President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
has instructed Turkey’s educational institutions to adopt a policy of
highlighting the contribution of Islam to global science and arts,
including the discovery of the American continent by Muslim sailors some 300 years before Columbus.
“I
have to be clear that there is an important responsibility falling on
the shoulders of our Education Ministry and YÖK [the Higher Education
Board]. An objective writing of history will show the contribution of
the East, the Middle East and Islam to the science and arts. As the
president of my country, I cannot accept that our civilization is
inferior to other civilizations,” Erdoğan said in his address to
students at the opening of a religious school in Ankara on Nov. 18.
“Why [do they not
believe it]? Because they have never believed that a Muslim can do such a
thing. They have never believed that their ancestors could manage to
launch ships in the Golden Horn after transporting them across land,”
Erdoğan said, referring to Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II’s conquest of
Istanbul in 1453.
“They have never believed that their ancestors
ended the Dark Age and opened the New Age. That’s a lack of
self-confidence,” he added.
Erdoğan defended his claims about
the discovery of the Americas and underlined that the suggested had not
originally been made by him. “This claim is not new. It is mentioned in
Prof. Fuat Sezgin’s books. A number of academics in Turkey and in the
world have made this claim,” he said, without referring to his
suggestion that the Muslims who discovered Cuba built a mosque on a hill
there.
Fuat Sezgin is a Turkish professor emeritus on
Arabic-Islamic science, who has been living in Germany since the
aftermath of the 1960 coup in Turkey.
A day after Erdoğan voiced
his claim about the discovery of the Americas for the first time,
Sezgin participated in a press conference to introduce the Turkish
edition of his book on the history of Arab-Islamic literature.
"I wrote years ago that the American
continent was discovered by Muslims sailors. Everything written in the
book is correct, but nobody in my country speaks about it," daily
Milliyet quoted Sezgin as saying on Nov. 16. Bilal Erdoğan, the son of
the Turkish president, was sitting next to Sezgin during the press
conference.
“Western sources shouldn’t be believed as if they are
sacred texts,” Erdoğan added Nov. 18,
promising to maintain his
“encouraging” role in this regard.
In his speech, he also cited
the mega projects being carried out in Turkey, including the
intercontinental Marmaray undersea tunnel, the third bridge over the
Bosphorus and the Kanal Istanbul project, as reasons for the Turkish
youth to have "self-confidence."
"Hurriyet Daily News," November 18, 2014
Will he also claim that Muslims were the first to set fooot on the moon?
ReplyDelete