To Bigotry No Sanction: A Mosque, a Memory, and the Republic at 250
On the Islamic Center of San Diego, the Hatred That Hunts Us Together, and the America Our Founders Promised
The first day of Dhul Hijjah is meant to be a beginning. Muslims around the world are turning their hearts toward Mecca for the Hajj. Pilgrims are gathering. At home, families are setting aside the lamb for sacrifice. Children memorizing surahs. Old men whispering the talbiyah — Labbayk Allahumma labbayk — into the dust of their prayer rugs. The Prophet ﷺ taught that on the first ten days of this month, mercy descends like rain.
This morning, at the Islamic Center of San Diego, mercy met gunfire at the door.
Two young men — boys, really, ages seventeen and eighteen — arrived at the largest mosque in San Diego County around 11:40 a.m. The Al Rashid School inside the complex was in session. Children were in classrooms. A security guard stood at the entrance. By the time police arrived, three men were dead: the guard who stood his ground, and two school staff members who tried to shield the children behind them. The two shooters were dead by their own hands in a vehicle blocks away. Investigators recovered writings about “racial pride” in a suicide note and hate speech scrawled on one of the weapons. San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl was direct: until the evidence says otherwise, this is being investigated as a hate crime (Associated Press, 2026; Time, 2026).
The mosque’s director, Imam Taha Hassane, found the only words a shepherd can find on a day like this. He called it outrageous. He said that no house of worship should be a place of fear. He told his congregation what every imam, every rabbi, every priest in America now knows to say: stay safe, stay close, and pray more (Public Broadcasting Service, 2026).
I have stood at the front of a mosque on a holy day. I know the rhythm of those mornings — the children chasing each other in the foyer, the elders correcting their wudu, the slow assembly of bodies into rows that will bow as one. I cannot stop seeing those rows this morning. I cannot stop seeing the guard at the door.
This essay is for him, and for the staff who died beside him, and for every congregation in this country — Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, Hindu, all of us — that now stations a guard at the door.
The Hatred That Hunts Us Together
A detail from today that did not make most headlines: at the very hour gunmen were walking into a San Diego mosque, more than four hundred Jewish federation leaders were arriving in Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress for one billion dollars in federal security funding for houses of worship. Mosques included. Within hours, Jewish Federations of North America had issued a statement of mourning for the dead in San Diego. They tied the two facts together explicitly: the threat facing American religious communities, they said, is real, urgent, and growing (Jewish Federations of North America, 2026).
A second detail: among the first solidarity statements to reach San Diego came from Temple Israel of West Bloomfield, Michigan — a synagogue that was itself attacked just two months ago, on March 12, 2026. Their statement said, plainly, that what happened to their sanctuary in March and what happened to the Islamic Center today proves that protection for houses of worship is not optional. Every dollar, they said, will be necessary (CBS News, 2026). I have been heartned by the numerous messages from Christian and Jewish colleagues- such as Mosaic Miami, Temple Beth Am, and the AJC in support of the Muslim community. As I have always said, American Jewish and Muslim futures are intertwined.
Anti-Muslim hatred and and antisemtism are similarly connected. Scholars have been saying this for a long time. Gil Anidjar (2008), in Semites: Race, Religion, Literature, traced how nineteenth-century European thought welded “the Jew” and “the Arab” into a single racial-religious category called Semitic — and how, under that label, whatever was said of one could be said of the other. More recently, Topolski and Bracke (2020) have shown in Patterns of Prejudice how the modern race-religion nexus continues to imagine Jews as the internal enemy and Muslims as the external one — two faces of the same fear.
The journalist Nathan Lean (2017) has shown how the same digital networks that manufacture hatred of Muslims also recycle, almost verbatim, the conspiracies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Susannah Heschel (2008) has demonstrated how mid-twentieth-century theological projects to “de-Judaize” Christianity — the construction of an “Aryan Jesus” — produced ideological tools that today’s white-nationalist movements simply repurpose against Muslims.
