Jefferson’s Jihad? Robert Allison (bio) Denise A. Spellberg. Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. 384pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.95. In the autumn of 1765, as he completed his legal studies, Thomas Jefferson bought a copy of George Sale’s translation of the Qur’an: The Koran; Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mohammed (1734). Jefferson had been led to the Qur’an by Samuel Pufendorf’s Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1716), which referred to the Qur’an as the foundation of law in the Muslim world. Jefferson bought a second copy sometime after 1770, when a fire destroyed his house and books. This copy now resides with the rest of Jefferson’s books in the Library of Congress. Congressman Keith Ellison took his oath of office on Jefferson’s Koran in 2007. The very existence of this book—a translation of the Qur’an Jefferson owned—sparked Denise Spellberg, a professor in the Middle Eastern Studies Department at the University of Texas, to begin her meditation on the American republic’s Founders and their engagement with Islam. More than any of his contemporary Founders, Jefferson was engaged with Islam and the Muslim world. As American minister to France in the 1780s, he was the first line of contact for American prisoners in Algiers, and he advocated using military force—even building a navy—to fight the Barbary States; as president he conducted a war against Tripoli. Jefferson also had much to say on religious liberty, as his Statute for Religious Freedom (one of three things he wanted carved on his grave) guaranteed religious freedom, in his words, to “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination” (p. 119). Jefferson’s pluralistic inclusion, his Enlightenment vision of freeing individuals, is for Spellberg a shade different: “To many of his political opponents, Thomas Jefferson may have been our first Muslim president” (p. 271). She adds, “many of his own countrymen considered their president an atheist, an infidel, or even a Muslim outright” (p. 224). Spellberg does not name those political opponents or tell us how many of his countrymen thought Jefferson “a Muslim outright.” For those unnamed opponents, Jefferson’s affinity for Islam was a negative; for Spellberg it is a positive. Jefferson, in her view, was the “founding father of Muslim rights in America” (p. 122). [End Page 630] This marks the distance between present-day liberalism and the liberalism of the eighteenth-century. Jefferson and his Enlightenment generation sought freedom for individuals; in our era, it seems unthinkable that rights or freedom exist except for members of groups. Was Jefferson advocating “Muslim rights” or human rights, which, by definition, included Muslims along with Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Presbyterians, and all denominations of infidels? Spellberg tells us that George Washington also “advocated Muslim rights” (p. 7) and calls John Leland, the Baptist minister who led the fight for religious liberty, a “Baptist advocate for the Rights of Muslims” (p. 240). This would have surprised Leland, Washington, and Jefferson. They advocated human rights, not rights for particular groups of people. Spellberg sees other limits to Jefferson’s vision: “For it must have occurred to Jefferson that he could scarcely declare all (free, white) men ‘created equal’ and ‘endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights’ if the Virginians among them did not have the right to freely practice their own faith” (p. 102). Why “must [this] have occurred” to Jefferson? If Jefferson could so blatantly deny the premise of equality to African Americans, why would he have extended equality to Muslims? Why must he have seen Muslims as citizens—Muslims whom Spellberg tells us were for Jefferson strictly hypothetical—when he could not imagine citizenship for the people of color who surrounded him? Strangely enough, Spellberg insists that Jefferson had to have included Muslims, but must have excluded people of color. She cannot write the Declaration’s “all men are created equal” clause without inserting the words “white” and “free.” She writes that “liberty and equality . . . were in Jefferson’s view the natural rights of white American males” (p. 122...