The founder of the History of the Arab Islamic Sciences Institute of Frankfurt University, Professor Doctor Fuat Sezgin, confirmed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s claim that it was actually Muslims who discovered the Americas.
The last Saturday, Turkish President Erdoğan claimed that Muslim navigators discovered the American continent in 1178, some 314 years before the Genovese explorer, Christopher Columbus. His claim was challenged by the international community.
“Muslims discovered America before Christopher Columbus,” Sezgin said and underlined that Europeans and many Muslims did not want to believe this fact."
Fuat Sezgin has worked on Islamic geography for over two decades and developed so many ideas on Islamic Arabic History.
“As a geography historian, degrees of latitude and longitude and maps are important for me. I can say something based on these tools and evidences,” he said and added, “I am a hundred percent sure that Muslims reached America before Columbus.”
More than 25 years, Sezgin worked on the Islamic geography and world maps, and wrote 6 volume on these topics.
He stated that all maps of Europe, Asia and Africa, which are now using widely around the world, were not only created by the Europeans. “The maps created by Muslims were the basis of these modern maps. I revealed this fact with all evidence."
He said that Europeans know this reality, but don’t want to accept it. “I also believed at the very beginning of my works, as other Europeans, that all maps were made by Europeans,” he said.
“This incident may be grievous to the people who don’t know the history of geography, but the important incident for me is the development of geographical knowledge and world maps,” Sezgin said.
Speaking at the inauguration ceremony of some 155 new schools in Turkey's capital, Ankara, on Tuesday, Erdoğan repeated his claim of last week.
"Those who ridicule our claim that Muslims discovered the Americas are the ones lacking self-confidence in their own history," Erdoğan said.
The Turkish President said that this was not his personal claim. This claim was raised by a number of historians before, including history professor Fuat Sezgin.
He also stated that he expressed this claim on the basis of research by scholars who are specialized in Islamic history.
"But in the international arena, our own youth started ridiculing us on that claim. Why do they oppose this? Because they have never believed that Muslims could make such achievements. This is the estrangement towards one's own history," he lamented.
The contribution of Islamic civilization to science and arts heritage is much more than those actually told by Western discourses on history, he continued.
"Our youth should have self-confidence, realizing that their ancestors highly contributed to civilization, science and arts," he added.
"If the history of science had been written objectively, it would have been acknowledged that the Middle East made a larger contribution to the arts and science than is currently known. I cannot allow a historic conception written by hegemons to break our self-confidence," Erdoğan said.
