How Thomas Jefferson Read the Qur'an

Located on the north side of the Duke of Gloucester Street, the printing office of the Virginia Gazette had lured Thomas Jefferson within its doors countless times since he first came to Williamsburg to study at the College of William and Mary. Back in Williamsburg for the fall session of the General Court in 1765, Jefferson was busy reading law and helping George Wythe prepare cases for trial. His own formal legal training was coming to a close. The surviving Virginia Gazette daybooks hint that he was studying for his bar examination in early autumn, when he purchased a copy of Grounds and Rudiments of Law and Equity, a general survey that would have made an ideal study guide (Dewey 119). On another visit to the Gazette office this autumn, Jefferson purchased a copy of the Qur'ān, specifically, George Sale's English translation, The Koran, Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mohammed, recently republished in a handy two-volume edition (Virginia, fol. 202).

Jefferson's purchase of the Qur'ān at this time may have been inspired by his legal studies, too. The interest in natural law he developed as a student encouraged him to pursue his readings in this area as widely as possible. The standard work in the field, Frieherr von Pufendorf's Of the Law and Nature and Nations, gave readers an almost endless number of possible references to track down and thus offered Jefferson an excellent guide to further reading. Pufendorf's treatise is rife with citations to diverse sources extending well beyond legal and political tracts and including works from many different times, places, and cultures.

Though Pufendorf's work reflects a prejudice against Islam characteristic of the time in which it was written, he nonetheless cited precedent from the Qur'ān in several instances. Discussing the issue of murder and revenge, for example, Pufendorf referred to a passage from the Qur'ān and, furthering his argument, linked the passage to similar ones from the works of Homer and Tacitus in order to emphasize ideas they shared (324). In addition, Pufendorf found the Qur'ān pertinent to a number of other important issues: adultery, laws of succession, marriage, the prohibition of gambling, the prohibition of wine, and the validity of warfare.

Regarding this last issue, Pufendorf could not help but admit that the Qur'ān contained advice pertinent to readers of all nations: "And Christians should all the more zealously undertake to compose the quarrels of others, because even the Koran . . . teaches that if two Moslem nations and countries engage one another in war, the rest shall make peace between them, and compel him who committed the injury to offer satisfaction; and when this is done, bring them by fair and good means to friendship" (831). To be sure, the call for peace and cooperation Pufendorf found in the Qur'ān deserves the attention he gives it. Jefferson's surviving legal papers show that he came to know Pufendorf's Of the Law of Nature and Nations thoroughly. No other work does he cite more frequently in his legal writings (Dewey 65). Pufendorf's work revealed the relevance of the Qur'ān to the interpretation of the law.

Jefferson acquired his Qur'ān not long after the injustice of the Stamp Act had forced him to question seriously the heritage of English constitutional law and to seek ultimate answers in the ideas of natural law and natural rights. Given the fact that he was devoting most of his time to the study of law, Jefferson could justify studying the Qur'ān simultaneously because it, too, was a lawbook. Being, as Muslims believe, the revealed word of God, the Qur'ān not only constitutes the sacred scripture of the Islamic faith, it also forms the supreme source of Islamic law. Wanting to broaden his legal studies as much as possible, Jefferson found the Qur'ān well worth his attention.

Reading the Qur'ān also let him continue studying the history of religion. Entries he made in his literary commonplace book about the same time he purchased Sale's Koran show that he...