Beck - It is about islam: Exposing the Truth About ISIS, Al Qaeda, Iran, and the Caliphate

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Jeffersons Quran

O ne block from the U.S. Capitol sits the Library of Congress. Housing more than 160 million books, manuscripts, photographs, recordings, and maps, its the largest library in the world. If you put its bookshelves together in a single line, they would extend 838 miles.

The current collection owes its start to one of Americas greatest Founding Fathers. After the Library of Congress was burned to the ground by the British during the War of 1812, Thomas Jefferson, then in retirement at Monticello, offered once more to be of service to his young nation. Jefferson, who owned the nations largest private collection of books6,500 at the timeoffered the entire lot to the newly rebuilt library for whatever price found appropriate.

Jefferson was a voracious reader and a distinguished intellect. Along with hundreds of books that matched his varied interests was a well-worn two-volume set that he believed offered his nation a warning.

Jefferson had bought these volumes, bound in leather and filled with yellowed pages that crackled when you turned them, forty years earlier when hed been a young red-haired law student in Williamsburg. By then hed already developed a reputation as a passionate debater in the service of justiceeven if it meant challenging the laws of the Crown. In 1765, the young rabble-rouser had become known for his strident opposition to Parliaments passage of the Stamp Act, the latest in a series of unjust taxes imposed by the British on the colonies without representation.

As a student of the law, Jefferson was curious about laws of many kinds, including those that had a voice in exotic lands or claimed to carry the word of God. That is why, when he wandered into the offices of the Virginia Gazette , the local newspaper that doubled as a bookstore, one day in October 1765, Jefferson found the two-volume set so tantalizing. Printed in London by a British lawyer named George Sale, the books were one of the first English translations of the Quran. After paying sixteen shillings, Thomas Jefferson held in his hands the holy book of Islam. He kept them among his possessions for the following four decades.

When I first heard that one of our nations Founding Fathers owned one of Americas earliest copies of the Quran, I endeavored to do some research on it. I was curious as to why Jefferson, a man famously curious and cosmopolitan, but also skeptical of organized religion, had it in his possession.

We dont know exactly how closely Thomas Jefferson read the Quran he owned. We do know that he is the only Founding Father to have a basic understanding of Arabic. We do know that he promoted and championed the creation of an Oriental languages department at his alma mater, the College of William & Mary. And we do know that he would be the first American president to go to war with Islamic radicals.

It is clear, however, that Jefferson was, to put it mildly, suspicious of Islam. He compared the faith with Catholicism, and believed that neither had undergone a reformation. Both religions, he felt, suppressed rational thought and persecuted skeptics. When combined with the power of the state, religion would corrupt and stifle individual rights. Islam, to Jeffersons mind, provided a cautionary tale of what happened when a faith insisted on combining religious and political power into one.

As a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, Jefferson cited Islam as an example for why Virginia should not have an official religion. A state religion, he argued, would quash free enquiry, as he recorded in his notes at the time. He knew Islam held little tolerance for other faiths.

But Jefferson was neither a bigot nor an Islamophobe. The irony of Jeffersons observations about Islam is that they were made in service of an argument that would ensure that Muslimsalong with Jews, Christians, atheists, and adherents of every other faithwould have full citizenship as Virginians, and ultimately, as Americans.

The landmark legislation Jefferson championed, A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which served as a model for the United States Constitution a decade later, ensured that there was no official religion of state. Between 1776 and 1779, Jefferson drafted more than one hundred pieces of legislation, but he was most proud of number 82, which is referenced on his gravestone as the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom. The fiercely controversial bill disestablished Christianity as the official religion of his state.

Jeffersons legislation was nothing short of revolutionary, a first in the history of the world: absolute freedom of religious conscience and permanent separation of church and state. And as evidenced by his copious notes, Jeffersons knowledge of the Quran and Islam had shaped his views of the importance of protecting religious liberty.

Jefferson believed that everyone should have the right to worship, or not to worship, as they choose. It was, unfortunately, not a view shared by the Muslims he eventually encountered.

In March 1786, after America had won its independence, Jefferson was serving as minister to France, shuttling between European capitals to secure commercial agreements. One of the thorniest challenges he had to confront was the growing power of the Barbary States, four North African territories that sponsored marauding pirates who were increasingly confiscating thousands of dollars in American shipping and enslaving hundreds of U.S. citizens in prisons across the Mediterranean.

In London, Jefferson and his fellow diplomat John Adams met with the ambassador from the pasha of Tripoli, a man named Abdul Rahman, to resolve the growing dispute. The war that existed between his nation and America, the ambassador explained, was founded on the Laws of their Prophet. The capture of U.S. ships and people was a just and holy war, sanctioned by the Quran.

Jefferson and Adams took meticulous notes of the meeting. It was written in their Koran, the two Americans noted, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Jefferson needed only reference his own two-volume translation of the Quran to understand that everything in the ambassadors explanation of the Barbary States holy war against America was accurate and faithful to Islams holy book.

The Qurans Sura (or chapter) 9, verse 29, explains the Islamic duty to make war upon non-Muslims:

Sura 47, verse 4 sanctions the taking of captives as spoils of war: