Read Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders for Free Online

opponents might agree that this was now an unavoidable question for the nation, however differently they might phrase it. What cannot be denied is how Jefferson and other important Founders answered.
    Invoking the Golden Rule in this way, as a commandment to embrace humanity without qualification, linked Jefferson to a select fraternity of men who had suffered for the sake of this seemingly simple belief. When those who first espoused it in Europe refused to accept violence or coercion in religion’s name, they laid the foundation for the crucial question that Jefferson would pose in 1776, answering itwith universal legislation: “Why persecute for difference in religious opinion?” 182 In his own answer, the Italian miller Menocchio invoked his love for all who were his neighbors—whether Muslim, Christian heretic, or Jew—before his death on the Inquisition’s pyre in 1601. Just over a decade later, the Baptist Thomas Helwys echoed him from the London prison in which he would die, still proclaiming, “Let them be heretikes, Turcks, Jewes, or whatsoever it apperteynes not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure.” 183 After a little more than thirty years, this same belief in the separation of religion from government and the individual’s absolute right to “soul liberty” would be expressed for the first time in North America by Roger Williams, who asserted:
    And I aske whether or no such as may hold forth other
Worships
or
Religions
(
Jews, Turkes
, or
Antichristians
) may not be peaceable and quiet
Subjects
, loving and helpfull
neighbours
, faire and just
dealers
, true and loyall to the
civill government
? It is cleare they may from all
Reason
and
Experience
in many flourishing
Cities
and
Kingdomes
of the World. 184
    Aspects of Christian thought, often articulated as dissent by those the ruling majority decreed heretical, contained the roots of an end to religious persecution and the seeds of pluralism. These same inclusive precedents for the practice of the Golden Rule existed also in the Hebrew Bible.
    Now, as in the eighteenth century, American Muslims symbolize the universality of religious inclusion and equality promised at the nation’s founding by Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Leland, and others, an ideal still in the course of being fully realized more than two centuries later. Any attack upon the rights of Muslim citizens should be recognized for what it remains: an assault upon the universal ideal of civil rights promised all believers at the country’s founding. No group, based on religion, should be excluded from these rights. To do so now would betray both our hard-won national legacy and the genius of those who conceived it.

Notes
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    1. For the early Ottoman and European trade in this luxury, which actually began in the sixteenth century, see Ariel Salzmann, “The Age of Tulips: Confluence and Conflict in Early Modern Consumer Culture (1550–1730),” in
Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922
, ed. Donald Quataert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 84, 87, 89; Mike Dash,
Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused
(New York: Crown, 1999), 34, 224. Although tulips were propagated in England as early as 1582 and may have crossed into their North American colonies in the seventeenth century, the flowers also became transatlantic at the same time with the arrival of the Pennsylvania Dutch, who counted the three petals of the tulip as symbols of the Trinity. The Ottomans also imbued the tulip with powerful but very different Islamic religious symbolism.
    2. Edwin M. Betts and Hazelhurst Bolton Perkins,
Thomas Jefferson’s Flower Garden at Monticello
, revised by Peter J. Hatch, 3rd ed. (Monticello, VA: Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 2000), 25–26.
    3. Damien Cave and Anne Barnard, “Minister Wavers on Plans to Burn Koran,”
New York Times
,