Did Muslims Discover America Before Columbus

8/14/2019 Did Muslims Discover America Before Columbus

1/14

Did Muslims Discover America Before Columbus?

Written by Louis PalmeSunday, 07 October 2012 02:15

Muslims have been raising the claim that it Muslims who discovered America before Columbus.It's no better than their more recent claim that Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, heard

the Muslim call to prayer (azan ) while there, and converted to Islam, and then moved to Lebanon. (Well, he did live inLebanon, Ohio.)

Columbus Day follows the Muslim Day celebration in New York City by just a few weeks, so it is

not surprising that Muslim leaders have tried to steal the credit for that historic achievement.After all, taking something that does not belong to them is part of their ideology (Surah 48:20)and the cherished traditions of their prophet. (Bukhari, Volume 1, Book 7, Number 331)

The discovery of America by Columbus was one of the most remarkable human achievementsof the 15 th Century, just as landing on the moon was in our own lifetime. But those two eventswould have been only historical footnotes had Christopher Columbus and Neil Armstrongmerely made one-way journeys. In fact, the expeditions would have been remembered as

foolish, ill-conceived, and inhumane stunts. With that in mind, lets consider the claim thatMuslims discovered America before Columbus.

1 / 14


2/14



On September 25, 2011, American Muslims held their 26 th Annual Muslim Day Parade in NewYork City with banners, leaflets, and of course, the now-predictable mass prayer in the middleof Madison Avenue. One of the leaflets that got my attention, mostly for its lack of syntax, washeadlined, Islam is Not Anti-Systemic by a local African-American Imam, Aiyub Abdul-Baqi.

Based on the title, one might think that the leaflet was a denial of the anti-Semitism that isinfused throughout the Quran (e.g., Surahs 5:60, 5:82, 9:28-30, and 62:5). Actually, there wasno mention of Jews anywhere in the document. Instead, the hand-out argued that Islam is asAmerican as apple pie. Furthermore, Muslims were here before the Christian Europeanconquest of America [1492] and we are here today. Imam Abdul-Baqi arrogantly upped theante by adding, For those seeking to obtain knowledge, they can read They Came BeforeColumbus by Dr. Ivan Van Sertima and Deeper Roots by Dr. Abdullah Hakim Quick, whichdocuments (sic) Muslims [sic] history in America and Caribbean [sic] up to the present.

So I tracked down those books along with several other supposedly scholarly works thatcontend that Muslims reached American before Columbus. The arguments were based on fourdifferent indicators which are discussed greater detail below: 1) 8 th to 7 th Century B.C. SouthAmerican Olemic statues appear to depict Negroid figures; 2) Some South American plants,artifacts, and root words seem to have African origins or similar names; 3) there are reports oflarge numbers of Africans leaving for America in the 14th

2 / 14


3/14



Century A.D., and 4) Muslims/Arabs had the necessary navigational expertise and maps ofAmerica prior to 1492. Note that none of this evidence demonstrates that Muslims everdocumented claims to territory or actually settled in America. Still, there was enough truth to the

indicators to make a great Islamic myth.

The discovery of America was the result of deliberate search for a sea route to the Far East.Europe fell into its Dark Age when Muslims gained control of the Mediterranean beginningaround the end of the 7 th Century. (See Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, pg.155.) Ultimately, the Ottoman Empire, which had reached its zenith with the siege and captureof Constantinople in 1453, had cut off all land routes to the Far East and monopolized the tradein spices, silk, and other commodities in great demand in Europe. Navigators like Columbus

believed that a sea route lay Westward, straight across the Atlantic. King Ferdinand and QueenIsabella of Spain were persuaded to finance the exploratory trip which promised to reap greatfinancial rewards. Columbus would get 10 percent of the profits plus a hereditary governorshipof the new territories in the region of the Indies.

While Columbus is generally given credit for discovering the Americas, Muslims today areadvancing arguments that contend that they were the first to discover this New World. What arethe merits of those arguments?

