"Radicals in Their Tolerance of Islam"

"The book charts the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in 16th-­century Europe and migration to America a century later. Much of the popular animus toward Islam, she explains, originated in northern Europeans’ fear of the Ottoman Empire (to say nothing of Barbary pirates trolling the Mediterranean for captives). But not every­one took a pejorative view of the faith or its adherents. John Locke, for one, preached toleration and 'civic equality' for England’s Muslim population in the late 1680s, as part of his daring argument for guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of Jews, Roman Catholics and nonconformist Protestants.

"Spellberg specifies Locke as Jefferson’s inspiration and, in the book’s finest pages, sketches a genealogy of his proudest accomplishments, especially the 1786 Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, which anticipated the First Amendment separating church and state."

 

Kirk Davis Swinehart in The New York Times reviews Denise A. Spellberg's Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders.