 Not without cause.

  Days after the 9/11 attacks, three murders prompted by hatred for Muslims occurred. On September 15, 2001, an American Sikh, who wore a turban as a sign of his faith, was wrongly identified as a Muslim and shot dead in Mesa, Arizona. On the same day, an American Muslim citizen of Pakistani descent was gunned down in his own store in Dallas by a white supremacist. Incidents of physical and verbal violence against other American Muslims mounted in the days that followed.74 On September 17, President George W. Bush spoke to the nation, declaring that “Islam is peace” and attempting to end the violence by affirming that “America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country.”75 But his words did not stem the tide of intimidation felt by American Muslims throughout the country.

  Two days after President Bush’s speech, an American Muslim of Yemeni descent fleeing an attacker in Lincoln Park, Michigan, was shot in the back. In early October 2001, the Indian American owner of a gas station was shot in Mesquite, Texas, by the same white supremacist who had a month earlier murdered an American Muslim in the Lone Star State.76 In 2001, anti-Islamic hate crimes reported to the FBI numbered 546, a huge spike from the previous year’s thirty-three.77 Between 2001 and 2006, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division investigated seven hundred cases of crimes motivated by religious bigotry against Muslims, Sikhs, Arabs, and South Asians. Federal courts tried twenty-seven cases, while local law enforcement pursued 150.78

  Beginning in the fall of 2001, the FBI and other law enforcement authorities held “voluntary” interviews with almost eight thousand young Muslim men with student or visitor visas throughout the country. Faced with the unannounced interrogations, none dared refuse to answer questions focused on their religious and political views. None of those interviewed would be accused of any tie to terrorism. Seven hundred immigrant Muslim men were arrested while trying to register under the new National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. There followed detentions without cause, and for those with visa infractions, deportations. In addition, three American Muslim citizens, including one captain in the U.S. Army, were “arrested, held in solitary confinement for weeks, and labeled ‘terrorists.’ ”79 Eventually, all three would be exonerated, but the American Muslim community at large would grow suspicious of their own government.

  The 342-page USA PATRIOT Act (H.R. 3162), hastily passed by Congress and signed into law by the president on October 26, 2001, provided the government unprecedented powers to monitor all American citizens. Intended to “deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes,” the law actually targeted the American Muslim community directly, despite its disclaimer that “Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and Americans from South Asia play a vital role in our Nation and are entitled to nothing less than the full rights of every American.”80 What most security-conscious Americans have failed to appreciate, however, is that these laws also may be used against non-Muslim citizens as part of any investigation in which the possibility of terrorism is alleged. In this way, too, the civil rights of American Muslims serve to test those of all Americans.

  The PATRIOT Act’s Section 213, for example, eliminates previous legal requirements that a warrant be provided to the owner of any home or business at the time of a search. Instead, legal authorities can “sneak and peek” without informing the subject until weeks or months later.81 Although the Supreme Court has ruled that such secret searches violate the Fourth Amendment’s protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” the act “has discarded this interpretation of the Fourth Amendment.”82 Section 215 allows the government, all without probable cause, the right to seize any document or record of any individual suspect being investigated for criminal activity. These materials include e-mails, computer records, and medical and education documents, as wel
l as credit and bank statements.83 Legal experts have noted that the provisions are particularly damaging to the rights of Muslim immigrants with legal visas and green cards. Section 412 states that these would-be citizens may be indefinitely detained, jailed, or deported, whether or not charges of terrorism are ultimately substantiated.84 As the sociologist Lori Peek asserts, the PATRIOT Act’s provisions have led to the “systematic erosion of civil rights for all Americans but have been especially devastating to Arab and Muslim communities.”85