They Came Before Columbus The African Presence in Ancient America, by Ivan VanStertima (1976)

Professor Van Sertima was born in Guyana in 1935 and was a professor of Afro-Americanstudies at Rutgers University. His book centers on the archeological evidence of early African

contact with America. The cover of Van Sertimas book shows a 10 foot high Olmec ColossalHead found at San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan near Veracruz, Mexico, which bears a strikingresemblance to African facial features. These statues are impressive for their size and theirapparent likeness to African Negroid races. They have been dated to 800 to 700 B.C., whichmight make them African in origin, but certainly not Muslim. There are also many plants andartifacts that indicate some contact between the two continents, but there is no record either inAfrica or in America confirming that these contacts were other than accidental and veryoccasional. Van Sertima relies heavily on a 1922 study by American philologist Leo Wiener,Africa and the Discovery of America. This book documents the common plants, monetaryartifacts, and even similar words to demonstrate extended cultural contact between Africa and

America, but the actual relationship between the people of those two continents is purespeculation. One could draw similar conclusions from flotsam and jetsam washed up on a

3 / 14


4/14



distant shore. (See more on Leo Wiener below.)

When it comes to recording actual American contact with African people, Van Sertima is a bitmore specific:

Peter Martyr, the first historian of America, reports about Darien in the Isthmus of Panama, TheSpaniards found Negroes in this province. It is thought that Negro pirates from [Africa]established themselves after the wreck of their ships in these mountains. The natives ofQuarequa carry on incessant war with these Negroes. Massacre or slavery is the alternatefortune of these peoples. Darien and Columbia were easily accessible to African ship-wrecked

mariners. These places lie within the terminal area of currents that move with great power andswiftness from Africa to America [I]t is important to point out here how many small, isolatedblack communities have been found on the American seaboard at the terminal points of thesecurrents. It is evident that the more or less pure black elements have been brought from Africathrough some accident at sea, they have there mixed with the local races, and have formedthose small isolated groups which are distinguished by their color from the surrounding tribes.(p. 24)

One of the center-pieces to his book is the story of an African Mandingo king who launched acolonial expedition to America with 200 master boats and 200 supply boats in 1310. The kingwas, according to accounts, Abubakari the Second, a nominal Muslim who Van Sertima claimswas no more Muslim than were the feathered and masked magicians of his court. Only oneship from that expedition ever retuned to Africa, having abandoned the voyage early on out offear. The following year, the king relinquished his throne and joined a second expedition toAmerica. This fleet was comprised of 2,000 vessels filled with supplies and settlers. Suchexpeditions would have dwarfed all of the early European settlements of America in the 16 th and17th Centuries, including the Mayflower Pilgrims, the Jamestown colony, and the St. Augustinesettlements combined. The accounts of the two large expeditions of boats from the Senegambia

coast of Africa (near Dakar) are sketchy at best. If the expeditions involved more than 2,400boats and large numbers of colonists, there certainly would have been much written about theventure. Archeologists have found a few religious artifacts and art depicting African figures inMexico relating to that time-frame, but no other documentary proof. Van Sertima chalks up thelack of historical evidence as racial prejudice:

It is hard for many to imagine the Negro-African figure being venerated as a god among theAmerican Indians. He has always been represented as the lowliest of the low, at least since the

era of conquest and slavery. His humiliation as a world figure begins, in fact, with the coming ofColumbus. (Columbus himself was the first to initiate slavery in the Americas, even against the

4 / 14


5/14



wishes of the Spanish sovereigns.) It was the very decade of his discoveries that the black andwhite Moors were laid low. The image of the Negro-African as a backward, slow and uninventivebeing is still with us. Not only his manhood and his freedom but even the memory of his culturaland technological achievement before the day of his humiliation seems to have been erased

from the consciousness of history Leo Wiener, the Harvard philologist, assumes that thegreat Mali empire of medieval West Africa owed all of its refinements, even its animist ritual andmagic, to the Arab-Islamic civilization. The Mandingo came to America before Columbus, hedeclares, but carrying another mans cultural baggage. He sees the Negro-African as simply aconductor of Islamic cultural electricity For them, before and after Columbus, the Negro is stilla beggar in the wilderness of history, a porter, a paddler, a menial, a mercenary the eternaland immutable slave. (p. 29-30)

What Van Sertima seems to forget in his victimhood rant, however, is that there are two distinctperiods of archeological evidence of contact by Africans in the Americas the pre-Classicperiod (800 to 700 B.C.) and the two centuries prior to Columbus. The former displayed what hecalled, The most remarkable representation of Negroes in America. . . The people who werehost to these Negro-African figures are known as the Olmecs. [The Negroid heads] stood twelveto twenty times larger than the faces of living men. They were like gods among the OlmecsThe construction of these Negroid figures is a fact of staggering proportions. Imagine forty tonsof basalt block mined from stone quarries eighty miles away and transported to the holy centerof La Venta not in pieces but in one massive chunk

It was only in the later, pre-Columbian period that Africans in America acquired a more sinisterreputation according to Van Sertimas own narration: Negro pirates from Africa tall black menof military bearing who were waging war with the natives, constantly waging war, The blacksalso killed and made war captives of Indians they caught in these raids along the Isthmus. I willleave it for the reader to decide if this stark difference between the reception given to theNegroes of the 8 th and 7 th Centuries B.C. and the Negroes of the 14 th and 15 th Centuries A.D.had anything to do with their conversion to Islam.

Van Sertima is a product of the multi-cultural heyday before the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iranwhich exposed the evil nature of the Islamists, particularly their hostility toward the GreatSatan of America. He writes,

But the whole notion of any race (European, African or American) discovering a full-blowncivilization is absurd. Such notions should now be abandoned once and for all. They presume

some innate superiority in the discoverer and something inferior and barbaric in the peoplediscovered. [This book] provides further evidence that all great civilizations and races are

5 / 14


6/14



heavily indebted to one another and that no race has a monopoly on enterprise and inventivegenius. (p. 256)

One of the most convincing arguments against Van Sertimas thesis of extended contactbetween Africans and Native Americans involves genetic and immunological studies over thepast two decades. There is no genealogical evidence of pre-Columbian widespreadinterbreeding of African or Arab races with the indigenous populations of America. If isolatedpockets of ship-wrecked African mariners existed, they were eventually wiped out throughwarfare or disease. Also, the extensive depopulation of the Native American populationfollowing Columbus discovery was not due to colonial bloodshed, but rather due to exposure toEuropean diseases, against which the Native Americans had not developed any immunity.Those diseases included small-pox, measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, influenza, whooping

cough, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, chicken pox, and venereal diseases. Each of thesediseases brought destruction through sweeping epidemics, involving illness and extensivedeath. Many Native American tribes experienced extensive depopulation, averaging 2550percent of tribal life lost due to disease. These huge mortality rates of the Native Americansafter contact with the European settlers indicates quite conclusively that they had beenimmunologically isolated from other parts of the world prior to Columbus discovery. In otherwords, there was no significant American contact with other continents which had alreadydeveloped immunity to those diseases.

Deeper Roots Muslims in the Americas and the Caribbean From Before Columbus tothe Present, by Dr. Abdullah Hakim Quick (1996)

Dr. Quick claims to be of African and Native American descent. He was born in the U.S. in 1949and converted to Islam in 1970. He received a B.A. in Islamic Studies (Dawah and Usul al-Din Proselytizing and Theology) from the Islamic University of Medina and a PhD in History of Islamin Africa from the University of Toronto, Canada. He was involved in Caribbean Islamic

development as the first Amir of the Islamic Council of Jamaica and the Imam of Masjid Bilal inKingston, Jamaica. (This mosque is apparently defunct today.) Dr. Quick lives in Toronto and isthe head of the History Department at the Al Maghrib Institute, a non-profit organization thatoffers weekend accelerated degree classes in Islam.

Dr. Quick pins his thesis on 1) linguistic similarities between Jamaican Creole and West AfricanMandinka dialects and 2) Arabic accounts of navigation in the sea of darkness and fog. Mostlinguists, however, agree that Jamaican Creole is an English-based language developed in the

17 th Century when African slaves brought with them their native vocabulary. The Arab/Muslimexploration accounts cited by Dr. Quick are underwhelming in their lack of detail.

6 / 14


7/14



- Khashkhas ibn Saeed ibn Aswad is said to have crossed the Atlantic with a group of

young sailors and returned in 889 A.D. with fabulous booty. Every Spaniard (Andalusian)knows this story. However, if such booty were found, it would be likely that those sailors would

attempt additional voyages. No further trips were reported.- Ibn Farrukh sailed from the Canary Islands in February, 999, and then sailed westward tothe islands of Caprira and Pluitana, arriving back in Spain in May of that year. Those islandswere never identified or confirmed by any other navigators.

- Another group sailed from Lisbon in the 12 th Century, but the short sailing period of only25 days would preclude arrival in the Western Hemisphere. The average sailing time forColumbus four voyages was 52 days.

