Shall we discover America again?

I support the argument that the American continent was explored by Muslims and not by Christopher Columbus. If the president said it, then there should be no further discussion. This is what I gathered from a street interview conducted recently.  

The question was “Who discovered America?” Some answered "Turks," some answered "Columbus," two answered "Magellan" and one man said "Jules Verne." Apart from that, we obviously follow science through the perspective of current politics, and many people answered, “Tayyip Erdoğan said so.” Most had not heard of Columbus anyway.  

Dear citizens, this is thinking outside of the box. We can call this a historical innovation, a breakthrough. Were we really going to spend our lives with the history provided by the “tutelage” system? Erdoğan said, “Muslims discovered America,” he did not say “Turks.” But people on the street are not going to waste any time on that detail. They say this: “Well, we discovered it, as the president said.”

I also think Turks are a high probability. Before the Arabs got there, I’m sure the Turks went and opened their simit shops and meatball kiosks. I am also almost sure, at this moment, that the American bagel and the hamburger originated from us.

The Native Americans are Turks anyway. When a Turk goes to a foreign place, the first thing they do is bring their relatives over. This means that the Native Americans told their Muslim Turk relatives, “Come, buy up land here, it will gain value in the future.”

Well, do not exaggerate Columbus. He landed there, but he thought it was India; he was such a blind explorer. With so much booze, did he go to the Prince’s Islands or the Canary Islands, how would we know?

Let’s get serious. America was not discovered by Columbus in 1492. There was nobody living there 14,000 years ago. According to a theory, a clan walked across the Bering Strait while others went ashore in east America after going from one island to the other by ship.
 
In the year 1000, Vikings went to Greenland. They also went to what are the New England shores of the U.S. today. Then they went back to Greenland.

Now comes the weird stuff: Professor S. Frederick Starr from Johns Hopkins University, the founder of Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, also thinks America was discovered by a Muslim Turk. (December 2013, History Today magazine.)

Our man in support of this theory is Abu al-Rayhan al-Biruni. He was an astronomer, mathematician, geographer, pharmacologist and historian, who lived between 973 and 1048. He was born in Uzbekistan and lived in Seljuk territory, so he is officially our ancestor. He calculated the diameter of the earth at the age of 30 very close to the figure known today. He wrote theories on gravity 700 years before Newton. And he proved the existence of America for the first time, despite never traveling there, centuries before Columbus. He drew a detailed world map of Europe, Africa and Asia. He rejected the idea that the rest of the world was an ocean. He said, “If Eurasia is the middle of the world, then a natural phenomenon has happened and there is a huge continent inhabited by people between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

If President Erdoğan was referring to this, then OK. But I can’t really tell; after all, he also said Columbus saw a mosque in Cuba, etc...