Thomas Jefferson’s Quran: How Islam Shaped the Founders
R.B. Bernstein of The Daily Beast looks at Denise A. Spellberg’s new book Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders and discusses how Islam influenced America’s model of religious freedom. Bernstein writes, “Spellberg’s point is that, contrary to those today who would dismiss Islam and Muslims as essentially and irretrievably alien to the American experiment and its religious mix, key figures in the era of the nation’s founding argued that that American church-state calculus both could and should make room for Islam and for believing Muslims.”