Dr. Quick also asserts that a mixed ethnic strain existed in the Americas prior to Columbus.These Black Caribs (Garifuna), according to Dr. Quick, were Muslims. However, heacknowledges that these people were most likely descendants of Africans who were conveyedto America by the currents and winds. When the Spanish settled in Central America, theGarifuna were found to be too independent to work on the plantations. Eventually, they revoltedand withdrew to the mountains. Todays Garfuna are predominately Catholic, matriarchal, andhave a culture deeply involved with music and magic. If they were ever Muslim, that religionwould have left an indelible imprint of male-dominated families and an aversion to music andmagic. Dr. Quick attributes the lack of information on the Garifunas Islamic origins to amassive cover-up.

After surveying the growing number of archeological, linguistic, and historical proofs for thepresence of Muslims in the Americas before Columbus, the researcher becomes totally awareof a massive cover-up. Not only was the presence of Muslims in the Americas known to theearly Spanish and Portuguese explorers, but Muslim geographical and navigational informationwas actually the foundation of European expansion. The colonization of the Americas by theSpanish was an extension of the Reconquista (reconquest) of the Iberian Peninsula. Muslimshad ruled much of Spain for 781 years, dominating Europe culturally, educationally, and

economically. The early explorers were, in many cases, Spanish soldiers who had fought inSpain or Africa and sailed the seas to destroy the power of Islam. They recognized the influenceof Islam wherever they journeyed and did everything in their power to convert the people toCatholicism. (p. 35)

Such was the plight of the early Muslims who braved the currents, visited new lands, learnednew languages and cultures, traded with the peoples of the Americas, and became part of thealready thriving civilizations. Yet despite all of these amazing achievements, very little

information about their presence is being allowed out to the general public. World History willone day open its arms to all of its participants. (p. 37)

7 / 14


8/14



Dr. Quick acknowledged that in1550, the King of Spain ordered the American colonies to usewhatever resources they had to prevent Moors (i.e., Muslims) from settling there and to try to

convert them or persuade them by good and legitimate means to accept our holy Catholic faith.This does not reflect a cover-up as much as it was a conscious reaction to 781 years ofIslamic domination in Spain where churches were converted to mosques and where Jews andChristians were dhimmis , second class citizens burdened with harsh taxes and civil restrictions.The source for these royal orders was a paper by Peruvian Rafael Bazan in the 1966 issue ofThe Muslim World . The portions of the royal decrees omitted by Dr. Quick clearly contradict his allegations of acover-up:

You are informed that if such Moors are by their nationality and origin Moors, and if they shouldteach Muslim doctrines, or wage war against you or the Indians, who are subject to us or in ourroyal service, you are authorized to make them slaves. But the Muslims who may be Indians orwho may have adopted the Muslim religion you shall not make slaves by any means whatever.On the contrary, you shall try to convert them or persuade them by good and legitimate meansto accept our holy Catholic faith. (Notes Bazan, All this serves as a starting point todemonstrate how it was that the fierce Islamophobia which developed in Spain during thecenturies of the Reconquest contained not the least trace of racism. It was, rather, a doctrinaland religious struggle. . . Proof of this is that for centuries past, the Spaniard did not hesitate to

mix his blood with that of the American aborigines. There was no such racism, therefore in theSpain of the sixteenth century) Be it known we have decreed that under no conditionshould [Muslims] go [to America], on account of the many annoyances which seem, frompractical experience, to follow those who have gone. And in order to prevent the harm whichthose who have gone there or those who may go there in the future may cause, since in a newland like that where the Faith is newly established it is advisable that every risk be removed, inorder that neither the sect of Muhammad nor any other may be propagated and proclaimedthere in offence to God our Lord and to the detriment of our holy Catholic faith (p. 177-182)

Africa and the Discovery of America, by Leo Wiener (1922)

Another book perpetuating the myth of an African pre-Columbian discovery of America is a bookby American professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, Leo Wiener, titled Africa and theDiscovery of America. In the introduction to the book, readers are told that Africans werepartners with Native Americans in the creation of a durable civilization long before theemergence of Europeans in this part of the world and that the region could have done without

the discovery by Europeans and might have been better off.

8 / 14


9/14



What follows is a disappointing litany of plants and artifacts common to both Africa and theAmericas cotton, tobacco, and bead money. There is not one chapter about explorers,

settlers, or even any written record of sustained human contact between Africa and America.For the commonality of plants and artifacts, those could have occurred by way of drifted objectsor occasional shipwrecked seafarers.

