Page 6 7KH ,VODPLF %XOOHWLQ For proof, they presented Columbus with the spears of these African Muslims. These weapons were tipped with a yellow metal that the Indians called Guanine, a word of West African derivation meaning gold alloy. Oddly enough, it is related to the Arabic world ‘Ghinaa’ which means ‘Wealth’. In 1498 CE, on his third voyage to the New World, Columbus landed in Trinidad. Later, he sighted the South American continent, where some of his crew went ashore and found natives using colorful handkerchiefs of symmetrically woven cotton which resembled the head dresses and loincloths of Guinea in their colors, style, and function. He referred to them as Almayzars. Almayzar is an Arabic word for ‘wrapper’, ‘cover,’ ‘apron’, and or ‘skirting’, which was the cloth the Moors (Spanish or North African Muslims) imported from West Africa (Guinea) into Morocco, Spain, and Portugal. During this voyage, Columbus was surprised that the married women wore cotton panties (bragas) and he wondered where these natives learned their modesty. Hernando Cortez, Spanish conqueror, described the dress of the Indian women as long veils and the dress of Indian men as ‘breechcloth painted in the style of Moorish draperies’. Ferdinand Columbus called the native cotton garments ‘breechcloths of the same design and cloth as the shawls worn by the Moorish women of Granada’. Even the similarity of the children’s hammocks to those found in North Africa was uncanny. Dr. Barry Fell (Harvard University) introduced in his book Saga America solid scientific evidence supporting the arrival, centuries before Columbus, of Muslims from North and West Africa. Dr. Fell discovered the existence of Muslim schools at Valley of Fire, Allan Springs, Logomarsino, Keyhole Canyon, Washoe and Hickison Summit Pass (Nevada), Mesa Verde (Colorado), Mimbres Valley (New Mexico), and Tipper Canoe (Indiana) dating back to 700-800 CE. Engraved on rocks in the old western US, he found texts, diagrams and charts representing the last surviving fragments of what was once a system of schools - both elementary and higher levels. The language of instruction was North African Arabic written with old Kufic Arabic script. The subjects of instruction included writing, reading, arithmetic, religion, history, geography, mathematics, astronomy, and sea navigation. In 1654, the English explorers reported a colony of bearded people wearing European clothing, living in cabins, smelting silver, and dropping to their knees to pray many times daily, wherever they might be. The early 17th Century Powhatan Indian’s description of Heaven is nearly, word for word, the description found in the Holy Qur’an. Tennessee Governor John Sevier records a 1784 encounter in what is now Western North Carolina with a darkskinned, reddish-brown complexioned people supposed to be of Moorish descent who claim to be Portuguese. In east Tennessee in late 1700’s, Jonathan Swift, an Englishman, employed dark-skinned men who were known as “Mecca Indians”. Many “Indian” words seem to have their origin in Arabic indicating a definite link and heritage. This is but a very small sampling of many Indian words with connections to Islam and Arabic/Turkish origins. There is much more which can be said about the legacy of Muslims in the early Americas. In spite of what the proverbial mainstream community may think, the presence of Muslims in the Americas is much older and much more profound than many of them know or care to admit. When the Prophet (pbuh) told his followers to “go as far as China” to spread the word of Islam, it is becoming apparent that they did just that and more!
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