How a founder’s encounter with Islam’s holiest book shaped the future America’s commitment to religious liberties.
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.
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.
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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.
