Page 4 - Issue 26

The Islamic Bulletin Volume X X No. 26 Page 4
Written by Sebatian R. Prangea
Photographed by Aasil Ahmadd
WHILE HE WAS A LAW STUDENT , THOMAS JEFFERSON BOUGHT A
NEWLY PUBLISH ENGLISH RENDITION OF THE QUR ’AN . WHAT CAN
THAT PURCHASE TELL US ABOUT HIM ? ABOUT HIS POLITICS , AS AN
AMBASSADOR AND AS THIRD PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES .
OR ABOUT THE LEGACY OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND PLURALISM
THAT HE LEFT TO THIS COUNTRY ?
Facing the United States Capitol in Washington,
D.C. stands the Jefferson Building, the main building of the
Library of Congress, the world’s largest
library. . . The stately building…is
named after Thomas Jefferson, one of the
“founding fathers” of the United States,
principal author of the 1776 Declaration
of Independence and, from 1801 to 1809,
the third president of the young republic.
But the name also recognizes Jefferson’s
role as a founder of the Library
itself…Among the nearly 6500 books
Jefferson sold to the Library was a two-
volume English translation of the Qur’an,
the book Muslims recite, study and
revere as the revealed word of God. The
presence of this Qur’an, first in
Jefferson’s private library and later in the
Library of Congress, prompts the
questions why Jefferson purchased this
book, what use he made of it, and why he included it in his
young nation’s repository of knowledge.
These questions are all the more pertinent in light
of assertions by some present-day commentators that
Jefferson purchased his Qur’an in the 1780’s in response to
conflict between the us and the “Barbary states” of North
Africa—today Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. That was
a conflict Jefferson followed closely— indeed, in 1786, he
helped negotiate a treaty with Morocco, the United States’
first treaty with a foreign power. Then, it was relations with
Algeria that were the most nettlesome, as its ruler
demanded the payment of tribute in return for ending
semiofficial piracy of American merchant shipping.
Jefferson staunchly opposed tribute payment. In this
context, such popular accounts claim, Jefferson was studying
the Qur’an to better understand these adversaries, in
keeping with the adage “know thy enemy.” However, when
we look more closely at the place of this copy of the Qur’an
in Jefferson’s library—and in his thinking— and when we
examine the context of this particular translation, we see a
different story.
From his youth, Thomas Jefferson read and collected
a great number of books… The collection he eventually sold
to the Library of Congress comprised 6487 volumes…
Jefferson not only cataloged his books but also marked
them. The initials “T.J.” were Thomas Jefferson’s device for
marking his books: On this page, the “T.” is the printer’s
mark to help the binder keep each 16-page “gathering” in
sequence, and the “J.” was added personally by Jefferson.It
is his singular way of marking his books that makes it
possible to establish that, among the millions of volumes in
today’s Library of Congress, this one specific Qur’an did
indeed belong to him.
Jefferson’s system of cataloging his library sheds
light on the place the Qur’an held in his thinking. Jefferson’s
44-category classification scheme was much informed by the
work of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), whose professional
trajectory from lawyer to statesman to philosopher roughly
prefigures Jefferson’s own career. According to Bacon, the
human mind comprises three faculties: memory, reason and
imagination. This trinity is reflected in Jefferson’s library,
which he organized into history, philosophy and fine arts.
Each of these contained subcategories: philosophy, for
instance, was divided into moral and mathematical;
continuing along the former branch leads to the subdivision
of ethics and jurisprudence, which itself was further
segmented into the categories of religious, municipal and
“oeconomical.”
Jefferson’s system for organizing his library has often
been described as a “blueprint of his own mind.” Jefferson kept
his Qur’an in the section on religion, located between a book on
the myths and gods of antiquity and a copy of the Old
Testament. It is illuminating to note that Jefferson did not class
religious works with books on history or ethics—as might perhaps
be expected—but that he regarded their proper place to be
within jurisprudence.
Jefferson organized his own library, and he shelved religious
books, including his English version of the Qur’an, with other
works under “Jurisprudence,” which fell under “Moral
Philosophy. “The story of Jefferson’s purchase of the Qur’
helps to explain this classification. Sifting through the records of
the Virginia Gazette, through which Jefferson ordered many of
his books, the scholar Frank Dewey discovered that Jefferson
bought this copy of the Qur’an around 1765, when he was still a
student of law at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. This
quickly refutes the notion that Jefferson’s interest in Islam came
in response to the Barbary threat to shipping. Instead, it situates
his interest in the Qur’an in the context of his legal studies—a
conclusion that is consistent with his shelving of it in the section
on jurisprudence.
Jefferson’s legal interest in the Qur’an was not without
precedent. There is of course the entire Islamic juridical tradition
of religious law (Shari’ah)based on Qur’anic exegesis, but
Jefferson had an example at hand that was closer to his own
tradition: The standard work on comparative law during his time
was Of the Law of Nature and Nations, written by the German
scholar Samuel von Pufendorf and first published in 1672. As
Dewey shows, Jefferson studied Pufendorf’s treatise intensively
and, in his own legal writings, cited it more frequently than any
other text. Pufendorf’s book contains numerous references to
Islam and to the Qur’an. Although many of these were
disparaging—typical for European works of the period—on other
occasions Pufendorf cited Qur’anic legal precedents approvingly,
including the Qur’an’s emphasis on promoting moral behavior, its
proscription of games of chance and its admonition to make
peace between warring countries. As Kevin Hayes, another
eminent Jefferson scholar, writes: “Wanting to broaden his legal
studies as much as possible, Jefferson found the Qur’an well
worth his attention.”
“We the General Assembly of Virginia do enact that no
man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious
worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced,
restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor
shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or
belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument
to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the
same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their
civil capacities”(From the Virginia Statute for Religious
Freedom, ratified 1786;drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777).
In his reading of the Qur’an as a law book, Jefferson
was aided by a relatively new English translation that was not
only technically superior to earlier attempts, but also produced