Jefferson’s Muslim tolerance was never tested because slaves were outside human law

Evidence

Although Thomas Jefferson emphasized that “Mahometans” should be protected under his vision of religious freedom, as Denise Spellberg’s book, Thomas Jefferson’s Quran, meticulously demonstrates, Jefferson’s commitments to religious pluralism were never tested. The only Muslims in America at the time were enslaved Africans not considered fully human under law. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson referred to each other as “Oriental despots” and “Mahometans” as derogatory epithets during the 1800 presidential election, revealing the extent to which Islam was the antithesis of American notions of liberty and freedom. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 97

Categorization

• CANDY: A light, striking fact for conversation: Jefferson and Adams insulted each other by calling each other Muslim despots in 1800.
• SEED: Angles for an essay on how American founding-era ‘religious liberty’ rhetoric was never stress-tested because the relevant group was legally excluded from humanity.