Do Muslims and Jews have a "Shared future" in the U.S. based on a shared past? For the past four years, two Wayne State University academics, Howard Lupovitch and Saeed Khan, have held an annual lecture series entitled "A Shared Future." Lupovitch, who is Jewish, is associate professor of history and director of the Cohn-Haddow Center for Judaic studies; Khan, a Muslim, is a lecturer in several departments, including Near Eastern and Asian studies.
Although a stated aim of the lectures was to "Connect members of both demographics through exploring hot-button topics," Khan made outlandish claims for a Muslim history in the New World based more on Islamic supremacism than facts.
Building on his earlier fiction of a 10th-century Muslim discovery of America, Khan added "There was a litany of Muslim cartographers, navigators, as well as maps, so it really then changes this narrative that Columbus found something new. It seems as though there was already a prescribed route."
The same uncritical acceptance of Muslim legend underlay Khan's claims about the 16th-century Spanish Muslim slave Estevanico, one of only four survivors of a large Spanish exploration party who, after the deaths of their comrades, trekked from Florida to Mexico.
Not content with asserting a Muslim foundation for Old World exploration in the Western hemisphere, Khan claimed for Islam that most American of musical forms: the blues.
In this, they resemble the fake histories peddled by well-attended traveling exhibits and the book describing them, National Geographic's 1001 Inventions: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Civilization, which helped popularize the myth that, as one critic put it, "The Muslims invented everything." This propaganda mars many current revised history textbooks that exaggerate the accomplishments of Islamic civilization while blaming its shortcomings on Western imperialism and bigotry.
As Orwell wrote in 1984, "Who controls the past controls the future." Saeed Khan is representative of Middle East studies academics rewriting American history to legitimize Islamism, the better to inoculate Islamists from criticism.
https://spectator.org/wayne-state-prof-peddles-fake-islamic-history/
Although a stated aim of the lectures was to "Connect members of both demographics through exploring hot-button topics," Khan made outlandish claims for a Muslim history in the New World based more on Islamic supremacism than facts.
Building on his earlier fiction of a 10th-century Muslim discovery of America, Khan added "There was a litany of Muslim cartographers, navigators, as well as maps, so it really then changes this narrative that Columbus found something new. It seems as though there was already a prescribed route."
The same uncritical acceptance of Muslim legend underlay Khan's claims about the 16th-century Spanish Muslim slave Estevanico, one of only four survivors of a large Spanish exploration party who, after the deaths of their comrades, trekked from Florida to Mexico.
Not content with asserting a Muslim foundation for Old World exploration in the Western hemisphere, Khan claimed for Islam that most American of musical forms: the blues.
In this, they resemble the fake histories peddled by well-attended traveling exhibits and the book describing them, National Geographic's 1001 Inventions: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Civilization, which helped popularize the myth that, as one critic put it, "The Muslims invented everything." This propaganda mars many current revised history textbooks that exaggerate the accomplishments of Islamic civilization while blaming its shortcomings on Western imperialism and bigotry.
As Orwell wrote in 1984, "Who controls the past controls the future." Saeed Khan is representative of Middle East studies academics rewriting American history to legitimize Islamism, the better to inoculate Islamists from criticism.
https://spectator.org/wayne-state-prof-peddles-fake-islamic-history/
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