The Islamist-rooted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday, very confident that the American continent was discovered by Muslims in the twelfth century, and not by the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus more than two centuries later.
“The contacts between Latin America and Islam back to the twelfth century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Columbus, “assured Mr. Erdogan in a televised speech in Istanbul on the occasion of a summit of Muslim leaders of Latin American countries organized by the authorities Turkey.
“Muslim sailors arrived in America in 1178. Columbus mentions the existence of a mosque on a hill along the Cuban coast,” he has said. Its momentum, Erdogan has even expressed willingness to participate in the construction of a mosque in the place cited by the Genoese sailor.
“I would like to tell my Cuban brothers, a mosque would perfectly well on this hill today as well,” added the head of the Turkish state. History books teach that it is the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus who in 1492 established the first foreign foot on the American continent while looking with its fleet a new sea route to India rally.
Muslim historians and theologians ultraminoritaires have recently questioned the discovery, suggesting an earlier Muslim presence in America, though no vestige of Islamic inspiration there has never been discovered.
In a controversial article published in 1996, historian Youssef Mroueh had mentioned a passage stories of Columbus in which he refers to a mosque in Cuba. But his colleagues, unanimous, dismissed his hypothesis ensuring that this “mosque” was only a picture to describe the shape of a landscape. Elected president in August, Erdogan reigned over Turkey since 2003.