  In addition, American Muslim citizens have been subject to religious profiling at airports. (Enterprising young Muslims created T-shirts that read “FLYING WHILE MUSLIM—IT’S NOT A CRIME.”)86 Special surveillance of mosques continues, and not until recently has the FBI’s infiltration of Muslim Student Associations in New York and New England colleges in 2005–6 been made public.87 Such policies have resulted in no convictions but have very effectively emboldened those inclined to suspect their fellow citizens who happen to be Muslim, as well as fortifying the stereotype of a religious minority as an enemy within.88

  Some American Muslims have responded by redoubling their efforts at public education and forging closer ties with Jewish and Christian organizations.89 Young American Muslims have undertaken campus outreach, including comedy tours attempting to neutralize bigotry with humor.90 There have been those among the young for whom 9/11 permanently confirmed a sense of alienation and exclusion, as was the case of one young man interviewed in 2003: “I look different from them. I believe different things. I think that is when I figured out that to be American was to be Christian and Jewish. To be Muslim and brown was to be not American.”91

  Still, despite experiencing prejudice, many American Muslims have seized the opportunity for greater civic engagement at the local and national levels, including running for public office. Such political involvement has been identified as an important alternative path for the frustrations that might have led to domestic terrorism.92 Yet Muslims remain underrepresented in American politics, even as they are called upon to run in order to “defend” the community’s civil rights and to “consolidate the sense of ownership and belonging of this vulnerable minority.”93 But those who answer the call often face an intensified version of the hostilities directed against the community. The election of the first American Muslim congressman, while cause for communal celebration, also resulted in an unprecedented demonstration of anti-Islamic bigotry.

  THE FIRST AMERICAN MUSLIM CONGRESSMAN

  Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an made headlines in the twenty-first century resting beneath the hand of the Democrat Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress. Ellison’s election in 2006 and his decision to use Jefferson’s Qur’an in his private swearing-in ceremony in January 2007 stirred a controversy in which American ideals about universal civil rights clashed with long-held anxieties about American Muslim citizens as the “distrusted Other.”94

  Ellison’s election was answered with “hostile phone calls and e-mail,” along with “some death threats.”95 Republican congressman Virgil Goode Jr. wrote a letter to constituents in Virginia warning that Americans must “wake up”; otherwise, there might “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”96 The Virginia congressman failed to remind those he represented that Ellison’s use of the Qur’an had followed a formal pledge of allegiance to the Constitution, the only form of oath he was obliged to take. For Ellison, the Qur’an was optional and private, but also personal.97 Why, after all, should he swear upon a religious text in which he did not believe? Ironically, Representative Goode’s district included Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home, the site near where, in 1776, this Founder first quoted John Locke: “[He] sais ‘neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.’ ”98

  Congressman Keith Ellison taking the oath on Jefferson’s Qur’an in 2007. (illustration credit 7.2)

  Goode’s alarmism failed to consider that Ellison’s election had been the result of a democratic process in which the candidate’s civic virtues mattered more than his creed, a possibility first predicted by the Federalist Samuel Johnston of North Carolina in 1788: “Another case is, if any persons of such descriptions should, notwithstanding their religion, acquire the confidence and esteem of the people of America by their good conduct and practice of virtue, they may be chosen.”99

  Another faulty assumption on Goode’s part was that Ellison as a Muslim must be “foreign,” as betrayed in his warning, “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.” Ellison, an African American convert to Islam, explained that his ancestors had resided in North America since 1742.100 Indeed, his conversion may well have been a reversion to the Muslim beliefs of his West African ancestors. Ellison was also Minnesota’s first African American congressman, but it was his religion, not his race, that his critics seized upon.

  Dennis Prager, the conservative columnist, talk show host, and President George W. Bush’s appointee to the Holocaust Museum Board, insisted that Ellison’s swearing-in on the Qur’an should not be tolerated “because the act undermines American civilization.”101 He asserted, “The centrality of the Bible as a repository of our values is the main issue,” arguing that “if you are incapable of taking an oath on that book [the Bible], don’t serve in Congress.”102 His assumption contradicted recent American political practice. Democratic congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz had sworn her private oath of office upon a Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, termed by Christians the Old Testament. As a Jew, she found the New Testament represented no repository of sacred truth. Why, as the Baptist evangelical John Leland had once asked in the eighteenth century, should anyone of any faith be forced by their government to swear upon a text whose truth they rejected? Such would amount not only to coercion, but also to hypocrisy. Indeed, considering that the Constitution explicitly forbade a religious test, why should an individual be condemned for using or not using any sacred text?

