There is also evidence that Muslims were on the ships that the Italian explorer, navigator and colonist Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in the 15th century.
It’s time to put paid to this claim made about Muslims and their supposed Columbus connection.
Three distinct claims are made by Muslim “scholars” about Muslims and Christopher Columbus. These are: first, the assertion that Columbus’s navigator was an “Arab” and “Muslim”; second, that the Pinzon brothers, one of whom was captain of the Niña and the other the captain of the Pinta, were Muslims (or Moriscos, outwardly converts to Catholicism); third, that Columbus recorded in his papers having seen a “mosque” on top of a mountain in Cuba, which means there must already have been Muslims in the New World before Columbus arrived.
Let’s deal with that last claim first, that “mosque sighting” in Cuba. It was first reported by a certain Dr. Youssef Mroueh in an article in 1996. There is no record of a “Youssef Mroueh” receiving a doctoral degree in history. In the article, Mroueh claims, without quoting the original words of Columbus’s papers, that he noted “seeing a mosque.” Here is Youssef Mroueh: “Columbus admitted in his papers that on Monday, October 21, 1492 [sic] 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.”
Note that word “admitted,” as if Columbus had wanted to hide any evidence of a Muslim presence in Cuba.
Why did Youssef Mroueh not quote Columbus? Here’s why: Columbus wrote “Señala la disposición del río y del puerto…, que tiene sus montañas hermosas y altas…, y una de ellas tiene encima otro montecillo a manera de una hermosa mezquita.” [unnamed editor] Relaciones y Cartas de Cristóbal Colón (1892), p. 49
In English: “Remarking on the position of the river and port…, he [Columbus] describes its mountains as lofty and beautiful…, and one of them has another little hill on its summit, like a graceful mosque.” — Clements R. Markham (tr.), The Journal of Christopher Columbus (1893), pp. 62-3
Columbus did not write that he had seen a mosque, but rather, that he had seen one hill atop another, looking “like a graceful mosque.” Youssef Mroueh surely knew this, but didn’t want to let his readers know it. So he didn’t quote from Columbus, changed the description from a simile (X is like Y, the hill is like a mosque) and made it a straight description (“there’s a graceful mosque on the hill”), and hoped he could get away with it. And in fact, his version has been accepted by some Muslims, including Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who claimed in 2014 that “In his memoirs [sic], Christopher Columbus mentions the existence of a mosque atop a hill on the coast of Cuba.”
Columbus never did.
And just as baseless and absurd was Erdogan’s claim in the same 2014 speech that “Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus. Muslim sailors arrived in America from 1178.” Again, not a scrap of evidence. But such myths serve to feed Islamic pride. Many Muslims do believe such stories and dismiss any attempts by Westerners to disabuse them not as truth-seeking, but as examples of attempts to deny Muslim achievements.
The next claim made by Muslims is that Columbus had an “Arab” navigator.
Some Muslims have claimed that Columbus did employ two Muslims on his own ship, one as a navigator, and another as an interpreter. They are flatly wrong. Let’s consider the claims made that Christopher Columbus included Muslims in his crew. Not only is there not a shred of evidence to support this, but what evidence there is goes the other way. Columbus undertook his voyages because he wanted to discover an alternate route for Europeans to Asia, i.e., India, with its spices, precisely because Muslims had, with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, managed to seal off the old trade routes to the East from Christian Europe. Columbus, a devout Christian, who claimed the territories he discovered for “los reyes católicos” (the Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella), would never have taken on members of the enemy camp (of Islam) for his crew, and especially would not have entrusted the critical job of navigator to a Muslim. But so effective has this Muslim rewriting of history been that in 2004, a State Department employee put out a claim about Columbus’s Muslim crew members: in a press release entitled “Islamic Influence Runs Deep in American Culture,” Phyllis McIntosh of the State Department’s Washington File claimed that “Islamic influences may date back to the very beginning of American history. It is likely that Christopher Columbus, who discovered America in 1492, charted his way across the Atlantic Ocean with the help of an Arab navigator.”
No, it is not “likely.” It never happened. The State Department was falsifying history in order to win favor among Muslims, both here and abroad.
Why did McIntosh make this absurd claim, even though “may date back” and “it is likely that” are weasel words providing an escape-hatch of deniability? How did she make the leap from no evidence to “may date back” and from “may” to “likely”? And even if, which did not happen, one crew member had turned out to be an “Arab” and thus a Muslim, how would that allow us to conclude that “Islamic influence runs deep in American culture”? What kind of “Islamic influence” would a single crew member have had on Columbus’s voyages, with all the other crew members on all three ships being Christians (or conversos, Jews who had accepted Catholicism), or on the subsequent discovery and settlement of the New World? McIntosh was pulling rabbits out of an ahistorical hat. She, and the State Department for which she worked, either felt there was no harm in trying to curry favor with Muslims (history is silly putty to some; they shape it as they will), or were under pressure to rewrite history, possibly from George W. Bush’s office (he was constantly prating about how “Islam is peace”), as part of a feelgood outreach campaign to American Muslims. But where did this particular story, about Columbus’s “Arab navigator,” come from?
It came from Muslims themselves. And it is based on a case of mistaken identity. For it was Muslims who, when they learned of an “Arabic-speaking Spaniard” on Columbus’s first voyage, decided that this must refer to a Muslim Arab. In fact, the reference was to one Luis de Torres, a converso (a Jew who accepted Catholicism). Luis de Torres knew Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, and some Arabic, and was taken on not as a navigator but as an interpreter by Columbus, who thought his knowledge of Hebrew would be useful if in Asia they ran into any Jewish traders (who were known to travel far and wide) or into members of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. But Muslims, in their eagerness to put themselves into the picture with Columbus, have committed two historical errors: first, they thought that the interpreter, the “Arabic-speaking Spaniard” Luis de Torres, was the navigator, and then they assumed that if someone on Columbus’s crew spoke Arabic, as Torres did, he must have been an Arab and a Muslim. Wrong on both counts.