Most people are taught that early America was shaped almost entirely by European Christians.
In the PBS documentary ‘How Muslims Influenced Thomas Jefferson and America’s Founders’, host Aymann Ismail shows that picture is only half true.
By following his journey through the Library of Congress, Monticello, Mount Vernon, and the stories of enslaved Africans, you start to see something the textbooks mostly ignore: Muslims were in the founding generation’s imagination – and on their plantations – from the very beginning.
Jefferson’s Qur’an And A Hidden Islamic Presence
Ismail begins in the Library of Congress, one of the country’s oldest federal institutions, surrounded by books that date back to the founding era.
He comes to see two volumes that tell two very different stories: Thomas Jefferson’s English translation of the Qur’an, and the Arabic autobiography of an enslaved West African Muslim named Omar Ibn Said.
A librarian points out Jefferson’s initials in the Qur’an, marking it as part of his personal library.
Another expert, Lanisa Kitchiner, confirms that the opening page of Omar Ibn Said’s book contains Qur’anic text, revealing that he had been a teacher of Islam before being sold into slavery in America.
Ismail frames these two books as symbols of a deep contradiction.
On one side, Jefferson’s Qur’an represents a founding elite who could study Islam as an idea while talking about broad religious liberty.
On the other, Omar’s manuscript shows a real Muslim in America stripped of freedom, stripped of legal status, and barely allowed to hold onto his faith.
It’s a powerful contrast, and Ismail uses it to argue that Muslims were both imagined as future citizens and, at the same time, trapped as property.
Religious Freedom That Imagined Muslims
To understand why Jefferson owned a Qur’an at all, Ismail travels to Monticello, Jefferson’s home in Virginia.
Historian John Ragosta walks him through Jefferson’s study, explaining that before selling 6,500 books to the Library of Congress in 1815, Jefferson’s shelves were packed with works on religion, law, and foreign nations – including that Qur’an.
Ragosta rejects the common talking point that Jefferson only bought a Qur’an to “know his enemies.”
He says Jefferson purchased it around 1765 as a young law student, driven by curiosity about comparative religion and Islamic legal thought, not by paranoia.
Historian Denise A. Spellberg, who has written extensively on Jefferson’s relationship with Islam, explains that in the 1700s, educated people in the Atlantic world already knew they had to take Islam seriously as a global force.
European powers had long dealt with Muslim empires like the Ottomans and the North African states, and Americans inherited that wider intellectual world.
Islam, Spellberg argues, wasn’t as “foreign” to the founders as we often assume.
Ismail then looks at Jefferson’s political writings.
Ragosta points to Jefferson’s 1777 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which later influenced the First Amendment.
In his own autobiography, Jefferson wrote that this law was meant to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and the infidel of every denomination.”
Ismail reacts with surprise that Jefferson explicitly named Muslims in the 18th century.
Ragosta stresses that Jefferson was imagining a future country where people of any faith, including Muslims, could enjoy religious freedom and full political participation.
From a modern perspective, that’s remarkable.
You have a slaveholding founder who could still picture Muslims as equal citizens someday, at least in theory.
It shows how forward-looking some of the ideas were, even while the actual practice lagged far behind.
A Ramadan Iftar In Jefferson’s White House
Ismail also highlights one rare moment when Jefferson’s theoretical respect for Islam turned into concrete action.
In 1805, a Muslim ambassador from Tunis arrived in the United States while Jefferson was president.
The U.S. was in the middle of conflict with Tripoli, and Tunis was acting as an ally and negotiating partner.
Spellberg describes how the ambassador, often referred to as Mellimelli, showed up in elaborate North African dress, with embroidered fabrics and a diamond snuff box that caused a sensation in Washington.
Jefferson invited him to a state dinner originally set for 3:30 in the afternoon.
When someone pointed out that Mellimelli was fasting for Ramadan, Jefferson simply moved the meal to sundown so the ambassador could break his fast.
Ragosta notes that this decision fits perfectly with Jefferson’s belief in religious liberty and his prior study of Islam.
He didn’t treat Mellimelli’s faith as a curiosity to be ignored. He adjusted federal protocol around it.
Many historians now see this as the first iftar dinner in the White House.
Ismail uses this story to show that Jefferson’s Qur’an wasn’t just an ornament.
At least once, it helped shape how the president of the United States engaged with a Muslim guest – with respect, and with some effort to accommodate his religious practice.
The Enslaved Muslims The Founders Ignored
But Ismail doesn’t let Jefferson off the hook.
He walks down from Monticello’s grand house to the slave quarters, where Ragosta reminds him that Jefferson enslaved more than 400 people over his lifetime.
Ragosta points out children’s fingerprints frozen in the bricks of the mansion, a quiet reminder that enslaved labor quite literally built the founder’s world.
Historian Vincent Brown (referenced in the film) says that when founders like Jefferson and Washington thought about Muslims, they mostly imagined distant centers of Islamic power in North Africa and the Middle East.
They did not generally think of the enslaved Africans on American soil as Muslims, even though many of them were.
