Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed over the weekend that Muslims discovered the New World before Christopher Columbus. He made the bold announcement at a televised speech in Istanbul to a group of Muslim leaders from the Americas. His claims are based on a paper by an academic affiliated with the As-Sunnah Foundation of America called Youssef Mroueh. Erdogan’s comments are already sparking much controversy throughout the world.
Mroueh wrote a paper in 1996 stating that in 1492 Columbus had reported seeing a mosque on top of a mountain while he was sailing near the north-east coast of Cuba. Most researchers believe that the mosque was actually a metaphor, to describe a