♪curious orchestral music♪ [Aymann VO] The Library of Congress in Washington, DC is one of America's oldest federal institutions.

Among its vast collections, many materials date back to our nation's founding.

I've come here to see two books that offer very different views of the early United States, and the place of Muslims within it.

♪♪♪ One book contains an English translation of the Qur'an -- Islam's sacred text -- and was once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

[John] That's Jefferson's initial -- the little T before the I.

[Aymann VO] The other book was written by an enslaved African man, brought to America during Jefferson's presidency.

On this first page, that's Qur'an, isn't it?

[Lanisa] It is.

Omar Ibn Said was a teacher of Islam before he was sold into slavery.

[Aymann VO] Together, these two books represent the promise and contradictions of America, where some Muslims were included in ideas of religious freedom championed by the nation's founders, while others were denied all their rights, include the right to practice their religion.

♪♪♪ Thomas Jefferson is well known as the author of the Declaration of Independence, and for serving as the third president of the United States.

He is less well known for owning a copy of the Qur'an.

That began to change in 2007, when Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, swore his private oath of office on Jefferson's copy of the Qur'an.

People didn't know that Jefferson owned a Qur'an and had it as an important part of his library, but the United States has always been a country with an Islamic presence.

Never not.

Never not.

♪soft thoughtful music♪ [Aymann VO] Muslims are rarely mentioned in the story of the nation's founding, so I want to know more about why Jefferson owned a copy of the Qur'an, and what it can tell us about the place of Muslims in early America.

The fact that Jefferson has a copy of the Al Qur'an is a tribute to the power of Islam and Muslims in world history.

This was one of the great texts of the world.

In order to be an educated person in the late 1700s, you had to know about the Qur'an.

Jefferson's fundamental curiosity would compel him to buy a Qur'an, to learn about Islam, to want to think about what Islamic philosophy would teach him about government.

♪♪♪ [Denise VO] These revolutionary leaders, who became head of government, were great readers, and the British before them had, in fact, contact with Muslim kingdoms, such as the Ottoman Empire from the 16th century and North African kingdoms in the 17th century.

So, Americans inherited a transatlantic connection.

♪♪♪ Islam wasn't as foreign as many people would have thought it would have been at the time.

Sometimes we think about America and its relationship to the West And this kind of Manifest Destiny and pushing West... and rather than the Atlantic world relationships that were essential at the end of the 18th century and through the 19th century.

When we think about early America, the founders, it was a profoundly global moment.

♪♪♪ [Aymann VO] My next stop is Jefferson's home in Central Virginia, a mansion that reflects the power and privilege of early America's white landholding elite.

This is where Jefferson kept the copy of his Qur'an, before selling most of his books to the Library of Congress in 1815.

-[John] Aymann!

-[Aymann] Pleasure to meet you.

-It's a pleasure to meet you.

-[Aymann] How you doing?

-Welcome to Monticello.

-[Aymann] Thank you.

[Aymann VO] Historian John Ragosta has spent much of his career studying Jefferson, especially his attitude towards religion and its role in the early Republic.

[John] So, Aymann, welcome to Jefferson's study.

[Aymann] Wow!

Before he sends all those books to the Library of Congress, this would have been lined with books.

There would have been bookcases everywhere.

He has 6,500 books that he sells to the Library of Congress, and, of course, among them is his Qur'an.

So, people talk about the Jefferson Qur'an, and you sometimes hear people say, "Well, he wanted to know his enemies."

[Aymann] Yeah.

It's completely ridiculous.

He buys that Qur'an in 1765 when he's a student.

He's interested in comparative religion.

He's interested in law.

He has a number of books on North African nations, on Muslim nations.

They're probably over in that area of the library.

[Aymann] What does that say about Thomas Jefferson compared to some of his peers?

[John] He's certainly more advanced than many people of his era in this regard.

That through science, through our minds -- "the illimitable freedom of the human mind" Jefferson talks about" -- we're going to improve.

Each generation is going to learn from the last, and it's through study of things like the Qur'an and comparative religion, through studies of comparative laws -- that's going to make us a better people.

Let's go on into the parlor.

♪♪♪ Here on the wall, we see the great explorers, political leaders, scientists, and philosophers -- Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke.

