Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Zohran Kwame Mamdani was sworn in as the first Muslim mayor of New York City on January 1 shortly after midnight, and then was inaugurated Thursday afternoon. On both occasions, he took his oath on the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book.
Although, as usual, bigots have tried to make something of this oath, the ceremony was in accordance with Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on the place of religion: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Islam has been in North America for 500 years and is part of the American heritage. One nineteenth-century enslaved American even wrote his autobiography in Arabic and quoted the Qur’an. Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville all referenced the Qur’an. At a time when white nationalists are attempting to distort American history and cut out of it the nation’s ethnic and religious diversity, Mamdani’s election and swearing-in bring us back to American reality. We are and always have been a medley, and have drawn strength from our differences. A song with only one note is unlovely.
Mamdani was by no means the first American politician to take the oath on the Qur’an. Keith Ellison, a Muslim, was sworn in to Congress and then as the attorney general of Minnesota on a Qur’an. Likewise, Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) were sworn in on a Qur’an. Ellison used the translation of George Sale that had been owned and annotated by Thomas Jefferson, showing the way in which the Qur’an played a role in American history. Jefferson and some other founders read the Qur’an as a law book and part of global legal history. A marble frieze on the Supreme Court building in Washington D.C lists the Prophet Muhammad as a great law-giver, along with Moses, Solomon and Charlemagne. It was the Founders who decided to do that.
At least 42 Muslim-Americans won public office this fall. Taking the oath of office on the Qur’an is a commonplace. Mamdani was even joined by 4 other Muslim-American mayors — Abdullah Hammoud (Dearborn, MI), Mo Baydoun (Dearborn Heights, MI); Faizul Kabir (College Park, MD); Ted Green (East Orange, NJ).
Mamdani used three Qur’an copies. At his swearing in in the middle of the night at an abandoned Metro station beneath City Hall, he used a family Qur’an belonging to his grandfather as well as a pocket-sized Qur’an from nineteenth-century Ottoman Syria that is held in the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Schomburg Qur’an. Via New York Public Library.
This NYPL Qur’an is itself part of American history because it was collected by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. His father was a German-Puerto Rican merchant and his mother an African-Caribbean from the Danish West Indies. While working for the Bankers Trust Company in New York by day for nearly a quarter-century, Schomburg in his spare time wrote African-American history and played a role in the Harlem Renaissance. As a schoolchild he had been told that Blacks had no history, and his collection of some 4,000 African-American artifacts and books was his response to the false claim. The Qur’an used by Mamdani was in his collection, suggesting it came from an African-American family.
Roughly 20% of the Africans kidnapped, enslaved and brought to the US were likely Muslims, though it was made difficult for them to pass the religion on to their children and so the religion dwindled over time. Some families that managed to become free even before the Emancipation Proclamation settled in New York, and managed to be in contact through storefront mosques with Muslim sailors at the port. They were able to pass the religion on into the twentieth century, as Rasul Miller argues. We know from the work of Sylvia Diouf that even enslaved Muslims in the New World managed to order Qur’ans via sailors from Africa and the Middle East. So it is possible that an African-American Muslim family in New York held this Ottoman Syrian Qur’an as an heirloom before it was acquired by Schomburg.
As for the other two Qur’ans used by Mamdani, at the two ceremonies on January 1, they belonged to his grandmother and his grandfather on his father’s side. Gujarati Muslims, Mamdani’s grandparents hailed from the Khoja caste. They lived in Dar es Salaam as part of the Khoja Shiite trade diaspora, who traded between British Bombay (now Mumbai) and British Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Most Khoja Shiites belong to the Ismaili branch of Islam, but some families adopted the Twelver [Ithna `Ashari] Shiism common in Iran and Iraq, while a few members of the Khoja caste are Sunni Muslims or Hindus. The Mamdanis are Twelvers.
Gujarati Diaspora, Joshua Project. Public Domain.
Americans also traded with what is now Tanzania, including Zanzibar, in the 19th century, just as did the Indian Gujaratis.
Although Christian nationalists and white nationalists have derided the custom of taking the oath of office on the Qur’an, there is no legal bar to it. The Constitution (Art IV, Cl. 3) says “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
Zohran Mamdani. NYC Mayor’s Office. Public Domain.
John Quincy Adams swore on a law volume containing the Constitution; FDR and many members of Congress simply affirmed their support of the Constitution, instead of using the Bible. The US Constitution is a secular, not a Christian document, and allows electees to swear the oath of office on any holy book or none, whatever is meaningful for them.
Former congressional representative Tulsi Gabbard, now Director of National Intelligence, FBI Director Kash Patel, and congressman Suhash Subramanyam have all taken the oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita, a key text of Hinduism. Jewish American officials have been sworn in on the Hebrew Bible, i.e. a Bible without the New Testament attached. Christian nationalists complaining about swearing-in ceremonies using the Qur’an and who insist that the Christian Bible be used never bring up either the Hebrew Bible or the Bhagavad Gita, neither of which is the Christian Bible. In any case, the Constitution forbids a religious test for American public office.
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