The crux of Dr. Wieners argument is that if the words associated with those plants and artifactsare similar in two different continents, then there is evidence of human contact. Tobacco seemsto have similar names in Africa and pre-Columbian America. The study of philology can provideimportant clues to the transmission routes of plants and other artifacts. However, it must be

used with caution, as Dr. Wiener acknowledges. The fact that Spain was under the control ofArabic speaking Muslims for 781 years prior to the exploration of America would go a long waytoward explaining the Arabic influence on place and plant names in the New World. The Englishlanguage contains many Arabic words, like algebra and alcohol, but that doesnt makeEnglish-speaking people Muslim.

More devastating to Dr. Wieners theories is the consensus of contemporary Mesoamericanscholars that there is neither linguistic nor genetic evidence linking Africa to pre-Columbian

America:

Some researchers claim that the Mesoamerican writing systems are related to African scripts.These assertions have found no support among Mesoamerican researchers. While mainstreamscholars have made significant progress translating the Maya script, researchers have yet totranslate Olmec glyphs. [Furthermore,] Genetic and immunological studies over the past twodecades have failed to yield evidence of pre-Columbian African contributions to the indigenouspopulations of the Americas. Additionally, the huge mortality associated with the spread of Old

World diseases introduced by Europeans suggests long-term immunological isolation whichfurther shows the lack of any contact with African people in the Americas before Columbus.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmec_alternative_origin_speculations )

The cover of the 1992 edition of Dr. Wieners book also reveals another problem. It is a picture

of an East African trading ship made of palm or papyrus fiber lashed together and propelled bya square sail. The caption explains that such ships were sailed on the Indian Ocean between

9 / 14
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmec_alternative_origin_speculationshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmec_alternative_origin_speculations


10/14



Africa and China. Square sails do not allow ships to sail toward the wind as lateen sails do.Neither Muslims nor Africans adopted lateen sails until the 16 th Century after Columbusdemonstrated their efficacy in makinground trip

voyages across the Atlantic. As any ocean navigator or space explorer well knows, theachievement of landing at a distant destination is nothing if one cannot also return to the point ofdeparture and report about the accomplishment.

Before Columbus Links Between the Old World and Ancient America, by Cyrus H.Gordon (1971)

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908 2001) was an eminent scholar of Near Eastern cultures and ancientlanguages. In addition to conducting extensive field archeological research in the Middle East,he taught at Dropsie College, Brandeis University, and New York University. One of his morecontroversial theories was that Jews, Phoenicians and others crossed the Atlantic in antiquityand settled in various parts of North and South America. He posits that all cultures shareelements due to accidental and deliberate contact or borrowing. However, he admits thatparallel occurrences of a simple cultural element may be due to independent invention, e.g.,houses.

Gordons evidence regarding cultural contact in the Americas prior to Columbus includes 1)ethnic figurines, 2) Greek accounts of travels to the region, 3) similarity of archeologicalartifacts, 4) inscriptions on Roman coins found in several Southeastern states in the U.S., and5) the maps of the Turkish navigator Piri Reis. Except for the Piri Reis maps (discussed below),all of the archeological evidence of contact occurs prior to the establishment of Islam in the 7 th

Century. There is only one reference to Muslim in Gordons entire book, and that is merely apassing comment that Jews and Muslims avoid pork.

Muslim Maps and Navigation Techniques

There are two scholarly works which lay the groundwork for the thesis Muslim maps indicatenavigation to the Americas prior to Columbus Mu-Lan-Pi: A Case for Pre-ColumbianTransatlantic Travel by Arab Ships by Hui-Lin Li (1961) and The Pre-Columbian Discovery ofthe American Continent by Muslim Seafarers by Fuat Sezgin (2005).

10 / 14


11/14



Regarding Mu-Lan-Pi, a 13 th Century Chinese Sung Dynasty document contains the followingdescription: The country of Mu-lan-pi is to the west of the Ta-shih country (presumably MoorishSpain). There is a great sea, and to the west of this sea there are countless countries, butMu-lan-pi is the one country which is visited by the big ships of the Ta-shih. The authors

claimed that the reports of this country came mostly from Arab seafaring merchants. But acloser look at the so-called Arab reports leaves much to be desired from a historicalperspective. Here is one excerpt: Among the native products are foreign sheep, which areseveral feet high and have tails as big as a fan. In the spring-time they slit open their bellies andtake out some tens of catties [one catty equals 1 pounds] of fat, after which they sew them upagain, and the sheep live on; if the fat were not removed, (the animal) would swell up and die.The author of the article about these reports, Hui-Lin Li, explains that these were probablyalpacas or llamas, and that the description of their annual shearing for wool was garbled intoextracting fat. The problem with such an explanation is that those particular animals were nativeto the alpine regions of the Andes Mountains (on the west side of South America) above 11,500

feet in elevation. It is unlikely that the Arab merchants sailing west from Spain (or even theMiddle East) would encounter alpacas above 11,500 feet on the far side of South America.