  Prager further speculated that Ellison’s election would somehow “embolden Islamic extremists and make new ones, as Islamists, rightly or wrongly, see the first sign of the realization of their greatest goal—the Islamicization of America.”103 He did not elaborate upon how this implicitly democratic end would be achieved. Would Islamic extremists from abroad arrive in the United States covertly, wait years to gain citizenship, and then all run for elected office—and win? Who, after all, would vote for Muslim candidates if their allegedly subversive political goals were unmasked by people like Prager? But if Americans did endorse a slate of American Muslim candidates, would that not simply be an affirmation of the Republic’s democratic health? The suggestion in Prager’s speech of Muslim conspiratorial intentions would not be successfully countered in any media venue, but would fester among select Muslim hate groups, seeping unremarked into mainstream national media and politics.

  Immediately after Ellison’s election, Glenn Beck, then with CNN’s Headline News (HLN), congratulated the new congressman but refused to define him as fully American, suggesting rather that he must be in league with the nation’s foreign adversaries. Beck asked, “Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”104 Congressman-elect Ellison had been indicted as un-American and possibly anti-American, based solely on the commentator’s prejudices about Islam. Beck qualified his insistence that the congressman prove his loyalty to the country by adding, “I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans feel that way.”105

  There was no public outcry in response to Beck’s remarks. Ellison’s brief answer was to affirm his “deep love and affection for my country.” He concluded, “There’s no one who is more patriotic than I am. And so, you know, I don’t need to—need to prove my patriotic strip
es.”106 He also wrote an editorial in which he declared, “I was elected to articulate a new politics in which no one is cut out of the American dream, not immigrants, not gays, not poor people, not even a Muslim committed to serve his nation.”107

  In spite of opposition, many Americans, Muslims in particular, took heart. The editor of the Arab American News in Dearborn, Michigan, observed, “It’s a step forward: it gives Muslims a little bit of a sense of belonging. It is also a signal to the rest of the world that America has nothing against Muslims.”108 Indicating this might be the case, a second Muslim, Democrat André Carson of Indiana, was elected to Congress in 2008, winning reelection in 2010. Carson’s religion would not attract the sort of notice that Ellison’s had. And Ellison would be reelected repeatedly by his predominantly non-Muslim constituents in Minneapolis. Still, the tactics used to undermine him, far from being retired, would be brought to bear, as early as 2004, against a bigger target, a potential candidate in the 2008 presidential election.

  COULD A MUSLIM BE PRESIDENT? NO—AND YES

  False reports that Senator Barack Obama was a “secret” Muslim began to circulate just after his impressive keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, long before a real Muslim, Keith Ellison, became a candidate for Congress.109 The initial anonymous e-mail, created by a fringe Republican political operative describing himself as “independent,” promoted a range of lies: that Obama concealed “the fact that he is a Muslim”; that his stepfather “introduced his stepson to Islam”; that he was enrolled in a Muslim school in Indonesia where he learned “radical teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists”; and that his Christianity was only “politically expedient,” a cover for his true faith. The e-mail’s author also deliberately referred to Obama as “Osama.”110 The allegations would circulate more widely on the Web in 2006, as Obama actively considered a presidential bid. By 2007, “CNN and others” had “thoroughly debunked the smear,” but as Chris Hayes reported, “the original false accusation has clearly sunk into people’s consciousness.”111 The idea would not die during the presidential campaign. Indeed, the confusion over Obama’s religion remains for some.