Layan Damanhouri
Saudi Gazette
What was long taught in history books and classrooms may turn out to be false claims. This is shown in a recent documentary film titled “We Discovered America Before Columbus.” The film, made by Saudi filmmaker Dr. Khalid Abualkhair, aims to present the real history of the discovery of the Americas through a series of interviews with historians and academics and newly-found evidences.
Abualkhair holds a PhD in political media and teaches Media and Political Communication at Taiba University in Madinah. In a year and a half, he set out on a journey across continents to unveil the truth about early Musims’ encounters in the American continents that counter today’s historical records narrated to generations since European colonialism.
“It was like putting pieces into a puzzle,” Abualkhair says, in an exclusive interview with Saudi Gazette.
Responding to the long debate of who were the first Americans, the film explores the American continents in two parts with the first segment focusing on the discovery of North America. “While there are theories made, there are also scientific facts. Some theories say the Native Americans reached America 16,000 years ago. Some state that the Irish were the first to arrive while others say the Vikings. And some even say the Japanese arrived in Ecuador. There also facts that reveal that the Africans and Chinese arrived. However, I decided to focus on the proofs from Andalusia and Mali.”
The film presents facts from documented sources as well as a series of interviews with dozens of historians, university professors and academic researchers in Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Morocco, Senegal and Mali.
In her book ‘We Were Not Us’, published in 1992 which marked the 500th anniversary of the fall of Granada, Duchess Luisa Isabel Alvarez states it is not the Spaniards who discovered America, backing her claims with documents of her family’s archives as well as the archives of Medina Simancus. “I referred to Duchess Luisa Isabel Alvarez because the archives include 4 million documents dating from the 12th century till today. Her family of Medina-Sidonia is significant because it’s the third most important family in Spain after King Juan Carlos,” says Abualkhair.
“The Simancus archives are the daily governmental documentation of royal decrees, declarations and letters from King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I until the 18th century. All of it is available and conserved. And the author referred to real facts and historical documentation.”
Letters and correspondence reveal that the Muslim Andalusians, who ruled over Spain between the 8th and 15th century, frequently traveled to America to trade goods long before Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the New World in 1492.
“Columbus’s expedition had three ships, two of which belonged to a maritime family called Benzon, or Ibn Zayn, who were knowledgeable and experienced in traveling the Atlantic Ocean,” says Abualkhair, who also investigated cartography and old maps drawn before the famous 1492 expedition.
“When I went to Spain to film the documentary, I was warned not to question two things: Catholicism and the discovery of America!” he added. “However, academics from universities and research institutes have shared their knowledge and facts.”
The second part of the film explores the discovery of South America through Muslim traces in Brazil by investigating the expedition of King Abubakr II, the ruler of the Mali Empire. “The Mali Empire lasted for 250 years. It was the richest kingdom in the world because it was famous for gold. It consists of 12 modern-day countries from Central Africa to Nigeria and Ghanam” Abualkhair says.
“The Andalusian civilization gradually transferred to Africa because the Mali Empire invested in Islamic scholars from Andalusia and invited them. As a result, the Timbuktu civilization was established and became the capital of culture and intellect.”
“Abu Bakr II ruled Africa and had immense wealth, political power and a strong army,” he further says. “Brazilian ambassador to Nigeria and historian Alberto da Costa e Silva says his belief was that there was no river without two coasts. So the African ruler set to cross the ocean to the other shore and establish an Islamic kingdom, handing over the throne to his brother Mansa Musa. His journey of 200 ships was planned with the Andalusian scholars who already had experience in traveling frequently to America.”
Once in Brazil, Abualkhair along with a crew of filmmakers discovered several truths to traces of Muslim African settlements in Salvador, Bahia, including an old mosque turned into a church, and diaries of travelers describing water streams similar to that of the Amazon River, and accounts of Malian slaves in later centuries in the Americas. There was also evidence that the Islamic records were that of African origin and not Arab.
According to historian and professor at University of Sao Paulo Dr. Iris Kantor, nationalistic historians during the colonial era refused to talk about the truth until the 1900’s. The new historians now seek to rediscover their real history about Portugal and Brazil.
Unlike modern-day historians, Duchess Luisa further said the Spanish monarchy had a racist view towards their history, eliminating “everything that wasn’t Catholic or non-white”. She further said the ones benefitting from history are the ones who hid it. During the colonial era, Muslims were declining in power and the Europeans wanted to conquer the gold and riches.
When asked about the choice of his subjects interviewed in the film, Abualkhair said, “I decided to interview Western and South American historians to refer to their own resources and data.”
After completing the film in 2014, Abualkhair toured several countries and sent the film to 700 universities around the world to call on researchers and historians to study the subject in depth and ultimately “rewrite history”. The proposal was well received by universities to conduct archeological research including Yale University, the University of Bolivia, and the University of Sao Paulo.
“As historians, it’s our duty to study the subject in depth and not accept Western accounts of history as is,” says Dr. Al-Johara Al-Maiman, an assistant professor in history at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. “This is an opportunity to conduct research and academic papers on the topic.”
Abualkhair says, “The fact that the Europeans hid an important part of history is real. Their own professors now admit it. There’s a famous quote. It says ‘history is written by the victors’.”
