Time to liberate Cuba!

I sensed this was coming when I discovered a Turkish book, “Goethe and Islam,” which proudly announced that “in addition to the controversy regarding whether Johann Wolfgang Goethe was Muslim, there is now proof that the German writer … was not only Muslim, but also Turkish.”

The Turkish author, an associate professor, [argued] that Goethe descended from a Turkish Seljuk officer, Mehmet Sadık Selim, who was taken hostage and taken to Germany during the Crusades. Most probably, Goethe was not a Christian, since the cross was among the four things he disliked. But the other three things make his Turkishness even more dubious: Tobacco smoke, bugs and garlic.

Thus, I wrote on Jan. 11, 2013: “But I expect Turkish scientists to work more vigorously and prove that Albert Einstein descended from a pious Muslim Ottoman family … And I always thought Bill Gates’ looks betrayed his Anatolian roots. Does he not look like a typical grocer in Konya?” (“Crash of civilizations in the age of ‘Holympics’”)

I always suspected the first men on the moon may have seen a mosque and a Turkish flag when they landed there, but hid it from the public. Same as that the Titans were in fact the Turkish precursors to the Janissaries. But until President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan revealed that Muslim sailors reached the Americas 314 years before Christopher Columbus, I did not know the time would come so soon to liberate Cuba.

Mr. Erdoğan also revealed that Columbus had seen a mosque atop a hill on the coast of Cuba and asked the Cubans to rebuild it. That’s hardly surprising, but not a good omen for the Cubans -- Leonard Cohen’s song may regain popularity in revised lyrics: First we take Jerusalem, then we take Havana!
After all, Mr. Erdoğan and his men seriously believe that Jerusalem and Istanbul have been Muslim cities since time immemorial and have vowed to liberate the former. Not really good news for the Castro Bros.

(Personally speaking, Brazil and Argentina also look like historical Muslim lands to me, but this theory needs to be refined a bit.)

But who may have discovered Anatolia, the Turks’ present-day homeland? The Turks. But then the Turkish-Sunni supremacist narrative celebrates 1071 as the year the Turks arrived in Anatolia. In which case, the Anatolian lands must have been uninhabited before 1071. Alternatively, Anatolia, like most other lands on earth, was Turkish even before the arrival of Turks. But I prefer to leave it to historians to verify if Muslim Turks also saw a mosque atop a hill in or near Vienna when they reached the gates of the city in 1683.

As for North America, things take a puzzling turn. It remains a mystery why American Indians, who were ethnic Turks according to many Turks, did not build mosques before the infidels came to the same lands. One convincing theory could be that the American Indians did build mosques, but the invading infidels demolished them.

We should always encourage creative contributions to the science of history.