This column first appeared in January 2011
Since I was a child growing up on the Indianapolis east side, I have always been amazed at the tolerance of the Irvington community. President John F. Kennedy once said, “Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.” I think that quote can easily be applied to Irvington. However, an argument could be made that Irvington’s roots of tolerance can be traced back to a time when the community was only a concept on a page with a regal sounding name.
The founding fathers of Irvington named the community after the great American storyteller Washington Irving and legend claims they planned the community according to Irving’s literary town, Sleepy Hollow. The story of Sleepy Hollow begins with Irving’s description, “The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole nine fold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.”
Unfamiliar with Washington Irving? Well, here’s a thumbnail sketch; “Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century. He was best known for his short stories ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ but also for several histories of 15th Century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors, and the Alhambra as well as historical works including biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad.” Wait a second, Muhammad, the founder of Islam?
Yes, Washington Irving was the first American writer to gain international recognition and he was also the writer who first introduced Islam to the American public. Not only was Irving a great storyteller, he was a great historian and the first American to describe Islam. His “Life of Mahomet” was the first sympathetic biography of the Prophet Muhammad ever to appear in America.
Irving was the first Westerner to penetrate the soul of Islam. His work transcended not only the boundaries of religion and nationality, but it also succeeded remarkably by informing the American nation of the growing influence of Muslim Spain. An influential 1955 report described this relationship as, “Christopher Columbus, departing from Granada in 1492 and employing the principles of navigation developed by Muslim scientists, had brought to America the accumulated wisdom of both the Christian and Muslim civilizations. Three and a half centuries later, Washington Irving, while penetrating through the Iberian Peninsula, was to rediscover the proud culture and present it to the West.”
As an aspiring writer wandering through Western Europe, Irving left no stone unturned in his quest to uncover the hidden glories of forgotten Spain. In May 1829, Irving reached Granada, the last seat of Muslim power in Spain and the most romantic city in the country. It was here beneath the snow-capped Sierra Nevada Mountains in springtime that his imagination gave full sway to his genius.
At the invitation of the governor, Irving was permitted to live within the palace of Alhambra, a palace and fortress complex constructed during the mid-14th century by Moorish rulers for the last Muslim Emirs in Spain. Its court was at that time reduced almost to ruins through centuries of neglect, malice, and hatred. But life in this dilapidated ruin fascinated Irving so much that he admitted: “Never in my life have I had so delicious an abode and never can I expect to meet such another.”
The palace was but a mere skeleton of its former grandeur and beauty. It was overrun with gypsies, peasants, and animals, both wild and domesticated. One of the towers had been ruined by the soldiers of Napoleon, and England’s King Charles V had demolished part of the building decades before. The beautiful red stucco brick which gave the Alhambra its name was crumbling to pieces. Irving’s response to the neglected beauty was his Tales of Alhambra which splendidly narrated the forgotten glories and tradition of the Alhambra and Muslim Spain. Through this work, the timeless monument once again became a living abode and soon it attracted the attention of the Western world and sparked the restoration and renovation of the previously forgotten Alhambra.
Although his research on Columbus had taken him to Seville, to Irving, the Alhambra, more than anything else, symbolized the Muslim imprint upon Spain. The Alhambra, teeming with a thousand dreams and memories, led Irving to write two more books entitled Legends of the Conquest of Spain and The Conquest of Granada, the very first Western books to accurately portray Muslim civilizations in true perspective.
Washington Irving’s immersion in Islam led him to the most towering personality in the annals of Islam, the holy Prophet Muhammad. With the same zeal characterized in his literary portraits of the Alhambra, Granada, and Cordova, Irving now attempted the risky task to present an unbiased biography of the holy Prophet of Islam. The result was a historic success.
The book, entitled The Life of Mahomet, was indeed the first unbiased biography of the Prophet of Islam ever to appear in the American continents. The powerful pen of Irving paints a vivid and scintillating picture of the forceful personality of the holy Prophet: “His intellectual qualities were undoubtedly of an extraordinary kind. He had quick apprehension, a retentive memory, a vivid imagination, and an inventive genius. Owing but little to education, he had quickened and informed his mind by close observation, and storied it with a great variety of knowledge concerning the systems of religion current in his day, or handed down by tradition from antiquity. His ordinary discourse was grave and sententious, abounding with those aphorisms and apologies so popular among the Arabs; at times he was excited and eloquent, and his eloquence was aided by a voice musical and sonorous.”
“He was sober and abstemious in his diet, and a rigorous observer of fasts. He indulged in no magnificence of apparel, the ostentation of a petty mind; neither was his simplicity in dress affected, but the result of a real disregard to distinction from so trivial a source. His garments were sometimes of wool; sometimes of the striped cotton of Yemen; and were often patched. It is this perfect abnegation of self, connected with his heartfelt piety, running throughout the various phases of his fortune . . . The early aspirations of his spirit continually returned and bore him above all earthy things. Prayer, that vital duty of Islam, and that infallible purifier of the soul, was his constant practice.”
Completing his portrayal of the holy Prophet, Irving describes beautifully: “When he hung over the death-bed of his infant son Ibrahim, resignation to the Will of God was exhibited in his conduct under this keenest of afflictions; and the hope of soon rejoining his child in paradise was his consolation. When he followed him to the grave, he invoked his spirit, in the awful examination of the tomb, to hold fast to the foundations of the faith, the Unity of God, and his own mission as a Prophet.”
Western publishers were not without reservation though and a few passages from the book were printed in advance to prepare the public for something totally different from what they had hitherto known. The reaction was spontaneous and its praises were already being sung in Irving’s native New York. A typical report claimed: “For variety, adventure, and characteristic traits of a singular people, and the wonderful imposition of a strange religion upon the world, it is hardly possible to imagine a more stirring narrative. The essence of Romance pervades the solid structure of History … it is throughout redolent of the East.”
The Life of Mahomet culminated Irving’s portraits of Muslim Spain and Islam. But what he had created was enough to introduce Islam in its right light and perspective to the American public. Washington Irving was the first American truly to discover Islam. Christopher Columbus discovered America for Spain, but Washington Irving discovered Muslim Spain for America.
On the evening of November 28, 1859, only eight months after completing a biography of his namesake, George Washington, a work which he expected to be his masterpiece, Washington Irving died of a heart attack in his bedroom at Sunnyside at the age of 76. Legend has it that his last words were: “Well, I must arrange my pillows for another night. When will this end?” He was buried under a simple headstone at Sleepy Hollow cemetery on December 1, 1859. Here lie the bones of the literary father of Sleepy Hollow, the Headless Horseman, Ichabod Crane, Rip Van Winkle, Islam in America, and tolerance in Irvington.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
