Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Jefferson's Koran

This story gave me a little bit of yay:
Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he'd take his oath of office on the Koran -- especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values.

Yet the holy book at tomorrow's ceremony has an unassailably all-American provenance. We've learned that the new congressman -- in a savvy bit of political symbolism -- will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

"He wanted to use a Koran that was special," said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, who was contacted by the Minnesota Dem early in December. Dimunation, who grew up in Ellison's 5th District, was happy to help.

1 comment:

Michael said...

Interesting blog you have here. And I agree with the savvy symbolism of Ellison using Jefferson's Koran. Though not in the way you think ...

"Consider, for example, the report sent by ambassadors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to the Congress in 1786 following their meeting in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, Tripoli's ambassador to Britain. As Joshua London wrote in NRO in 2005:

These future United States presidents questioned the ambassador as to why his government was so hostile to the new American republic even though America had done nothing to provoke any such animosity. Ambassador Adja answered them, as they reported to the Continental Congress, "that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, 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 who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.""