26. Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1764), 1:vii.
27. Ibid.
28. Bobzin, “Translations of the Qur’an,” 5:345; Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 10–14, 37–63.
29. Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 74–75; Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1764), 1:vii.
30. Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 8–9; Bobzin, “Translations of the Qur’an,” 5:346–47.
31. Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8, 76–82; Bobzin “Translations of the Qur’an,” 5:347; Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 8.
32. Quoted in Matar, Islam in Britain, 79.
33. Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 9. The translation by Alexander Ross is considered by Nabil Matar, “Alexander Ross and the First English Translation of the Qur’an,” Muslim World 88 (January 1998): 81–92. See also Matar, Islam in Britain, 76, 81.
34. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 251; Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 22–23.
35. Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1764), vi.
36. Sale, “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1734), 46. This observation appears in a marginal comment about the inhabitants of Medina.
37. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 191; Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 28.
38. Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1764), vii; Matar, Islam in Britain, 82; P. M. Holt, “The Background to Arabic Studies in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Historians of the Middle East, ed. Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 21–25, 27; G. A. Russell, “The Impact of The Philosophus Autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke, and the Society of Friends,” in The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. G. A. Russell (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 226–27, 232, 239–46; Samar Attar, The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl’s Influence on Modern Western Thought (New York: Lexington Books, 2007), 1, 7.
39. Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 35–36; Bobzin, “Translations of the Qur’an,” 5:348.
40. Bobzin, “Translations of the Qur’an,” 5:348; Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 257–59.
41. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions Garnier Frères, 1963), 1:255.
42. Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 22–23.
43. Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1764), 1:viii.
44. Sale, Koran (1734), 31 note a.
45. Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1764), 1:viii.
46. Ibid., 1:ix.
47. Ibid. Claims that Sale’s translation was “pro-Unitarian,” are made by J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 105 n. 16. This position is also endorsed by Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 18, 21, 25–28, 30. However, Sale would contradict this position in his own words to the reader.
48. Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1764), 1:vii–viii; Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 18, 21, 25–28, 30.
49. Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1764), 1:vii.
50. Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 24–35.
51. Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1734), v.
52. Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 24–26; Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 106–8, 136, 149–50.
53. Sale, “To the Right Honourable John Lord Carteret (Dedication),” Koran (1764), 1:A3; Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 30–31; Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 106–7.
54. Champion, Pillars, 120–23, 186, 188–90; Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 30. Numa Pompilius (715–673 BCE) had also figured centrally in the works of seventeenth-century English authors, who argued that Muhammad, like Numa, had introduced a religion that promoted civic virtues.
55. Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 24–25; Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 27–43. Regarding Prideaux’s work, see Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1734), iii. For disputes with Prideaux about the birth order of the Prophet’s father and the story of the first mosque in Medina, see Sale, “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1734), 38, 51, respectively.
56. Sale, “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1734), 64.
57. Sale, “To the Right Honourable John Lord Carteret (Dedication),” Koran (1764), 1:A3; al-Hibri, “Islamic and American Constitutional Law,” 499–500; Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 255.
58. The presumption that Sale read Stubbe may be found in Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 25–27. This premise is also supported by Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 106. But neither author can prove this definitively.
59. Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1764), 1:ix.
60. Ibid., 1:ix–x; Champion, Pillars, 101.
61. Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1764), 1:x.
62. Sale, “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1734), 41.
63. Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 106.
64. Sale, “To the Reader,” Koran (1764), 1:vii.
65. Sale, “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1734), 142.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., 143.
68. Ibid., 63; Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 64–80.
69. Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 21, 23–24; Champion, Pillars, 120–32.
70. The Qur’an explicitly notes twenty-four prophets who preceded Muhammad, with references that suggest there may have been others who remain unnamed.
71. Sale, “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1734), 76.
72. Ibid., 33–34; Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur’an, 34.
73. Sale, “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1734), 35.
74. Ibid., 35, 71.
75. This Qur’anic verse begins with the injunction to People of the Book (Jews and Christians) to reject the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity and to embrace the divine unity of God. The pivotal sentence in this verse: “So believe in Allah and His messengers, and say not ‘Three’—Cease! (it is) better for you! Allah is only One God. Far is it removed from His transcendent majesty that He should have a son. His is all that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth. And Allah is sufficient as Defender.” See Muhammad M. Pickthall, trans., The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an: Text and Explanatory Translation (New York: Muslim World League, 1977), 98. See also Neal Robinson, Christ in Islam and Christianity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 26–30.
76. Robinson, Christ in Islam, 5–7.
77. The translator’s erudition regarding the four “perfect” women in Islam may be found in Sale, “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1734), 102, 251, chapter 66, 458 note d.
