About that Jefferson Koran

Yes, “Virgil,” it’s true: There is a Jefferson Koran.
When and why?
In the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library rests the original Virginia Gazette Daybook – a fascinating account book of that bookseller’s customers in the Virginia Colony capital town of Williamsburg.
For October 5th, 1765, the Gazette Daybook clearly records a purchase by the second customer of the day: a 22-year-old law student named Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson made a single purchase: George Sale’s two-volume translation and introduction to “The Koran, Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mohammed.”
In a recent article in Early American Literature, Kevin Hayes suggests that Jefferson had multiple reasons for buying a Koran, ranging from preparations for the bar exam, to his broader interests in natural law to the history of religion.
(As may pleasantly surprise some), the most frequently cited source in Jefferson’s legal writings was Pufendorf’s 1672 classic, Of the Law of Nature and Nations.
As Pufendorf cites multiple precedents from the Koran on various civil and international legal issues, It was quite “natural” for Jefferson as an advanced student of laws, not just of one nation but of the world, to study the Koran, especially one which included detailed comparative comment by a distinguished British lawyer, George Sale.
The following introductory passage from Sale no doubt was a selling point to Jefferson:

If the religious and civil Institutions of foreign nations are worth our knowledge, those of Mohammed, the lawgiver of the Arabians, and founder of an empire which in less than a century spread itself over a greater part of the world than the Romans were ever masters…. Since students of law study legal precedent from ancient Rome, they should also study precedent from a society with an even greater reach than Rome.

Flash Forward:
241 years and 3 months later from the day Jefferson first purchased it, Jefferson’s Koran was delivered from its current home at the Library of Congress to the House of Representatives. There, it served as the holy book upon which America’s first Congressperson of the Muslim faith, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, took his ceremonial oath of office.
I already wrote here about the controversy over Ellison’s desire to use a Koran for his ceremonial oath, and specifically about Virgil Goode’s bizarre letter and contentious press conference about Ellison’s wishes.
Among the press conference lowlights, Virgil Goode declared that he wouldn’t use the “Q-Ran” for his oath taking; denied he was a racist, characterized all Muslims as inherent threats to American values; ducked the core question of whether Ellison has the right to take an oath on whatever book he wishes, and refused to apologize to Ellison or anyone else.
In my annotated transcription of Virgil’s “bad” performance, I suggested that Congressman Goode might benefit from re-studying his basic Virginia civics, particularly the most famous person ever from his district – Thomas Jefferson.
On Jefferson’s tombstone at his Monticello home, Jefferson’s requested epitath cites three great accomplishments in his life:

Author of the Declartion of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and Father of the University of Virginia.

That Jefferson was America’s third President is not mentioned.

As Jefferson biographer Merril Peterson has written, Jefferson’s tombstone citation of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom belongs in the top testimonials of Jefferson’s life:

“it remains one of the main pillars of American democracy and a beacon of light and liberty to the world.”

First proposed by Jefferson in 1779, but not passed until early 1786, the preamble of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom begins (emphasis added):

Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either,…

The operative section of the Statute declares that that no person

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 opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

The statute then closes with the extraordinarily unusual warning that any subsequent attempt to to repeal or narrow it will be “an infingement of natural right.”
Virginia’s Statute on Religious Freedom directly contributed to the subsequent US Constitution’s Article VI ban on “religious tests” for public office and the Bill of Right’s prohibition against an establishment of religion and gurantee of the free excercise of religion.
The nation’s editorial comment on Virgil Goode (and the wingnuts who inspired him) has been mostly negative, including by leading Jewish organizations and a string of local newspapers in Goode’s district. (I haven’t found one yet that supports his claims.) It’s hardly a proud moment for central Virginians to see their Congressman lampooned nationally as ” “intolerant, misinformed and downright un-American.” One paper from the Nebraska heartland condemns Goode’s comments as “sheer lunacy.”
Yet Goode remains defiant and unrepentant, no doubt buoyed by friendly appearances on Faux News and Rush Limbaugh.
In an essay, published Tuesday in USA Today, Goode wastes most of his space repeating his original letter, denies he’s trying to set up a flagrantly unconstitutional religious test for office, and then closes with this chilling paragraph:

Let us remember that we were not attacked by a nation on 9/11; we were attacked by extremists who acted in the name of the Islamic religion. I believe that if we do not stop illegal immigration totally, reduce legal immigration and end diversity visas, we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion, rather than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a beacon for freedom-loving persons around the world.

