Central Asian Muslim scholar Abu Raihan Al-Biruni hypothesized the existence of the Americas in the early eleventh century.
Amid the growing wave of pessimism
regarding the so called ‘official story’ that has for centuries
attempted to convince the world that Spanish explorer Christopher
Columbus was the first person to discover the Americas, an article which
claims that central Asian Muslim scholar Abu Raihan al-Biruni
discovered America the continent centuries before Columbus has come to
light.
Writing in History
Today, S. Frederick Starr explained that the Muslim scholar had indeed
discovered the Americas long before Columbus set sail in 1498. According
to the article, Abu Raihan al-Biruni, who was born in the year 973 in
what is today known as Uzbekistan, was the first person to officially
suggest that an undiscovered landmass in the ocean between the Europe
and Asia actually existed.
Although al-Biruni, who made the claim
in the early eleventh century, never himself laid eyes on the Americas,
his unmatched expertise on geography and mapping led him to the
conclusion that the known world – which spanned from the west coasts of
Europe and Africa to the east coasts of Asia – only accounted for
two-fifths of the world.
His knowledge of both Middle-Eastern and
Indian languages, as well as being trained in mathematics, astronomy,
mineralogy, geography, cartography, geometry and trigonometry under
great scholars like Ahmad al-Farghani, gave him deep insight into the
sciences of various fields and civilizations. Al-Biruni began by working
out the latitudinal and longitudinal locations of various cities in
central Asia, India, the Middle-East and the Mediterranean.
Having studied the works of Ancient
Greek scholars like Claudius Ptolemy and Pythagoras, al-Biruni was of
the few people in that time that actually accurately estimated that the
earth was round. His teacher al-Farghani had also estimated that the
earth was indeed round, and did surprisingly well to provide a
near-accurate measurement of the earth’s circumference, which Columbus
himself also used as a basis for his own explorations. However, Columbus
failed to note that al-Farghani had given the measurement in Arab miles
rather than Roman miles, leading him to grossly underestimate the
distance of his journey. Furthermore, Columbus had no intention of
discovering the Americas when he set sail, as he assumed that his
travels would take him directly from Europe to Asia.
Al-Biruni, like his teacher, also
provided an estimation of the earth’s circumference, which happened to
be a lot more accurate, skipping only 10.44 miles from modern
measurements. As well as proposing that the earth orbited the sun rather
than the more commonly accepted opposite notion of that time, in his
book Codex Masudicus, Biruni also hypothesized the existence of the
Americas.
This theory was proposed in around 1037,
by which point al-Biruni would have been 70 years old. For this reason,
due to not having the energy nor the means to make the trek himself,
al-Biruni’s belief remained a mere theory. That is not the say that the
Americas had not already been discovered, because there are also records
citing that Norsemen from Scandinavia scouring across Iceland and
Greenland, eventually accidently landing on Canada only to be chased
away by natives who were already living there also exist from the late
tenth century. However, al-Biruni was the first person from the known
world to officially claim the so called ‘new world’ existed.
