WASHINGTON, 6 May 2004 — Did Columbus discover America or did Muslim explorers discover it centuries before?
According to the Arab World Studies Notebook, a school textbook is designed to help US history and social studies teachers understand the history and culture of the Arab world, the Middle East and Islam — Muslims got here first.
The 540-page book says the Muslim explorers arrived in America in the 9th century, lived and married into the Native American Algonquin tribe on the East Coast. When European explorers later met the tribe in the 17th-century, they met tribal chiefs named Abdul-Rahim and Abdullah Ibn Malik.
Leo Weiner, an American historian and linguist at Harvard University, wrote in 1920 what he said was documented evidence that Arabs arrived to the United States before Columbus “discovered” the continent.
This concept was rejected when recently brought to the attention of the Algonquin Native Americans. They said there was no reference to this in their written records, or oral history.
Peter DiGangi, director of Canada’s Algonquin National Secretariat in Quebec, Canada, contacted Audrey Shabbas, editor of the Notebook. She then agreed to pull the offending paragraph from the book.
“The Arab World Studies Notebook is exactly what its meant to be, and no apologies need to be made for it. It’s a resource for teachers and their students to learn about the diversity of voices from the Arab world, Middle East and wider Islamic world,” Shabbas told Arab News in a telephone interview from her office in California.
She said the book is co-published by AWAIR, a nonprofit organization, and the Washington-based Middle East Policy Council. “It is very well thought of and is even being translated into Braille by a Catholic university in San Antonio, Texas,” said Shabbas. The notebook offers 90 readings and lesson plans covering Arab and Islamic history and culture.
Shabbas questions the motives of those who censured the offending paragraph.
“What’s interesting is the motive of the folks that brought this to the attention of the Algonquin Indians,” said Shabbas. “Once the Algonquin let me know that they had no records of Muslim names, we immediately agreed to remove it.”
