Erdogan: Muslims Discovered America

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made one of his many statements that don't necessarily have a lot of factual basis, this latest one being about Christopher Columbus. Speaking at an Istanbul summit of Muslim leaders from Latin America, Erdogan claimed Muslim explorers beat Columbus' arrival to the Americas by three centuries. “Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus," he said. "Muslim sailors arrived in America from 1178. Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast.” While Youssef Mroueh wrote a controversial article in 1996 that said Columbus wrote of seeing a mosque in Cuba, experts widely believe it is a metaphorical reference to the landscape. Of course, neither Columbus nor Muslim explorers “discovered” the Americas. Indigenous people had long lived on the continent, cultivating their own civilizations and culture.