Video: Turkish President Claims Muslims Discovered Americas, Not Columbus

Fact checked

The President of Turkey recently made a statement saying that he believes Muslim explorers discovered the Americas prior to Christopher Columbus’ voyage in 1492.

According to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Muslims had visited the Americas a couple of hundred years before Columbus.

Erdogan is quoted as saying: “Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus.”

The claim is based on an article written in 1996, where the historian Youssef Mroueh wrote that in Columbus’ diary he mentions the existence of a mosque on a hill in Cuba.

Some experts say that this reference was metaphorical to describe the landscape, and there is no evidence that Islam was being practiced in America at this time.

Erdogan made the statement at a conference of Latin American Muslim leaders that took place in Istanbul.

He also mentioned that he would like to discuss building a mosque in the location described in the diary of Columbus.

The first people to arrive in America are widely believed to have done so 15 thousand years ago by crossing the Bering Strait.

It’s also thought by many that the first Europeans to visit the shores of North America landed 500 years prior to Columbus and were Norse sailors.

Royce Christyn

Royce Christyn

Journalist at News Punch
Documentarian, Writer, Producer, Director, Author.
Royce Christyn

3 Comments

  1. Let me see now. There has been snippets of evidence and speculation that the Chinese, Portuguese, Norwegians, Danes, Polynesians, and Clovis Man have all been the “First” to discover North America. But only Columbus told the rest of the world, so the prior “discoveries” are meaningless because none of them told the rest of the world, “Hay guys, I found this new continent”. Anything else is an argument in semantics about the meaning of the word “discovery”.

    If we define it as the first human to put his foot on the continent, you would have to give the title to Clovis Man. If you agree that the word “disclose” is an integral part of the meaning of “discovery”, then you would have to give the title to Columbus. Personally, I prefer to celebrate Columbus Day, not Clovis Man Day.

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