Istanbul (AFP) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that the Americas were discovered by Muslims in the 12th century, nearly three centuries before Christopher Columbus set foot there.Oh, yeah. We all know about Piri Reis.
"Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus," the conservative president said in a televised speech during an Istanbul summit of Muslim leaders from Latin America.
... and then they settled there and life was good until the Euros came to displace them.
"Muslim sailors arrived in America from 1178. Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast," Erdogan said.
Oh, sure. Everybody knows that. We also know that the Egyptians couldn't have built the pyramids; that took powerful space aliens.
Erdogan said that Ankara was even prepared to build a mosque at the site mentioned by the Genoese explorer.
Wait a minute: Columbus said he saw a mosque on a hill and then Ankara sez they're ready to build one there? What happened to the one Columbus saw?
"I would like to talk about it to my Cuban brothers. A mosque would go perfectly on the hill today," the Turkish leader said.
I'm sure the godless commie Cubeheads would be just tickled to be colonized by Moslems.
History books say that Columbus set foot on the American continent in 1492 as he was seeking a new maritime route to India.
"In fourteen hundred and ninety two
Columbus sailed the the ocean blue.
He had three ships and left from Spain;
He sailed through sunshine, wind and rain.
He sailed by night; he sailed by day;
He used the stars to find his way.
A compass also helped him know
How to find the way to go.
Ninety sailors were on board;
Some men worked while others snored."
A tiny minority of Muslim scholars have recently suggested a prior Muslim presence in the Americas, although no pre-Columbian ruin of an Islamic structure has ever been found.
It's entirely probable that there were significant numbers of sailors who "discovered" the New World. For one thing, the Indians of the east coast have features that are much more "Caucasian" than those further west. The theory is that the Indians crossed from Siberia to Alaska. West coast Indians share features with Siberians, for the most part. Paleo-Americans, last time I read up on them, were "Caucasian," which might account for the differences in feature. But so also might significant numbers of Euros and North Africans.
But it doesn't matter if Lief Erickson or Piri Reis or some Carthaginian sailor (I forget his name, too lazy to look it up) did sail to what's now America. It wasn't really a friendly place to settle. Just ask Virginia Dare. Prior to Columbus the discoverers and any attempted settlers didn't have the slight technological advantage over the indigenes that the Spanish had when they followed up on Columbus' discovery. Any Arab or Nordic or Carthaginian settlement would either be wiped out by Powhattans or Iriquois or whomever, or they would go native and intermarry with their neighbors, like the Lumbees and the Seminoles.
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.
Not that it matters to a Moslem. It's in the same category as the Soviet Union bragging about how a Russian was the inventor of the light bulb, the automobile, and sex.
| Not content with that nonsense, according to Ynet, in the same speech the honourable President Erdogan also said: |
| No comment. |
| "Allah promised all that to us, and we mean to have it all," he added. |
Gulen is the founder of the Hizmet Movement which teaches an Anatolian version of Islam that derives from a Sunni-Moslem scholar Said Nursi.
The BBC described Gulen as promoting a "tolerant Islam which emphasizes altruism, hard workd and education."
| In other words, jihad via the quiet, long march through the institutions. |
Latin America has a network of pro-Gulen schools.
Erdogan also issued criticism of wealthy Moslem oil tycoons for not paying benefits to the poor, called a Zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam.
"And do rich Moslems in the Islamic world pay their Zakat for their oil revenues?" Erdogan rhetorically asked. "Nobody can answer this question positively," he responded.
