In this original and illuminating book, Denise A. Spellberg reveals a little-known but crucial dimension of the story of American religious freedom—a drama in which Islam played a surprising role. In 1765, eleven years before composing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson bought a Qur’an. This marked only the beginning of his lifelong interest in Islam, and he would go on to acquire numerous books on Middle Eastern languages, history, and travel, taking extensive notes on Islam as it relates to English common law. Jefferson sought to understand Islam notwithstanding his personal disdain for the faith, a sentiment prevalent among his Protestant contemporaries in England and America. But unlike most of them, by 1776 Jefferson could imagine Muslims as future citizens of his new country. Based on groundbreaking research, Spellberg compellingly recounts how a handful of the Founders, Jefferson foremost among them, drew upon Enlightenment ideas about the toleration of Muslims (then deemed the ultimate outsiders in Western society) to fashion out of what had been a purely speculative debate a practical foundation for governance in America. In this way, Muslims, who were not even known to exist in the colonies, became the imaginary outer limit for an unprecedented, uniquely American religious pluralism that would also encompass the actual despised minorities of Jews and Catholics. The rancorous public dispute concerning the inclusion of Muslims, for which principle Jefferson’s political foes would vilify him to the end of his life, thus became decisive in the Founders’ ultimate judgment not to establish a Protestant nation, as they might well have done. As popular suspicions about Islam persist and the numbers of American Muslim citizenry grow into the millions, Spellberg’s revelatory understanding of this radical notion of the Founders is more urgent than ever. Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an is a timely look at the ideals that existed at our country’s creation, and their fundamental implications for our present and future.
Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History, Volume 8 (CMR 8) covering Northern and Eastern Europe in the period 1600-1700, is a continuing volume in a general history of relations between the two faiths from the seventh century to the early 20th century. It comprises a series of introductory essays and also the main body of detailed entries which treat all the works, surviving or lost, that have been recorded. These entries provide biographical details of the authors, descriptions and assessments of the works themselves, and complete accounts of manuscripts, editions, translations and studies. The result of collaboration between numerous leading scholars, CMR 8, along with the other volumes in this series is intended as a basic tool for research in Christian-Muslim relations. Section Editors: Clinton Bennett, Luis F. Bernabe Pons, Jaco Beyers, Lejla Demiri, Martha Frederiks, David Grafton, Stanisław Grodź, Alan Guenther, Emma Loghin, Gordon Nickel, Claire Norton, Reza Pourjavady, Douglas Pratt, Radu Păun, Peter Riddell, Umar Ryad, Cornelia Soldat, Karel Steenbrink, Davide Tacchini, Ann Thomson, Serge Traore, Carsten Walbiner
'Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi' examines John Selden and his rabbinic and especially talmudic publications, which take up most of the six folio volumes of his complete works and constitute his most mature scholarship. It traces the cultural influence of these works on some early modern British poets
A corrective addendum to Edward Said’s Orientalism, this book examines how sympathetic representations of Islam contributed significantly to Protestant Britain’s national and imperial identity in the eighteenth century. Taking a historical view, Humberto Garcia combines a rereading of eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British literature with original research on Anglo-Islamic relations. He finds that far from being considered foreign by the era’s thinkers, Islamic republicanism played a defining role in Radical Enlightenment debates, most significantly during the Glorious Revolution, French Revolution, and other moments of acute constitutional crisis, as well as in national and political debates about England and its overseas empire. Garcia shows that writers such as Edmund Burke, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Percy and Mary Shelley not only were influenced by international events in the Muslim world but also saw in that world and its history a viable path to interrogate, contest, and redefine British concepts of liberty. This deft exploration of the forgotten moment in early modern history when intercultural exchange between the Muslim world and Christian West was common resituates English literary and intellectual history in the wider context of the global eighteenth century. The direct challenge it poses to the idea of an exclusionary Judeo-Christian Enlightenment serves as an important revision to post-9/11 narratives about a historical clash between Western democratic values and Islam.
This book analyses South Asian Islam’s engagement with the West, and Britain in particular. It traces the roots of British multiculturalism to South Asia and the Deobandi school of Islam. The work shows how the pattern of interaction that initially emerged between the Deobandi Muslims and the colonial British state in late-19th century replicated itself in the British society in the second half of 20th century. The monograph reflects upon Islam’s ‘compatibility’ with liberal democracy as well as explores how it contributed to its origins in the Enlightenment ethos. A nuanced, sensitive and topical study, this book will be essential to understanding the world in the light of contemporary world events—Paris 13/11 and Charlie Hebdo attacks, the Danish cartoon controversy, and the Trojan Horse incident in certain British schools as well as the much earlier Rushdie affair. It will be of great interest to researchers and scholars of political science, religion, political Islam, British and South Asian Studies, and history.
The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640-1714 is the most wide-ranging overview available of prose writing in English during one of the most tumultuous periods in British and Irish history. Stretching from the outbreak of the English Civil Wars to the death of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch, the volume is unprecedented in the breadth of its coverage of an age in which prose moved from the margins of cultural life in Britain to its centre. The volume also breaks new ground in the diversity of the prose writing it covers: its thirty-six chapters by an array of established literary critics and historians capture the excitingly multiple forms that prose took in what was a golden age for non-fictional writing, but which also saw the emergence of modes of prose fiction that became part of the origin story of the eighteenth-century novel. This Handbook reflects that multiplicity and diversity in its structure. Four longer introductory chapters map the changing contexts of the publication and reception of prose in the period, as well as the influence of the classical heritage and the role of relations with continental Europe. The subsequent thirty-two chapters are organized by different categories of prose writing. The contributors approach key authors and texts from various and often unconventional perspectives. The volume offers coverage of well-known writers and texts while also capturing the assortment of prose writing in a time of rapid political and social change: there are chapters on, for example, 'Bites and Shams'; 'Circulation Narratives'; 'Keys'; 'Pornography'; 'Recipe Books'; 'True Accounts', and even 'Handbooks'.
Civil Religion - a tradition of political thought that has argued for a close connection between religion and the state - made an important contribution to the development of religious and political thought at key moments of early modern British political and colonial history. As this volume shows, it was at work not just during the Enlightenment, but within a much wider periodical framework: the Reformation, the rise of the Puritan movement, the conflict over the Stuart state and church, the English Revolution, and the formation of key American colonies in the eighteenth century. Advocates of Civil Religion tried to reconcile a national church with religious toleration and design a constitution capable of preventing the church from interfering with affairs of state. The volume investigates the idea of Civil Religion in the works of canonical thinkers in the history of political thought (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau), in the works of those who have been recognized as shaping political ideas (Hooker, Prynne et al.) during this period, and in the advocacy of those perhaps not previously associated with Civil Religion (William Penn). Although Civil Religion was often posited as a pragmatic solution to constitutional and ecclesiological problems created by the Reformation and the English Revolution, they also reveal that such pragmatism was not at odds with religious conviction or ideals. Civil Religion certainly enhanced citizenship in this period, but it did so in ways which depended on the truth claims of Protestantism, not on their domestication to politics.
In Adam Boreel (1602-1665): A Collegiant’s Attempt to Reform Christianity, Francesco Quatrini offers an account of the life and thought of Adam Boreel, a leading member of the seventeenth-century Collegiant movement in Amsterdam.