Thomas Jefferson’s interest in Islam began with his purchase of a Qur’an in 1765, years before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, but his interest in the faith and its practitioners proved lifelong, informing his capacious views of religious freedom and civil rights. Nor was he alone among the Founders in thinking about Muslims as the imaginary outer limit for a uniquely American pluralism, a universal ambit of citizenship still the basis of rancorous public dispute. The lecture reveals the presence of Islam as part of an early American discourse of rights, but parallels its presence with proof of other Qur’ans from the founding era produced by early American Muslims in Arabic.
Denise A. Spellberg is Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies gender and early Islamic history as well as Islam in Europe and America. She received her B.A. from Smith College and her M.A., M. Phil., and PhD from Columbia University. A multi-country Fulbright Scholarship, a Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Scholarship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship provided research and writing support for her first book, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of ‘A’isha bint Abi Bakr (Columbia University Press).The award of a Carnegie Scholars Islam Initiative Fellowship, designed to complicate and nuance American views of Islam post-9/11, enabled the completion of a second book, Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders (Knopf). The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The Nation, and other news outlets featured its findings. The book has been translated into Indonesian, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. Spellberg served as historical adviser and interview subject for the PBS documentary, “American Muslims: A History Revealed,” a series of short, online video documentaries. The segment dedicated to Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an, published online in December 2024, had been viewed 740,000 times by March 2025.