DAR AL HARB - U.S.A. - GEORGIA: AN EDITORIAL ABOUT THE JEFFERSON QUR'AN AND ITS USE BY ELLISON

Thomas Jefferson's Koran

I wasn't paying much attention to the controversy stirred up by the swearing in of Minnesota congressional Rep. Keith Ellison using a copy of the Koran until I heard that it was a copy that belonged to Thomas Jefferson.

The day after Ellison was sworn in, Front Page Magazine.com put up an article on the Internet about this particular Koran. It sparked a flood of information about the historical background of this book which was widely spread on the web but was seen only on a smattering of mainstream news sources.

It appears Rep. Ellison had said that he wanted to use Thomas Jefferson's copy of the Koran (the spelling used in and on the two-volume copy) "because it showed that a visionary like Jefferson believed that wisdom could be gleaned from many sources, including the Koran."

Jefferson did glean wisdom from the Koran, but apparently the knowledge he acquired enabled him to know the enemy he faced as an ambassador and then as president, the Muslim Barbary Pirates.

Jefferson wrote to John Adams (who favored the expediency of paying tribute) saying that he believed there would be no end to the demands for tribute and wanted matters settled "through the medium of war." He proposed a league of trading nations, but the U.S. could not supply the needed ships.

In 1786, Jefferson and Adams, ambassadors to France and England respectively, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, Tripoli's ambassador to Britain. Their mandate was to negotiate a treaty on the appeasement of tribute. They asked the ambassador why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.

As Jefferson reported later to the Secretary of State John Jay, and to Congress, the ambassador had answered that Islam "was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise."

For the next 15 years America paid off the Barbary Pirates until Jefferson became president in 1801. Declaring that America would spend "millions in defense but not one cent in tribute," he deployed American warships and Marines to the North African coast, defeating the Barbary States in 1805 thus bringing their piracy and slavery to a halt.

In the words of Front Page's Andrew Walden: "For a Muslim to keep his word to an infidel at the expense of opportunities to expand Islamic power is the Islamic equivalent of a mortal sin. In 1807, Muslim pirate attacks on American ships began anew."

America became engaged in the War of 1812, but then quickly re-engaged the pirates after that and finally defeated them in 1815.

Jefferson's Koran is a two volume 1764 reprint of its first publication in 1734. According to the "Raleigh Biblical Recorder," the chief of the rare book section in the Library of Congress, Mark Dimunation, said that this copy was marked "T J" and probably came into his possession around 1765. Known as the "Alcoran of Mohammed," it was the first English translation from the original Arabic.

No matter what the original reason was for Jefferson acquiring the copy, two things are obvious:

It would have been invaluable to him in understanding Muslim thinking, and I'm sure he referred to it after what the ambassador from Tripoli had said. Second, it is readily apparent that the Koran was of little or no philosophical influence on Jefferson, given that he effectively ignored it in his commentaries and other writings.

It's strange then, that Rep. Ellison requested it. Whatever the case, he's declined to talk about it further, but Jefferson's words still ring true: "It will be more easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe them." - December 1786.


Pertinent Links:

1) Thomas Jefferson's Koran