Blue mosque with water fountain, in Istanbul, Turkey
Source: The Telegraph
By Rob Crilly, New York, and agencies
Muslims discovered the Americas in the 12 century, nearly 300 years before Christopher Columbus made his famous voyage there, according to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey.
His words, delivered in a televised speech, will lend support to a controversial theory that has been debunked repeatedly by historians.
That did not seem to bother the conservative Turkish president during a summit in Istanbul of Muslim leaders from Latin America.
“Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus,” he said.
Tayyip Erdogan
Mr Erdogan went on to say that Columbus descibed the existence of a mosque on a hill by the Cuban site and that Ankara was prepared to fund a new place of worship for Muslims there.
I would like to talk about it to my Cuban brothers. A mosque would go perfectly on the hill today,” the Turkish leader said.
History books say that Columbus set foot on the American continent in 1492 as he was seeking a new maritime route to India. Other accounts suggest he may have been beaten there by Leif Erikson, a Norse explorer, or by the ancient Phoenicians
A tiny minority of Muslim scholars have recently suggested a prior Muslim presence in the Americas, although no pre-Columbus ruin of an Islamic structure has ever been found.
In a controversial article published in 1996, historian Youssef Mroueh refers to a diary entry from Columbus that mentions a mosque in Cuba. But the passage is widely understood to be a metaphorical reference to the shape of the landscape.
And while Columbus is frequently credited with discovering the country that became the US, he actually never set foot in it, exploring instead the Carribean and the South and Central American coastlines.
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Are you sure he doesn’t mean that Muslims beat USA to the moon? After all, there used to be a story told in the Muslim world that when, after the moon landings, Neil Armstrong was once visiting Egypt and he heard the Azan being called out, he said that he had heard it on the moon!
Those were the days when relations between the USA and the Muslim world were good. Fast forward to this century. With the public in Muslim countries having turned against the USA (rightly or wrongly is a different matter), they picked up the theory that the moon landings were faked. So now you hear Muslims in Muslim countries say it like a matter of fact that the moon landings were faked. They have forgotten about the Azan on the moon!
Really? Where is the proof? Vikings predates everyone.
Mr President,
USA,
Muslims not a terrorist. Muslims beat Columbus to the Americas.
A moot point as the Welsh and Irish also claim the same. We know the Norse established settlements well before 1492. The Chinese also may have touched upon the ‘New World’ at some point during the famous ‘Seven Voyages’ of reknowned Admiral Zheng He in the early 15th century C.E. The Chinese were the pre-eminent naval power at that time, in all actuality. Fate decreed that they and the European powers never met. The world was still too large at that point of our humanity.
But, who ever came from afar to the ‘Americas’ met the indigenous peoples who had been there for a very long time… a very long time.
Columbus most probably did not ‘discover’ the ‘New World’. He did, however, do something that no other outsiders did – He made the news known far and wide and opened the door enabling the lands to become what thay are today. No other person or peoples can claim the same. Arriving and then leaving is not the same as arriving and then staying, in other words…
If it makes Mr. Erdogan happy, or proud, to claim that, then fine. I’ll use a favorite German phrase to express how I feel about that – Das macht nichts
Let’s face it, the people who first discovered America are those who walked across the Bering Straits to get here!
There have probably been lots of people who go to American various ways before Columbus. As far as Europeans go, besides Leif Erickson, there is evidence that British merchants were going back and forth on a regular basis in the fifteenth century to get lumber and fish. They kept this a secret so they would have it to themselves. Earlier Polynesians probably reached the coast of Chile for we find the remains of chicken bones there (no chickens in the New World) and somehow the sweet potato founds it way back through the Polynesian Islands. Getting to the Americas is no big deal. The larger problem was finding your way back again. If you stayed there your colony would either die out or assimilate to the local population. What allowed for the Europeans to conquer the Americas so easily is the diseases they brought with them, diseases the early Vikings had not yet been exposed to. But Muslims were an integral part of that ‘disease pool.’ If Muslims had established themselves in the Americas the Native Americans would been exposed to the diseases which later nearly wiped them out.
I wonder where he got the year 1178 from?
Pidram Sultan Bood
America is very near, but much further is the moon. A sufi by the name of Ibn al-Arabi travelled to the moon long before Nel Amstrong set foot onto it. How?. It is for us to find out.
AND … who knows … some people say Armstrong’s ‘moon landing’ was actually the same as Ibn al-Arabi’s …
Mr.Erdogan has rightly said that Muslims discovered America before Columbus. From the Diary of Columbus it is clear that he saw “a graceful mosque” there on Monday, oct. 29. If any body has any doubt, he is requested to go through the Diary of columbus on the internet.