78. Ibid., 102.
79. Sale, Koran (1734), 458. The original is found in Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, Jami’ al-bayan ‘an ta’wil ay al-Qur’an, ed. M. Shakir and A. Shakir, 16 vols. (Cairo: Dar al-Ma’arif, 1955–69), 6:397–98. For a discussion of the importance of these women in early Islamic history, see D. A. Spellberg, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of ‘A’isha bint Abi Bakr (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 167–70.
80. Sale, “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1734), 71.
81. Ibid., 114–22.
82. Ibid., 122–24, 135, 139–40.
83. Matar, Islam in Britain, 110–15. See also Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffee Houses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985).
84. Sale, “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1734), A2.
85. Ibid., 152–54.
86. Ibid., 156.
87. Ibid., 132–38.
88. Ibid., 178; Elmarsafy, Enlightenment Qur�
��an, 31.
89. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 248; al-Hibri, “Islamic and Constitutional Law,” 498, 501.
90. Sale, “To the Right Honourable John Lord Carteret (Dedication),” Koran (1764), 1:A4.
91. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 246.
92. Jefferson actually compiled two separate collections of extracts from the New Testament, the first in 1804, the second in 1819–20. See Thomas Jefferson, The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (Boston: Beacon, 1989).
93. Peter K. Conkin, “The Religious Pilgrimage of Thomas Jefferson,” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 30.
94. Vrolijk, “Sale, George,” 48:685–87.
95. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury (London: Methuen, 1911; rprt. 1974), 5:356 n. 68; Vrolijk, “Sale, George,” 48:685–87.
96. Quoted in G. Thomas Tanselle, Royall Tyler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 268 n. 29.
97. Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, ed. Douglas Wilson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 214; Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 250.
98. Thomas Jefferson, The Commonplace Book of Thomas Jefferson: A Repertory of His Ideas on Government, ed. Gilbert Chinard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1926), 76.
99. William Salkeld, Reports of Cases Adjudg’d in the Court of King’s Bench (London: E. Nutt and R. Gosling, 1717), 1:46.
100. Ibid.
101. Jefferson, Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, 155–56.
102. Ibid., 156; Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God, 22–23.
103. Quoted in Wilson, introduction to Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, 156 n. 5; H. T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke (London: Constable, 1970), 298.
104. Wilson, introduction to Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, 156.
105. Ibid., 42–43.
106. Ibid., 45–46.
107. Jefferson, Notes on Virginia in Life and Selected Writings, 255.
108. Jefferson, Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, 25.
109. Edward Dumbauld, Thomas Jefferson and the Law (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 4–5.
110. Dewey, Thomas Jefferson, 59.
111. Ibid., 63.
112. Ibid., 65–66; Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 247–48.
113. Dewey, Thomas Jefferson, 57.
114. Ibid., 70–72.
115. Ibid., 70; Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” 247–48, 252.
116. Von Pufendorf’s legal reference is borne out for its inaccuracy in Redhouse Yeni Türkçe-Ingilizce Sözlük/New Redhouse Turkish-English Dictionary (Istanbul: Redhouse Press, 1974), 573.
117. I am grateful to Leslie Peirce, an Ottoman expert on gender and the law, for setting me straight on the nuances of the term kabin’s application in the Ottoman Empire. E-mail communication, August 11, 2011. Without her intervention, I would have continued to assume that Von Pufendorf was completely rather than only partly wrong in his definition.
118. W. Heffening, “Mut‘a,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 11 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960), 757–59; Noel Coulson, A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh: University Press, 1964), 31–32.
119. Redhouse Yeni Türkçe-Ingilizce Sözlük, 573.
120. S. A. Skilliter, “Khurrem,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 5:66–67. See also Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 58–65, especially 59 n. 3.
121. Sale, “Preliminary Discourse,” Koran (1734), 134.
122. Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 10.
123. Voltaire, Essai, 1:255–76.
124. The French, as recorded by Jefferson and Voltaire, is included for interested readers in the notes below.
125. Voltaire, Essai, 1:255–61.
126. Ibid., 1:255. Voltaire’s note on Sale was signaled with an asterisk.
127. Jefferson took note: “Whilst Omar, the second of the successors of Mohamed was extending his conquests over Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine, etc., his lieutenants s’avançaient en Perse.… Alors tomba cette ancienne religion des mages.” See Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 334.