Desperate, Goode now resorts to waving the 9/11 bloody shirt in the service of ugly Islamophobia of the worst sort. Goode apparently subsribes to the bigoted yarn that all Muslims – by definition – are threats to our “Judeo-Christian” civilization.

Flatly turning Jefferson on his head, Goode audaciously claims that for America to remain a “beacon for freedom-loving persons,” it must keep the land “free” from those who believe differently than we do. That is, to preserve our “freedom,” we must declare our soil off-limits – that is, no longer welcome to those who believe differently than “we’uns” do.

Jefferson just turned over in his grave.
Grating as it may sound, Jonathan Turley well characterizes such thinking as “Judeo-Christofascism.”
I merely suggest that Goode is being profoundly un-Jeffersonian.
Late in his life, in his own autobiographical sketch, Jefferson has the following revealing recollection of an attempt made to amend the preamble in his Statute on Religious Freedom (cited above):

When the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our relgion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read, ” a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

Divided we stand:
There’s a certain surreal absurdity to this entire controversy. No Congresspeson in fact takes her or his official oath by swearing on any book. All 435 of them pledge their secular oaths of office together – as a group, with a closing “so help me God” affirmation. Thereafter, most elect to conduct their own individual, but legally meaningless ceremonies. There, they may repeat their oaths, with their hands on a favored holy book.
Even if the oaths were taken formally and individually, with holy books in hand, it has long been established in Anglo-American common law to permit religious minorities to use the favored holy book they believed in most when taking oaths in civic matters. As Jonathan Edelstein notes, it was in 1765 – the same year Jefferson bought his Koran – that an appelate British court ruled that “Mahometans” could take oaths in a court of law according to his own religious forms, the same right that had earlier been recognized for Sikhs and Hindus.
More fundamentally, Edelstein observes,

“Oaths have always been recognized as a personal matter, and courts from time immemorial have viewed it as critical that witnesses view their oaths as binding. Thus, the one thing that was never taken away from Jews, even during the darkest periods of persecution in medieval Europe, was the right to swear on the Old Testament.”

What was true in English common law also extended to practice in America. In 1820, New York’s highest court held that “Mahometans may be sworn on the Koran; Jews on the Pentateuch, and Gentoos and others according to the ceremonies of their religion, whatever may be the form.” In this tradition, New York’s Ed Koch took his 1969 oath in Congress on the Hebrew Bible.
Relatively speaking, Thomas Jefferson might be more impressed with today’s Iranian Constitution than with the “Virgil Goode position.” At least in Iran, the Islamic Republic’s Constitution directs that elected legislators representing minority religious groups will take their oaths by mentioning their own holy books.
One of Jefferson’s best known quotes proclaims, “I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Jefferson particularly was referencing percieved state-allied churches, the would-be theocrats of his generation.
Virgil Goode’s civil religion preaches that America’s strength comes from a bounded religious unity – that if we are not all all in accord with the dominant faith, then we must be against it.
Jefferson, by contrast, famously observed that,

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But id does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg.”

It is also true Jefferson was a great advocate of a vibrantly religious citizenry, as the key wellspring from which virtuous government might be most durable. In the context of the stain of slavery, Jefferson too “feared” for his country that God ultimately will be “just.”
But that hardly means Jefferson had in mind a unified national position on religious identity or practice. In 1821, Jefferson commented to a Georgia rabbi that freedom of religion is the most effective antidote against religious conflict in society:

“[T]he maxim of civil government being reversed in that of religion, where its true form is `divided we stand, united we fall’.”

For Jefferson, our strength as a nation is rooted in its capacity for diversity.
———————————-
Suggested further readings:
Jefferson of course thought and wrote extensively on subjects of religion, liberty, and government. Many of the quotes in the blogosphere on Jefferson are apocryphal – of dubious origin. For one reliable compendium of the extraordinary range of Jefferson quotes, just on religion and politics, start with this listing provided by the University of Virginia’s electronic text center. For secondary sources on topics mentioned above, consider starting with:
Merril D. Peterson, “Jefferson and Religious Freedom,” The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 274, no. 6 (Dec. 1994), pp. 112-120.
Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan, eds., The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom : its Evolution and Consequences in American History (Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Kevin J. Hayes, “How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur’an,” Early American Literature, Vol. 39, no. 2 (June 2004), pp. 247-261.
James Hutson and Jaroslav Pelikan, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (Library of Congress, 1998).