MOSCOW, November 16 (Sputnik) — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was addressing a summit of Latin American Muslim leaders in Istanbul, during which he said that Muslim sailors had discovered America before Columbus, Washington Post reports.
"Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus," he claimed.
He further added, "Muslim sailors arrived in America from 1178. Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast," reports Al Jazeera.
Columbus is widely believed to have discovered the Americas in 1492, while trying to find a new route to India.
There are scholars who believe there's archaeological and documentary indication of Muslims in pre-Columbian America. Erdogan is actually citing the disputed work of Youssef Mroueh, an academic affiliated with the As-Sunnah Foundation of America, stated The Washington Post.
In the 1996 paper, Mroueh referred to the existence of a mosque spotted by Columbus along the Cuban coast stating that," Columbus admitted in his papers that on Monday, October 21, 1492 CE while his ship was sailing near Gibara on the north-east coast of Cuba, he saw a mosque on top of a beautiful mountain," reports The Washington Post.
But in a disputed article published in 1996, historian Youssef Mroueh said Columbus' entry was proof that Muslims had reached the Americas first and that "the religion of Islam was widespread".
However, the passage is widely understood to be a metaphorical reference to the shape of the landscape, as stated by BBC.
Most history books claim that Columbus set foot on the American continent in 1492, while looking for a new maritime route to India. Some 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.
There is wide speculation of other peoples in other eras discovering the Americas long before Columbus. The most established narrative of pre-Columbian encounter involves explorers and settlers from Scandinavia, who arrived on the shores of Newfoundland and Canada some five centuries before the Spanish expedition of 1492, as told by The Washington Post.
During the summit, the president also said that Ankara was prepared to build a mosque at the site mentioned by the Genoese explorer, the AFP news agency reported.
"I would like to talk about it to my Cuban brothers. A mosque would go perfectly on the hill today," he said.
