Who discovered America? Turks or Muslims?

Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan, as you might have probably heard, argued last week that Muslims discovered the Americas some three centuries before Christopher Columbus. Since then, this unexpected take on history has been attracting the attention of not just the Turkish but even the international media. I, too, discussed the accuracy of Erdoğan’s claim in my previous piece in these pages. (“Tayyip Erdoğan and Christopher Columbus,” HDN, Nov. 19) But there is more to this debate than the accuracy or the inaccuracy of the claim. Deep down, it tells us something about the unusually ideological approach to history in Turkey.

To explain what I mean, let me take you back to the 1930s, when a “New Turkey,” for its time, was being built under the auspices of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. His ideology, called Kemalism, aimed at not only establishing a new republic but also building a new national consciousness. At the core of this effort lay the veneration of the Turkish identity. Kemalists blamed the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire for overlooking and even suppressing ethnic Turks for centuries. Now, they claimed, was the time for a secular Turkish renaissance after a millennia-long Islamic “dark age.”

That is why Atatürk kept praising “the Turk,” and his capabilities, in almost every speech he gave and every policy he initiated. The promotion of a pseudo-scientific history thesis that defined Turks as the cradle of human civilization was one such policy. That is why history textbooks and popular media of the 1930s was full of “discoveries” about the hidden role of Turks in world history.

In this story, there was one interesting detail that I did not know until the other day, when I read the column of respected academic Hilmi...