The most lethal of these tools is now called the Great Replacement theory. Its premise is that a global Jewish conspiracy is engineering mass Muslim and non-white immigration to replace the white Christian population of the West. The pattern of attacks tells you who pays the price. The Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh in October 2018: eleven Jews dead at Shabbat. The Christchurch mosque attacks in March 2019: fifty-one Muslims dead at Friday prayer. The Poway Chabad shooting that same April. The El Paso Walmart in August 2019: twenty-three killed in an attack targeting Hispanics. The Buffalo Tops supermarket in May 2022: ten Black shoppers killed by a gunman whose 180-page manifesto, the Forward reported at the time, named Jews more than a hundred times. The synagogue and the mosque and the Black supermarket are not separate targets. They are the same target, drawn by the same imagination.
The data tracks the theory. The FBI’s 2023 Hate Crime Statistics, released in September 2024, recorded a record 11,862 hate crimes nationally. Anti-Jewish incidents reached 1,832 — the highest in the history of FBI tracking. Anti-Muslim incidents jumped 49% to 236, the highest since 2017 (Anti-Defamation League, 2024). The Council on American-Islamic Relations (2025) reported 8,658 anti-Muslim complaints in 2024, surpassing the previous all-time record set in 2023. The ADL’s 2023 audit logged 8,873 antisemitic incidents, a 140% increase and the highest figure since their tracking began in 1979. The eight weeks after October 7, 2023 produced both the largest antisemitic surge and the largest anti-Muslim surge in either organization’s history. The graphs are not parallel curves on the same axis. They are the same curve.
The two graphs are the same curve because the two hatreds are the same hatred.
What the Founders Actually Wrote
Now I want to do what an interfaith preacher trained as a scholar is supposed to do at a moment like this: I want to turn to the texts. Not the polling. Not the punditry. The founding documents of the republic in which the guard at the door of the Islamic Center died this morning.
Begin with George Washington in the summer of 1790. He was traveling through Rhode Island, the colony Roger Williams had founded as a refuge from theocracy. In Newport he received an address from Moses Seixas, warden of the Touro Synagogue — the oldest standing synagogue in North America. Seixas welcomed the new president on behalf of “the Children of the Stock of Abraham” and gave thanks for a government that to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance. Washington took the phrase and gave it back as policy:
“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.… May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” (Washington, 1790)
Read it slowly. The President of the United States is telling a Jewish congregation that toleration is not enough. Toleration is the language of an indulgent majority. The Constitution he had just helped frame did not tolerate the children of Abraham. It recognized them as citizens by natural right.
And “the Children of the Stock of Abraham” — in the theological vocabulary Washington inherited from his Anglican tradition and the Hebrew Bible itself — included the descendants of Ishmael. It included the Muslims. The phrase is, whether Washington meant it consciously or not, an Abrahamic phrase, not a sectarian one.
Five years earlier, in 1784, Washington had been more explicit. Writing to Tench Tilghman about hiring craftsmen at Mount Vernon, he gave instructions that have shocked his hagiographers ever since: if they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe; they may be Mahometans, Jews, or Christians of any sect, or they may be atheists (Washington, 1784). This was not a rhetorical flourish for a synagogue. It was a memo about a contractor. It was how Washington actually thought.
Turn to Thomas Jefferson. In 1786 he secured the passage of the Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom — the law he was so proud of that he asked for it on his tombstone alongside the Declaration of Independence. The text declares that “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship,” that none shall suffer in body or goods on account of religious opinion, and that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion” (Jefferson, 1786).
Thirty-five years later, in his autobiography, Jefferson explained what had been at stake when the Virginia legislature debated the bill. An amendment had been proposed to insert the name of Jesus Christ into the preamble. The amendment, Jefferson recalled, was rejected by a great majority — in proof, he wrote, that the legislators meant to comprehend within the mantle of the law’s protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu, and the infidel of every denomination (Jefferson, 1821/1914).
