Jefferson's Quran and the Founders' Test of Religious Liberty

Tazeen Ali, assistant professor of religion and politics at Washington University in Saint Louis, used Thomas Jefferson's two-volume English translation of the Quran to examine what the founders meant by religious liberty. She said Jefferson bought the translation in 1765 and kept it alongside legal treatises, reading it as work of law rather than private devotion.

Ali framed the Quran and Jefferson's writings as part of a broader debate between 'toleration'—a system that leaves Protestant norms intact while permitting dissent—and a stronger 'religious liberty' that treats civil rights as independent of religious belief. "This version of religious liberty ... is big enough, at least in theory, to include Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, and people with no religion at all," Ali said, summarizing the founding-era principle.

The lecture traced how Jefferson and allies pressed for the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which disestablished the Church of England in Virginia and declared that no person should be "burdened on account of his religious opinions." Ali argued those provisions were written so broadly that, in principle, they could extend to Muslims as equal citizens. She also noted limits: founders sometimes invoked "Mohammedans" as a rhetorical test case while simultaneously using orientalist tropes to warn of foreign threats.

Ali linked this domestic principle to constitutional protections at the federal level, citing Article VI's ban on religious tests for office. She emphasized the gap between the abstract commitments founders articulated and the exclusions that persisted in practice, especially in relation to enslaved people and public sentiment. The lecture concluded that Jefferson's Quran helps reveal an unresolved, century-long tension between a universalist ideal and political and cultural resistance.

The episode ended with audience questions about whether Jefferson's liberal commitments were sincere and how European biases have shaped public memory of these debates. Ali reiterated that the founders' rhetoric planted seeds for future inclusion even as practice lagged behind.