By Micah Halpern
I've Been Thinking:Absurd and ridiculous are the first two words that came to mind when I read that Turkish leader Erdogan addressed a conference of Muslims from Latin America and informed the group that Muslims discovered
America - not Columbus, and that Columbus actually wrote that in his diaries.
"Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus."
"Muslim sailors arrived in America from 1178. Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast."
"I would like to talk about it to my Cuban brothers. A mosque would go perfectly on the hill today," the Turkish leader said.
Erdogan is wrong. The quote he gave is not from Columbus or from his diary - it is from Bartoleme de Casa who rewrote the ship logs from his own point of view and through his own eyes. And the actual quote goes: "has a hill on its summit like a graceful mosque."
De Casa was describing what they called San Salvador. He was hardly describing a mosque on the hill. Actually, quite the opposite!
The irony of it all is that de Casa was most probably a converso - he was from a Jewish family that had been forcibly converted to Christianity.
Micah@MicahHalpern,com
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