The other study by Fuat Sezgin introduces several Muslim or Arabic navigators who might havevisited and mapped North or South American during their travels, namely, Nicol da Conti andPiri Reis. Critical to mapping that region was an accurate determination of longitude. Arabs hadmastered the technique of determining longitude by measuring the elapsed time between lunareclipses at various locations. However, to accomplish this one needed to observe a very rare

lunar eclipse and one had to accurately mark the time. Columbus reported only one lunareclipse in his four voyages to the New World, and he marked time with nothing more accuratethan an hour-glass. Many of his honest geographical observations were as much as 6,000miles off. (These faked observations, it is now believed, were recorded to lend credence to hisarrival in the Far East in order to justify his demand to be appointed governor of the Indies.)Although some pre-Columbian maps show outlines of South America, there are no logs or otherdocumentary evidence of Muslims/Arabs ever landing or establishing trading posts in theWestern Hemisphere. Concludes Sezgin, the basic proposition that the inhabitants of the OldWorld reached the landmass beyond the Atlantic Ocean time and again since antiquity appearsto be generally corroborated. In all likelihood these encounters between inhabitants of Old and

New World came about up to a certain point in history by chance rather than on purposeApparently the Arabic-Islamic navigators and cartographers were hardly aware of thesignificance which the progress they had achieved for world history.

Navigation vs. Drifting

11 / 14


12/14


13/14



managed to drift with a small square sail to St. Maarten in the West Indies. The voyage took 66days, and ended up over 1,000 miles from its intended destination (Eleuthera) because, afterall, they were merely drifting with the current and prevailing winds.

Conclusions

Based on the books and documents cited by the pamphlet (and within the cited books), one cancome to the following conclusions:

- If Muslims can claim any part in the discovery of America it was due to their blockading theMediterranean and land routes to the East that prompted Columbus and other explorers to seekalternate routes to avoid the Muslim robbers and pirates.

- While Muslims, Africans, Chinese, and Vikings may have charted maps of America andeven landed in America (the Western Hemisphere) prior to Columbus, none of those culturesactually succeeded in making permanent settlements or writing documented reports on whatthey discovered.

- Rather than being as American as apple pie, Muslims were the objects of the first lawspromulgated in the Americas in the 16 th Century prohibiting the immigration of Moors,Berbers, and people from Levant. These laws were based on ideology, not race, and reflected

the Spanish aversion to Islam occasioned by 781 years of oppressive Islamic rule.

- While thousands of boats and settlers from Africa reportedly left for America, there is noevidence of such large numbers everarriving . The few who did arrive seem to have drifted there randomly and sporadically after being lost atsea, rather than deliberately seeking and navigating to America, as did Columbus.

- The paucity of evidence supporting the African cultural impact on America is not so muchthe result of racial bias or cover-up, but rather lack of historical documentation on either side of

the Atlantic. Genealogy, Immunology, Archeology and History do not have reputations forpredetermined outcomes.

Finally, Aiyub Adbul-Baqis statement that Islam is as American as apple pie betrays hisignorance. Until the advent of vegetable shortening in 1911, the crusts of apple pies were madewith pork lard, a forbidden, haram food for Muslims. To say that Islam is as American as applepie meant that Islam was actually haram for most ofAmericas history.

13 / 14


14/14



Postscript : When the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, died on August 25, 2012, at age82, we were reminded that soon after his historic space achievement, Muslim sources createdthe false story that while in space, he heard the Muslim call to prayer ( azan ),converted to Islam, and moved to Lebanon. (Well, he did live in Lebanon, Ohio.) (See:

http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/usa-laughable-muslim-fantasies-neil-armstrong-converted-to-islam-after-landing-on-the-moon/ )

14 / 14
http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/usa-laughable-muslim-fantasies-neil-armstrong-converted-to-islam-after-landing-on-the-moon/http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/usa-laughable-muslim-fantasies-neil-armstrong-converted-to-islam-after-landing-on-the-moon/http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/usa-laughable-muslim-fantasies-neil-armstrong-converted-to-islam-after-landing-on-the-moon/http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/usa-laughable-muslim-fantasies-neil-armstrong-converted-to-islam-after-landing-on-the-moon/

Documents

Did Muslims Discover America Before Columbus