12th Century Muslims reached America?

The Turkish President has made a speech in which he said that contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. The claim is that Muslims discovered America in 1178,and indeed that Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast.

So friends, how plausible is this supposed Muslim-Cuba connection?
 

Cryostorm

Monthly Donor
Honestly no clue, the only possible Pre-Columbus contact, besides fishermen which just about every country with an Atlantic coast can claim, I can think of is that one Mansa of Mali, Mansa Musa I's predecessor Mansa Abu Bakr II, who sailed a fleet west and never returned, but that was in the fourteenth century.
 
As people pointed out "mosquee" was used by Europeans (then Catholics) to name whatever place of worship or cult (or percieved as such) that wasn't Christian.

Muslims being considered as polytheists worshipping greek Gods, it sort of makes sense in an ignorant context.

You have a theory about Mande having discovered America IOTL, but it's essentially baseless (basically : someone launched an expedition westwards, or so is it told. The end.)

The plausibility of such historical event is quite low : not quite as much as Illuminati building the pyramids thanks to their time-travelling abilities, but still enough of a fringe theory to not being taken seriously.

As for Muslims discovering Americas in an ATL's XIIth century : that's doable, but for many reasons I'd place my bet on Western African Muslims, as Ghana or Mande, rather than Arabo-Berbers (whom naval tradition wasn't that obvious outside Ifriqiya, and eventually had enough troubles, inner and outer, to really deal with that).

I could see, with a bigger naval tradition in West Africa (such as sailing in Kongo or southern) an equivalent to accidental discovery of Brazil, for exemple.
 
The Portuguese ran into Christians everywhere they went on their way to India and beyond. Of course they were Hindus etc, i.e. not Muslims. a whole pantheon of saints were conflated with Hindu deities.

By their logic, if you weren't Muslim you must be Christian.

Just support to LSCatilina
 
That Muslim sailors could have reached the American continent in the 12th c. isn't implausible, but Erdoğan fails to take into account it that that's still almost 200 years after Eric the Red first landed in the New World, an event with archaeological support (L'Anse aux Meadows).

I've found a creative interpretation of history in conversations with Muslim friends (those born and raised in the near and middle east) over the years. One day, years ago, my roommate at the time, a Moroccan, made the claim that Morocco had never been colonized like the rest of Africa. Given that we were having this conversation in France, it would have been easy to bring up the partition of Morocco between Spain and France early in the 20th c., but I decided to rebuke that by starting with the Romans. Mauretania's status as a client kingdom was ended by Claudius in AD 43, and it remained a Roman province for the next 400 years. But the Romans, Vandals and Visigoths wouldn't count, I realized, because these events occurred before Islam came to Morocco, so that didn't happen to Morocco as he envisaged it. OK, I accepted that, as many European countries have the date of Christianization as an historical event of major import.

So... then I brought up the fact that he grew up speaking a language that originated thousands of km from his hometown and worshipped a religion that was brought to his country at the point of a lance. He didn't see it that way, and as he told me how he'd been taught in school about what we non-Muslim non-Moroccans would see as the Arab conquest, I realized he saw the arrival of Islam and the Arabs in about the same way the Irish see St. Patrick, as if the Arabs were cassocked monks peacefully spreading the word of Allah. I even tried explaining to him how proud as a Muslim of Arab descent he should be of the real story of the spread of Islam, how extraordinary a feat it was for the Arabs to manage, in the space of 100 years, to conquer more than half the known World, from the Indus to the Pyrenees, defeating two of the three strongest Empires on Earth at the time in the process; how amazing it was that in most cases, the Arabs didn't force people to convert (as the Europeans did in the New World) but respected the Peoples of the Book and encouraged conversion through taxation and social policy. It didn't phase him: he had his story and he was sticking with it.

This anecdote isn't meant to be authoritative. I'm also not denying that western Christian countries don't also pick and choose the history they wish to highlight, but from my experience, history is very malleable as taught in the Arab world where even epic triumphs can be explained away to fit a narrative
 
In addition to LS's point about the European use of "mosque", Columbus only mentioned it in his diary to describe the shape of a rock formation. Erdogan's entire basis for these ridiculous claim is that there was a mosque in Cuba. But given that these ruins have never been discovered, it's clear there was never a mosque in Cuba, so the whole case falls apart. The man is just a Muslim nationalist trying to rewrite history.
 
Exactly...it is entirely possible that any seagoing group from Europe (including the Romans) could have reached the Americas due to misadventure. Any survivors might either be killed, eaten (if caught by the Arawak), or even absorbed in to the local population. Some may have returned (like the Vikings from Greenland to "Vinland"). Having said that, the short answer is there is zero evidence that the Muslims discovered America - by "discovered" the conventional definition includes continuous contact, not a chance encounter in passing.
 
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