Thomas Jefferson’s Koran

Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the House of Representatives, caught some crap from a bigot because he wants to take his ceremonial oath using the Koran instead of the Bible. It turns out that the Koran he’ll be swearing on isn’t just any Koran — it’s a Koran that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson’s copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed most of Jefferson’s collection and has his customary initialing on the pages.

But hold on. I thought that a Koran must be in the original Arabic to be a true Koran.

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