“The enemy is inside the gates.” That was how Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama described the swearing-in of Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s first Muslim mayor, in a post on X.
This uproar stemmed from one simple fact: Mamdani took the oath of office with his hand placed on the Qur’an. The outrage may well deepen if his critics learn that more than one Qur’an was present at the ceremony. One belonged to Mamdani’s grandfather. The other was a small, palm-sized Qur’an from the New York Public Library, part of the Schomburg Center collection, which focuses on Black culture. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938), a historian and writer of Puerto Rican origin, devoted his life to documenting the history of Black people and Muslims in New York. This second Qur’an dates back to the late 18th or early 19th century. It is neither ornate nor gilded, unlike many old copies preserved in American libraries. Its selection carried deliberate symbolism: it is a migrant Qur’an, much like the new mayor himself – one that settled in New York decades ago and became part of the city’s fabric.
Mamdani is not the first elected official in the US to choose the Qur’an for the oath of office. In 2006, Keith Ellison was elected to Congress from Minnesota, becoming the first Muslim member of Congress. When he was sworn in at the start of 2007, he chose a historic copy of the Qur’an that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), one of the Founding Fathers and the third president of the US. Ellison, who stood to the left of most of his Democratic colleagues and pursued a progressive agenda, faced intense backlash at the time. His choice triggered Islamophobic and racist attacks from conservatives and the right. He was re-elected and served in Congress until 2019, after which he became Minnesota’s attorney general. In 2016, Haim Saban, one of the Democratic Party’s major pro-Israel donors, accused Ellison of antisemitism because of his positions in support of Palestine and Gaza.
The history of Muslims in the United States is far older than the selective memory of fascists and racists – and the distorted, truncated versions of history on which they rely – would allow.
In 2008, a year after Ellison’s election, André Carson was elected to Congress from Indiana. Like Ellison, he was born into a Christian family before converting to Islam. In 2019, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan joined them in Congress. Tlaib initially intended to take her oath using the same Jefferson-owned Qur’an preserved at the Library of Congress but later chose instead to use a Qur’an that belonged to her own family.
Thomas Jefferson was not the only American president to own a copy of the Qur’an. His predecessor, John Adams (1735–1826), the second president of the United States, owned a copy of the first edition of the Qur’an published in the country, printed in Massachusetts in 1806. That copy is still preserved at the Boston Public Library. According to historian Denise Spellberg’s book Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders (2014), there was widespread interest in the Qur’an among Protestants in both England and the United States. At the time, it became one of the best-selling books. The reasons varied: curiosity was one, but the translation and study of the Qur’an were also driven by missionary ambitions and by the mindset of “know your enemy.”
The first English translation of the Qur’an appeared in 1649, produced by Alexander Ross, though it was based on a French translation. In 1734, George Sale published the first English translation made directly from Arabic – though he relied on an Arabic text accompanied by a Latin translation prepared by Ludovico Marracci in 1698.
[by Sinan Antoon in Al-Quds Al-Arabi]
Compiled and translated by Faizul Haque