John Locke, he actually has to flee England because religious disputes are... -He's worried about his life!

-[Aymann] Yeah.

At that point in time.

He writes 'The Second Letter of Toleration,' and Locke says, "We should be open, politically, to Jews and to Mohemetans, which is the term they would use for Muslims."

Jefferson says, "We can go further than Locke.

In America, all people can participate in religious freedom."

[Aymann VO] Jefferson's commitment to the idea that all citizens should be free to practice their religion as they choose can be seen in a bill he wrote for the Virginia state legislature in 1777 -- a document that's thought to have shaped the religious clauses in the Bill of Rights.

Some founders argued that the government should favor Protestant Christians over all other traditions.

But Jefferson was clear.

In his autobiography, he stated that his law included "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohemetan, the Hindoo and the infidel of every denomination."

So at the very foundation of this country, there was one of the Founding Fathers imagining Muslim Americans!

-[John] Absolutely.

-That's crazy!

[John] He understands that's gonna happen.

To think about Muslims as future citizens was a way of imagining a completely new nation that included more than just Christians -- particularly Protestant Christians.

Bringing Muslims into the conversation, mentioning them in documents, there's some foreshadowing of the hopes and aspirations of what the country could become.

♪inspiring thoughtful music♪ [Aymann VO] Where are we right now?

Well, we're actually coming up on Thomas Jefferson's grave site, which is down below the Monticello house.

But this is where Jefferson is buried.

And, unlike most of us, Jefferson actually specifies what he wants on his tombstone, and he says, "I want it to say: 'Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia."

And then he writes, "And not a word more."

To see religious freedom on the tombstone, that feels very significant.

This was America.

This is the nation they were building.

It's going to be built on political freedom, religious freedom, public education.

And they're interrelated; it's a three-legged stool.

[Aymann VO] Jefferson's vision of America offered the possibility that any citizen of any faith could practice it freely.

It opened the door for all citizens to participate politically, too.

The fact that Jefferson held onto the image of Muslims as people who might, one day, not only have religious freedom but political equality... is really the beginning, I think, of his political understanding of a future society that had universal, inclusive precedents for the future.

[Aymann VO] Jefferson clearly thought about Muslims in theory.

In practice, he had little contact.

Documents from the time record just one meeting with a Muslim man here in the United States, which took place while Jefferson was President.

In 1805, the first Muslim ambassador to the United States arrived from Tunis.

We were in the middle of an undeclared war that Thomas Jefferson had waged against Tripoli.

Tunis was an ally of Tripoli.

So, the Tunisian ambassador was sent to negotiate with President Jefferson.

He was dressed in finery of all sorts of brocade -- gold, scarlet -- and he had a diamond snuff box that was the talk of the town, whereas a New Hampshire senator who was at this meeting said that Jefferson appeared scruffy by comparison.

Jefferson received him at a State dinner that he set the time for -- at 3:30 in the afternoon.

Well, someone let it be known that Mellimelli is obviously Muslim, and it's Ramadan.

And Jefferson doesn't skip a beat.

He says, "Okay, then dinner will begin precisely at sundown."

Which indicates that Jefferson learned from his Qur'an and from other books about what Muslims believe.

[John] And Mellimelli arrives very shortly after sundown, and then they break bread and have an Iftar dinner.

This is often referred to as the first Iftar dinner in the White House, and it's happening in Jefferson's presidency.

[Aymann VO] Jefferson's treatment of Mellimelli is revealing.

Here was a man of power and influence, from a part of the world the founders associated with Islam.

This made him very different to the many Muslims already living here by this time.

[Vincent] The founders are thinking about Islam, and they're thinking about Muslims, but they're thinking about the kind of great centers of Islamic learning and power in what we now call "the Middle East."

They're not thinking about Muslims who are in the new United States.

Thousands upon thousands of enslaved African Muslims being shipped to the Americas.

Many of the places from which people were horrifically taken in West Africa were places impacted by Islam, and so the people who were brought to America -- estimates range from thousands to tens of thousands -- were Muslim!

There is evidence for the presence of enslaved African Muslims; you see it in runaway advertisements.

You also see it in plantation records of slave names.

We actually do have a few narratives that have been penned by African Muslims enslaved here, and some of them are written in Arabic.