The Jew and the Mahometan. By name. In 1786. In Virginia.
In his Notes on the State of Virginia, written in the early 1780s, Jefferson made the philosophical core of the matter as plain as he ever made anything. The legitimate powers of government, he said, extend only to acts injurious to others — and “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” (Jefferson, 1785, Query XVII). Twenty gods, or no god. The whole religious universe was placed beyond the reach of the state.
James Madison gave us the theological argument. His 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments — written to defeat a Virginia bill that would have used tax dollars to support Christian teachers — is, to my mind, the most rigorous defense of religious liberty ever produced by an American hand. Madison began with a principle: religion is a duty owed to the Creator, and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion of every man, he wrote, must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man (Madison, 1785).
Then he warned. A government that established Christianity, he said, would depart from the generous policy that had offered America as an asylum to the persecuted of every nation and religion. He told his fellow Virginians it was “proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.” First experiment. He did not mean the hundredth.
Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, told the story of a Philadelphia preaching hall built so that any preacher of any religious persuasion could address the public. If the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Islam in Philadelphia, Franklin wrote, he would find a pulpit at his service (Franklin, 1791/1916).
These are not modern interpretations imposed on the founding. These are the founding. Washington at Mount Vernon. Washington at Newport. Jefferson in Virginia. Madison in his Remonstrance. Franklin in Philadelphia. Every one of them, by name, included Muslims among those whom the new republic was being built to protect.
The Treaty They Signed
If anyone tells you that the founders meant to build a Christian nation, ask them to read aloud Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli.
The treaty was negotiated in 1796 under a commission issued by President George Washington. It was signed at Tripoli in November of that year by the American envoy Joel Barlow, certified at Algiers in January 1797, ratified unanimously by the United States Senate on June 7, 1797, and signed by President John Adams three days later. It was published in two New York papers and the Philadelphia Gazette. There is no record of significant public dissent. Article 11, as ratified, reads:
“As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims], — and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” (Treaty of Peace and Friendship, 1796/1797)
Read that aloud. Read it twice. The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. Not in any sense. Signed by Adams. Ratified unanimously. Treated by the founders as so unremarkable that it produced no controversy.
The scholar Denise Spellberg (2013) has documented how seriously the founders took their engagement with Islam — how Jefferson read the Qur’an, how the founders’ debates about a Muslim president were not hypothetical curiosities but live constitutional questions. The Treaty of Tripoli is not an obscure document discovered by twentieth-century secularists. It is what the founders said about themselves, to a Muslim sovereign, under their own signatures, with their Senate’s unanimous consent.
It is the most decisive primary source we have. It should end the argument.
Two Rededications
Yesterday, on May 17, the day before a young man drove to a mosque in San Diego with his mother’s weapons, a different gathering took place on the National Mall in Washington. It was called Rededicate 250. It was billed as a prayer rally for the semiquincentennial of American independence. President Trump appeared by prerecorded video, reading from 2 Chronicles. The stage featured stained-glass-style images of the founding fathers beside a large white cross. The roster of speakers was drawn almost entirely from a single stream of American Christianity. Muslims were absent. Mainline Protestants were absent. The historically Black denominations were absent. Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Indigenous spiritual leaders were absent. The only non-Christian leader on the program was a single Orthodox rabbi who already serves on the President’s Religious Liberty Commission (Las Vegas Sun, 2026; Religion Unplugged, 2026).
I do not write this to mock the people who attended. Many of them were sincere believers grieving a country they love. I do not doubt the sincerity of evangelical faith, nor the legitimacy of public prayer at a national milestone. I write it because the rally proposed a particular answer to the question every American is now being asked: what, exactly, are we rededicating?