128. Jefferson’s notes on Voltaire’s view of Zoroastrians continue: “Ils ne purent abandonner une religion consacrée par tant de siècles.—La plupart se retirèrent aux extrémités de la Perse, et de l’Inde …” Jefferson noted Voltaire’s comparison of Zoroastrians to Jews: “mais ignorans, méprisés, et, à leur pauvreté près, semblables aux Juifs si longtems [sic] dispersés sans s’allier aux autres nations.” Ibid., 334–35.
129. “Tandis qu’un lieutenant d’Omar subjugue la Perse, un autre enlève l’Egypte entière aux Romains, et une grande partie de la Lybie. C’est dans cette conquête qu’est brûlée la fameuse bibliothèque d’Alexandrie, monument des connoissances et des erreurs des hommes, commencée par Ptolemée.” Ibid., 335.
130. The myth of the Islamic destruction of the ancient library at Alexandria persists in the work of the classicist Luciano Canfora, whose The Vanished Library (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989) attempts to refute several sound arguments made by the classicist and Arabist Alfred Joshua Butler in The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion, ed. P. M. Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 407–26. My thanks to Richard Bulliet for this reference. The best, final refutation of the myth of the Muslim destruction of the library may be found in the analysis of both the classical and Arabic sources by Mostafa El-Abbadi, Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria (Paris: UNESCO, 1990), 167–79. El-Abbadi explains that the problematic five-century-long silence of Arabic sources about Umar’s command to destroy the Alexandria library may actually reflect the era of the Crusades, during which Christian plunderers sought out Islamic libraries in the Middle East to take back to Europe. During this period, the Sunni warrior Salah al-Din (Saladin), in taking control of Egypt from the Shi‘i Fatimid dynasty, seized their famed library in Cairo and sold their books. Saladin also used books to pay his followers, as he did in dismantling a million books in a Syrian library. Saladin’s treatment of these great libraries, according to El-Abbadi, created within the Islamic world “the widespread feeling of resentment and discontent at the loss of such a priceless legacy of learning”; see El-Abbadi, Life and Fate, 179. El-Abbadi concludes that the reason the anecdote about Umar’s destruction of the Alexandrian library in the seventh century emerged only in the twelfth century in Arabic accounts is explained by the author Ibn al-Qifti’s debt to his employer, Saladin. He argues that this was his attempt to ameliorate Saladin’s real destruction of libraries by comparison to Umar’s invented, earlier conflagration. Much about the details of the anecdote in the Arabic versions extant seems absurd.
131. Butler, Arab Conquest, 401–2.
132. Jefferson recorded from Voltaire the falsehood that Muslims wanted no science. He copied, “Alors les Sarrazins ne vouloient de science que l’Alcoran; mais ils faisaient déjà à voir que leur génie pouvait s’étendre à tout.” Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 335.
133. Voltaire admits more Islamic precedents in medicine and algebra; see Voltaire, Essai, 1:268. For more on Western borrowing, see Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 31. On the diffusion of new Islamic hybrids to Europe in the medieval era, see Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 42–51 (citrus); 20–24 (sugar); 24–31 (cotton); 15–20 (rice).
134. Voltaire says, “La chimie et la médecine étaient cultivées par les Arabes. La chimie, perfectionée aujourd’hui par nous, ne nous fut connue que par eux.” Here he ad
mits Islamic scientific advances, but these were not recorded by Jefferson. See Voltaire, Essai, 1:267–68.
135. “Letter to Rev. Madison,” Paris, July 19, 1788, in Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 926.
136. Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 341.
137. “Letter to John Page,” August 20, 1785, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 8:418.
138. Jefferson, Commonplace Book, 335; Voltaire, Essai, 1:263.
139. For an explanation of the slow stages of conversion to Islam in the Middle East, see Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
140. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:530, 532, 535–36.
141. Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God, 13–16.
142. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:526.
143. Ibid., 1:527.
144. “Memorial of the Presbytery of Hanover (October 24, 1776),” in The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding, ed. Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009), 269.
145. Jefferson, “Autobiography,” in Life and Selected Writings, 40.
146. “Memorial of the Presbytery of Hanover,” 269.
147. John A. Ragosta, Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia’s Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 142–44.
148. Differences in the spelling of “Muhammad” and “Qur’an” abound in these sources. “Mahomed” and “Alchoran” are used in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:526. Instead, “Mahommed” and “Al-Coran” appear in “Memorial of the Presbytery of Hanover,” 269.
149. The meaning of this document is read quite differently by Thomas S. Kidd, God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 182–83.
150. Virginia Gazette Daybooks, Segment 2, fol. 18; Gilreath, Thomas Jefferson’s Library, 54. See also “Alcoran,” in Oxford English Dictionary, 13 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 1:210.
151. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1:530–39.
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