[Aymann VO] There's no firm evidence of Muslim presence at Monticello.

But this was a plantation, where Jefferson -- the person who wrote that all men are created equal -- enslaved over 400 people over his lifetime.

[John] You can actually see some of the fingerprints in the bricks.

Enslaved children, likely, are forming these bricks.

-You know, here in the bricks... -[Aymann] Oh, wow.

-Young children... -Oh, wow.

When these bricks were formed... -230 years ago.

-[Aymann] Wow.

-But it's a brutal system.

-[Aymann] Yeah.

And, literally, they're the ones who are making the material that builds this mansion.

♪somber music♪ You don't have Monticello, at that time, built like this without that enslaved labor that Jefferson is using.

Enslaved people built this country.

♪♪♪ As long as we're talking about the founding principles that established a nation based on freedom, then we have to be talking about slavery, and the unfree.

As long as we're talking about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, we have to be talking about their slaves, because any ideas they had about human freedom, and how it would flourish, and the conditions in which it would flourish are immediately contradicted by the fact that they held slaves, and that the United States becomes, by the mid-19th century, the largest slave society in modern history.

[Aymann VO] It's among these enslaved population -- people with no rights of any kind, let alone the right to practice their religion -- that a very different picture of Muslims in early America emerges.

♪curious music♪ These Muslims weren't imaginary future citizens from far away.

They were real people -- right here -- struggling to keep their faith and traditions alive, often in the most difficult circumstances.

Evidence of at least two enslaved Muslims can be found on the plantation of another former president: George Washington.

[Mary] Welcome to the library.

This is a page from George Washington's tax list -- they're call "tithable lists" -- from 1774, and this is the first document that shows a person with a Muslim name.

Right in here, you can see the name "Fatimer," and under here is "Little Fatimer."

[Aymann] That's the name of the prophet's... -[woman] Daughter!

-[Aymann] Daughter!

This makes it very real for me.

[Denise] The idea that there would have been a Fatima and a Little Fatima, that suggests strongly that there was a mother and daughter -- a mother who had control over nothing in her life except the name she gave her child, who was also enslaved.

♪pensive jazz music♪ [woman] This says, "Cash is being paid for the following Negroes: Abram, Oxford, Tom, Jack, Edie, Fatimore."

All those people brought in 2,303 pounds and 19 shillings.

This is years before the Declaration of Independence, and here, we have evidence that Muslims might have lived here.

Do we know anything else about Fatima?

It gives you an idea of how hard, maybe, in a family situation, it might be to pass on... Islam in a family, because, if they are a mother and daughter, they're being split up here.

[Aymann] I can't imagine if I would've been Muslim at all... -[woman] Mm-hm.

-Had I been separated from my parents in this way.

[Aymann VO] Washington's name is often associated with freedom -- freedom from the British, and religious freedom; he was committed to the idea, too.

♪man playing flute♪ Knowing he enslaved people here -- some of them Muslim -- is hard to take in.

Back at the Library of Congress, I've come to see another way enslaved Muslims remained connected to their traditions -- not through their names, but in their writings.

Like the book Jefferson owned, this one also contains verses from the Qur'an, but this book is very different.

It was written here in America by an enslaved man brought to the United States in 1807.

This is the only known autobiography that we have written by an enslaved man in this country in Arabic So it is short, small, tiny, but incredibly powerful in terms of what it can tell us about history.

[Aymann] Do we know anything about who wrote it?

[Lanisa] Omar Ibn Said was living in the Senegambia in a little area called Futa Torro, he was born in 1770, and he studied Islam and Arabic language and writing before he was taken from his hometown, made it through the Middle Passage, and landed in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was sold at auction.

[Aymann VO] In his book, Ibn Said tells a dramatic story -- how, when his first enslaver mistreated him, he ran away.

He made it to Fayetteville, North Carolina, before being captured and held in the local jail.

Here, he came to the attention of the next man to enslave him, a politician, after he wrote in Arabic -- probably verses from the Qur'an -- on his jailhouse wall.

This would have shocked local residents, given the widespread belief that enslaved Africans had no written traditions.

[Aymann] I know that this is introduced as an autobiography -- I've heard it called that -- but on this first page, -that's Qur'an, isn't it?