The Christian-nationalist answer is that we are rededicating America to a Christian founding it never had. The empirical scholarship on this is, by now, voluminous. Whitehead and Perry (2020) showed in Taking America Back for God that the more strongly Americans embrace Christian-nationalist ideology, the more likely they are to view Muslim refugees as terrorist threats, to demand that minorities perform loyalty to “America’s traditions,” and to oppose policies that protect public safety. Crucially — and this is the finding that ought to detain any pastor — they showed that as Americans become more religious by the ordinary measures (worship attendance, prayer, scripture reading), they tend to move in the opposite direction. Christian nationalism, that is, is not a deepening of Christian faith. It is, often, its substitute.
Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry (2022) have demonstrated how the flag and the cross, fused, produce a politics that requires enemies. Katherine Stewart (2019) has documented the institutional architecture funding the project. Anthea Butler (2021) has shown how its historical roots in white evangelical racism run deep.
The America that gives bigotry no sanction does not require enemies. It requires citizens.
This is what is at stake at 250. We have a choice between two rededications. One is to a fiction — a Christian founding the documents themselves disavow — and to the politics of enemies that the fiction demands. The other is to what the founders actually wrote: a republic in which the Jew, the Mahometan, the Hindu, and the infidel of every denomination sit together under one law, each free to profess, none required to convert, all protected by a state that gives bigotry no sanction.
The first rededication leaves the guard at the door of the mosque to die for it. The second is the one the guard died defending.
What We Can Still Build
I am a Muslim. I preach at a mosque in Slidell, Louisiana, where my mother founded a children’s school and where I learned, from elders who carried Khoja Gujarati and East African Swahili in their mouths, that pluralism is not the opposite of faith but its requirement. I am also a co-founder of an interfaith network in Miami built, painfully, after October 7, 2023, by Jews and Muslims who refused to let our grief become each other’s enemy. I have spent the last two years sitting in living rooms with Jewish neighbors who lost cousins in Israel and Muslim neighbors who lost cousins in Gaza, and I have watched something the cable channels keep missing: ordinary American Jews and ordinary American Muslims, when they sit together, do not become each other. They become more themselves.
The Hebrew tradition has a word for the binding agreement that makes such sitting possible. It is brit — covenant. The Arabic tradition has a parallel word. It is mīthāq. When the Prophet ﷺ arrived in Medina in 622, he drafted a document — what the historians call the Constitution of Medina, the Ṣaḥīfat al-Madīna — that bound together Muslims, Jews of several tribes, and the pagan clans of Yathrib into a single political community under shared law (Arjomand, 2009). It was not a theological agreement. It was a civic one. Each community kept its faith. None was forced to convert. All were bound to defend the city.
The American founders did not know they were repeating an old Abrahamic move when they wrote a Constitution that made religion private and citizenship plural. But they were. They built a mīthāq on Iroquois land in Philadelphia. They wrote it in the language of natural rights, but the structure is the structure the Prophet built and the structure Hillel could have recognized. Three covenants pointing in the same direction.
The America rededicated to that covenant — to the actual founding, not the imagined one — is an America in which the security guard at the Islamic Center of San Diego, the rabbi at Temple Israel of West Bloomfield, the pastor of Mother Emanuel in Charleston, the granthi at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, the priest at Saint Mary’s in any Mexican-American parish, and the children playing in the foyer of any Hindu temple in New Jersey all sit, in Washington’s phrase, under their own vine and fig tree, and there is none to make them afraid.
That is what I will be praying for tomorrow morning. That is what I will ask my Jewish friends to pray for at Shabbat. That is what I will ask my Christian friends to pray for on Sunday. That is what I will ask every reader of this Substack to work for between now and the Fourth of July, 2026, and after.
A guard died at a door today so that children could pray. The founders left us the language to honor him. The covenant is older than the republic, and the republic is old enough to remember.
To bigotry, no sanction. To persecution, no assistance. Not now. Not at 250. Not ever.
References
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Thanks so much for this…. amazing essay!