Brown explains that thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of enslaved people taken from West Africa came from regions deeply shaped by Islam.
We see this in runaway ads mentioning Islamic names, plantation records, and in rare surviving writings in Arabic.
Ismail travels to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate, where historian Mary Thompson shows him 18th-century tax lists.
On one document from 1774, she points to the names “Fatimer” and “Little Fatimer,” almost certainly versions of Fatima, the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter.
Spellberg notes that this pairing strongly suggests a Muslim mother and daughter, with the mother using the only power she had left – naming her child – to preserve a piece of her faith.
Another document Mary reads aloud lists enslaved people, including “Fatimore,” with their sale price.
Ismail is visibly shaken as he realizes that Washington, widely celebrated for championing liberty, almost certainly enslaved Muslims and sold them like property.
This is where the gap between American ideals and American reality hits hardest.
You can talk about religious freedom, but if the people you own cannot control their bodies, their labor, or their families, they cannot truly practice any religion in a meaningful way.
Omar Ibn Said And Faith In Chains
Back at the Library of Congress, Ismail examines the small Arabic autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, guided again by Lanisa Kitchiner.
Kitchiner explains that Omar was born in Futa Toro in the Senegambia region in 1770, educated in Islam and Arabic before being captured, shipped through the Middle Passage, and sold in Charleston in 1807.
Ismail notices that Omar begins his text with Surah al-Mulk, a Qur’anic chapter dealing with sovereignty and justice.
Kitchiner and Spellberg both suggest this may have been a subtle form of protest – invoking God’s ultimate authority in the face of human enslavement.
Omar describes how he ran away from an abusive enslaver and was captured in Fayetteville, North Carolina, after writing Arabic on the jailhouse walls.
Locals, who assumed enslaved Africans had no written language, were stunned.
His literacy caught the attention of a new enslaver, a politician who claimed to “convert” Omar, but as Spellberg notes, the manuscript shows he never really abandoned Islam.
Ismail also hears the story of Ibrahim Abdul Rahman, another enslaved Muslim whose Arabic skills were so respected that people in the U.S. asked him to write the “Lord’s Prayer.”
Historian Denise Spellberg recounts how, instead, he wrote al-Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Qur’an – his version of the Lord’s Prayer.
Eventually, Abdul Rahman returned to West Africa.
Omar never did.
As Kitchiner stresses, Omar remained enslaved until his death, even though his literacy and faith survived everything that was thrown at him.
The existence of his small book, written in Arabic on American soil, forces us to rethink who gets included in “American” history.
Letters, Lost Lives, And Jefferson’s Limits
Ismail also explores the story uncovered by scholar Jeffrey Einboden, who has studied Arabic documents found among Jefferson’s papers.
In 1807, two enslaved African Muslims in Kentucky wrote letters in Arabic asking for help, which somehow made their way to President Jefferson.
Einboden explains that Jefferson tried to get the letters translated, intrigued by their literacy and faith.
For a moment, he even considered advocating for their freedom.
But before anything could happen, the men escaped again.
The trail ends in Carthage, Tennessee, and their ultimate fate is unknown.
Jefferson kept the letters, but their story faded from view.
Ismail and Einboden use this episode to show both the potential and the failure of the founding generation.
Jefferson could recognize the significance of Arabic writing and Muslim identity, yet he never turned that recognition into a consistent stand against slavery.
To me, this is where the founders look most human – and most flawed.
They could imagine Muslims as future equal citizens on paper while ignoring enslaved Muslims already standing in front of them.
That tension still echoes today.
From Jefferson’s Shelf To Keith Ellison’s Oath
The documentary ends in the modern era with Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, reflecting on his 2007 decision to use Jefferson’s Qur’an for his private swearing-in ceremony.
Ellison tells Ismail that he felt both “light as a feather” and weighed down by the “weight of a civilization.”
He also points out that there’s no legal requirement to swear on any religious book at all.
The ceremony is symbolic, and members often bring texts that matter to them – Jewish lawmakers with the Tanakh, Hindu lawmakers with the Bhagavad Gita, and, in his case, Jefferson’s Qur’an.
Ellison says that by using that specific book, he wanted to send two messages: Muslims “have always been here,” and they are now writing a new chapter in American history.
Historian Denise Spellberg and others in the film argue that this moment brought the story full circle.
A book once owned by a slaveholding founder, who could only imagine Muslims as future citizens in theory, was now helping a Muslim descendant of enslaved people step fully into political power.
Ismail closes by noting that there is nothing foreign about Islam in the United States.
The faith is woven into the story of the founding generation, both at the highest levels of government and in the most brutal corners of slavery.
We just haven’t been taught to see it.
Once you do, the map of early America looks very different – and a lot more honest.
A former park ranger and wildlife conservationist, Lisa’s passion for survival started with her deep connection to nature. Raised on a small farm in northern Wisconsin, she learned how to grow her own food, raise livestock, and live off the land. Lisa is our dedicated Second Amendment news writer and also focuses on homesteading, natural remedies, and survival strategies. Lisa aims to help others live more sustainably and prepare for the unexpected.