-[Lanisa] It is.

[Aymann] The Surah that he starts this autobiography with is the Surah Al-Mulk, which talks about justice.

[Lanisa] Yes.

[Aymann] And that, to me, just gives me chills.

[Denise] He was attempting to tell the story of his enslavement, but also to capture a chapter of the Qur'an called Al-Mulk, which is known as “The Dominion” or “The Sovereignty."

Some scholars think that it was his way of protesting his enslavement.

Muslims who were enslaved and had been educated in West Africa before their enslavement carried with them to the United States learning about Islam, memorized passages of the Qur'an, so the faith traveled with them inside them.

One of the most famous examples of this is another enslaved person, Ibrahim Abdul Rahman, who was enslaved for 40 years in Mississippi, eventually receiving manumission -- emancipation -- because of his Arabic literacy.

And many of the manuscripts we have from him are people asking him to write something.

One of the manuscripts that's now held in Philadelphia is one of the presumably-white interlocutors asks him to write the Lord's Prayer.

But instead of the Christian Lord's Prayer, Abdul Rahman writes the Fatihah, the first chapter of the Qur'an.

Of course, it is the Lord's prayer for Ibrahim Abdul Rahman.

[Aymann VO] Abdul Rahman was able to return to West Africa, but Omar was not so fortunate.

Omar Ibn Said, despite how ever exalted he may have been as an enslaved African man -- as an enslaved Muslim African man -- he was never made free!

He was never made free.

This is a piece of history -- a missing piece of history -- written by a man in his own hand, who not only survived the Middle Passage, who not only survived the plantation system, but lived to write about it.

So this is American history at its finest, but it's also Senegalese history it's also African history, it is also Islamic history.

It is world history.

♪soft curious music♪ [Aymann VO] The presence of enslaved Muslims who could read and write did not escape Thomas Jefferson.

Researchers recently found Arabic writings among his papers -- documents written by two enslaved African Muslims who had run away and made it to Western Kentucky.

From there, they wrote letters in Arabic, asking for help.

In 1807, these letters reached Jefferson at the White House.

[Jeffrey] And then the story unfolds of him trying to get these Arabic writings translated.

But, in the meantime, the two men who were taken captive escaped.

And Jefferson eventually receives updates, and then the last moment that we have any glimpse of where they are is Carthage, Tennessee.

[Aymann VO] For a moment, these men caught Jefferson's attention.

He even considered advocating for their freedom because of their literacy, until the trail went cold.

And we don't know what happens after 1808, as Jefferson fails to translate them, and their case is forgotten.

And yet, he keeps the papers.

♪♪♪ [Aymann VO] Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777, the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, but the idea of religious freedom for all Americans was a long time coming.

States continued to restrict who could run for office by religion until the 1830s.

It was not until 1947 that the Supreme Court ruled that states were also prohibited from establishing a religion.

And the government restricted Native Americans' spiritual practices until 1978, with access to some sacred sites still limited.

For American Muslims, an important moment in the story came when Keith Ellison was elected to Congress, against a backdrop of significant anti-Muslim sentiment.

Here was a Muslim, descended from enslaved people, choosing to swear his private oath of office on the copy of the Qur'an that Jefferson once owned.

[Ellison] It was an amazing moment; I felt weight.

I also felt light, like a feather!

And I also felt the weight of a civilization!

It did make for some interesting TV moments when... [Ellison] Oh, yeah.

People were trying to argue that you had to swear in on a Bible.

Well, the funny thing is nobody has to swear in on anything!

When the Speaker says, "Do you swear to uphold the Constitution and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic?"

"I do."

Bam.

After, there's this ceremony, and it's common for people to use books.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz brings out a copy of the Tanakh.

Tulsi Gabbard brings the Bhagavad Gita 'cause she's Hindu.

It opened up a tradition where people got to do this.

When Keith Ellison decides to get sworn in on Jefferson's Al-Qur'an, it's a way of saying, "First of all, we've always been here.

And second of all, we're writing a new chapter."

The story of Islam in America is also a story of how the idea of Muslims as future citizens brings us to the present day when we do have a population of Muslims whose citizenship is often perceived as suspect or foreign.

There's nothing foreign about the practice of Islam in the United States.

♪soft curious music♪