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

September 9, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/us/10obama.html?pagewanted=all ; Enayat Najafizada and Rod Nordland, “Afghans Avenge Florida Koran Burning, Killing 12,”
New York Times
, April 1, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/world/asia/02afghanistan.html?…all . It is worth noting that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the minister Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center based in Florida as an anti-Muslim hate group; see Robert Steinback, “The Anti-Muslim Inner Circle,”
Intelligence Report
, no. 142 (Summer 2011), Southern Poverty Law Center.

INTRODUCTION: IMAGINING THE MUSLIM AS CITIZEN AT THE FOUNDING OF THE UNITED STATES
    1. For a study that finds that American magazines included a range of attitudes toward Muslims, including “naïve curiosity, obsessive exoticism, geopolitical calculation, gentle condescension, and unabashed bigotry,” see Robert Battistini, “Glimpsesof the Other Before Orientalism: The Muslim World in Early American Periodicals, 1785–1800,”
Early American Studies
8, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 446–74, quote on 447.
    2. The first person to connect Jefferson with Locke’s interest in Muslim civil rights is the distinguished historian and head of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, James H. Hutson, “The Founding Fathers and Islam,”
Library of Congress Information Bulletin
61, no. 5 (2002): 1, http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0205/tolerance.html . The first analysis of Jefferson’s focus on the Qur’an as an extension of his interest in history and religion, without reference to Locke, may be found in the pathbreaking article and subsequent book by Kevin J. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,”
Early American Literature
39, no. 2 (2004): 247–61; and Kevin J. Hayes,
The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9, 130, 201, 258, 259, 316.
    3. Naomi Cohen describes Jews and Muslims as “linked” with “other perceived deviants whose enjoyment of political rights made a mockery of the dominant religion”; see Naomi Cohen,
Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13, 16–17, 24–26, quote on 24; Gerard V. Bradley, “The No Religious Test Clause and the Constitution of Religious Liberty: ‘A Machine That Has Gone of Itself,’ ”
Case Western Reserve Law Review
37 (1986–87): 702; Arthur Hertzberg,
The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 15.
    4. Bret E. Carroll,
Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America
(New York: Routledge, 2000), 90–95; Francis Newton Thorpe, ed.,
The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America
, 7 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909), 5:2637; Morton Borden,
Jews, Turks, and Infidels
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 13.
    5. Carroll,
Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion
, 90–95.
    6. “George Washington to the Members of the Volunteer Association and Other Inhabitants of the Kingdom of Ireland Who Have Lately Arrived in the City of New York,” December 2, 1783, in
The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799
, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 39 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938), 27:254.
    7. In 1790, Washington wrote to Jewish congregations in Savannah, Newport, Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, and Richmond; see Paul F. Boller Jr.,
George Washington and Religion
(Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 152–62; for the actual missives, see 184–88; Carroll,
Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion
, 52.
    8. “George Washington to Tench Tilghman,” March 24, 1784, in
Writings of George Washington
, 27:367. (I have corrected Washington’s original spelling of