6 A Witness of Their Own Nation: On the Influence of Juan Andrés

Abstract

Many have now heard the story of how, on 4 January 2007, the first Muslim to be elected to the United States congress-Democratic representative from Minnesota Keith Ellison-was sworn in, not without some controversy. As is the custom, public servants are allowed, in the non-official presentation for the media leading up to the actual swearing-in ceremony in the House of Representatives itself, to place their hand on the Bible while vowing to do their duty. Since Ellison is a convert to Islam, he asked if he could use the Qurʾān rather than the Bible, and he was allowed to use no less than the personal copy of the Qurʾān in English translation that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, a copy that, after surviving multiple fires in the Capitol, now resides in the Library of Congress. This use of the Qurʾān caused considerable controversy, spurring conservative author and pundit Dennis Prager to declare in an editorial that 'America, not Keith Ellison, decides what book a congressman takes his oath on' .1 Although this remark was denounced by the Anti-Defamation League as 'intolerant, misinformed, and downright un-American' , Prager's views found some sympathetic ears, and a chain email started circulating at this time alleging that US president Barak Obama had similarly been sworn in to the presidency on a Qurʾān instead of a Bible, and that he was actually a clandestine Muslim.2 While this story and its fallout are now well known, what is not commonly known is that Jefferson's Qurʾān, a 1764 printing of an English translation made

The Perennial Importance of Mary's Virginity and Jesus’ Divinity: Qur'anic Quotations in Iberian Polemics After the Conquest of Granada (1492)

“…42 Juan Andrés and his Antialcorán were quoted and cited regularly well into the eighteenth century, and even on occasion in the ninteenth and twentieth. 43 In his preface Juan Andrés records that in 1510 he had translated the entire Qur'an into the Romance (Aragonese) vernacular at the request of Martín García, and that the bishop had used this material in his sermons. He also says that he translated multiple volumes of ḥ adīth ('siete libros de la çuna', 'seven books of Sunna').…”