Moses, Muhammad and Nature’s God in Early American Religious-Legal History, 1640-1830 : A Global Crosscultural Perspective

This is the first comparative study of Mosaic and Islamic law in American history.

Constructing a complex picture in trans-Atlantic, trans-European and world historical perspective, this book elucidates the deeper intersecting storylines which lie beneath and behind the rise of the debates in the 1990s and 2000s over the promotion of the Ten Commandments and Mosaic Law as alleged sources of American Constitutional law and symbols of American national identity as these debates have taken shape in close connection with both resurgent anti-Semitism as well as anti-Sharia protests and anti-Sharia legislation throughout the United States (and other Western societies).

Building in interdisciplinary fashion from previous scholarship in several related fields, this work takes American religious, cultural, political, and legal history in new directions, making its own unique contributions to the history and historiography while also opening new angles of exploration for future research.