On Sowell and McWhinney's views of fringe Southern and Gangsta Rap culture

a reply to: strongfp
Could they not have had a ship better suited to long voyages? Are you sure Ottoman galleys were the last word in Barbary Coast ships?
Your own source says:

For decades now, there have been discussions about whether Muslims discovered and reached America before Columbus; there have actually been claims that Muslim were in America long before Columbus, by well-known scholars such as Fuat Sezgin and some of his interlocutors, based on their analysis of Arab maps through the ages.[1] Some went even further, saying that Columbus admitted in his journals that he had seen a mosque on a Caribbean island on one of his voyages.

Can it be the Muslim world didn't discover the New World that long before Columbus, leaving little time for the accumulation of artifacts?

Can it be they wanted to spend the profits on the conquest of Europe rather than defending their fleet from European navies and native American tribes which were not a part of their trade system?

Can it be Spanish artifacts weren't that different from Berber? The Abbasids and their Berber allies did control much of Spain for more than 500 years just before Columbus.

As for my perception of time being all over the place, you've shown you only skim what I'm trying to say. It's not a chronological narrative.

originally posted by: SolveditCan it be they wanted to spend the profits on the conquest of Europe rather than defending their fleet from European navies and native American tribes which were not a part of their trade system?

I didn't proofread.

I mean of course that maybe they practiced extreme secrecy.

Various sources online say "Utman" is not a part of Scottish and people never say it in Scotland.

According to Wikipedia:

The word Ottoman is a historical anglicisation of the name of Osman I, the founder of the Empire and of the ruling House of Osman (also known as the Ottoman dynasty). Osman's name in turn was the Turkish form of the Arabic name ʿUthmān (عثمان).

So it might be how an Arabic speaker would ask someone if they were from the Ottoman Empire.

If my theory is correct and various people had some idea the New World existed before Columbus, it still can't be said that they rushed over as soon as firearms were good enough. From Wikipedia:

"By 1380, twelve years after the Ming dynasty's founding, the Ming army boasted around 130,000 gunners out of its 1.3 to 1.8 million strong army. "

So if Zhong He in fact discovered California as some claim, he probably could have conquered it if guns were in fact the main deciding factor.

Even before firearms, Old World conquerors would still have had at least two advantages:

They had metal weapons and armor.

Old World leaders had the political knowledge to raise and equip much larger armies. From Wikipedia again:

"In the early 17th century, the Iroquois Confederacy was at the height of its power, with a total population of about 12,000."

That's a little more than 1/10th of the number of European participants in the First Crusade, again according to Wikipedia.

What if a large portion of the Confederacy had been made up of people who had lost their jobs when the international slave trade started to collapse?

People with Viking heritage could sometimes be hard to tell from people from North Africa. The Vikings were probably part Berber. They may actually have started from the navy of the Umayyad invasion of Gaul. It has been genetically found that they were multiethnic.

It has also been said that the Southern army had surprisingly liberal attitudes toward blacks and mixed-race people serving in their ranks. There was no difference in pay, for example, unlike the North. It has also been remarked that if it weren't so, they would not have had an army. I think that means they needed the numbers. But what if they weren't white Southerners who had intermarried with Blacks? What if they were simply from North Africa, and had lost their gig selling slaves to Europe or South America, and decided to come here?

The Ottoman empire or their former vassals the Barbary States could have had their personnel involved in the African slave trade. They had expertise and experience. There are a few etymological suggestions the Ottomans had sold European slaves to West Central Africa, such as the word for a traveling minstrel, griot, being similar to the Lithuanian for playing an instrument, "grot" or "groti." There is also the fact that the West African pronunciation of Nigeria sounds like Lithuanian for "the nation of the disobedient" or Negerija, which may be what the Central European slaves called themselves if they got sold downriver to the Malian empire. That tends to prove they were there. It's possible their personnel also assisted in the international trade in African slaves.

All throughout the late 18th and the 19th centuries, Europe and the Americas were banning slavery left and right. The traders would have been losing their gigs. England and the United States were actually blockading the Slave Coast with naval squadrons starting in 1808 and 1819.

I have suggested there's a small chance some of the freedmen disappeared around the end of the Civil war. I have suggested there's a small chance black African slave traders from Africa found a way to come here and pay people off and steal identities in order to get a new place to live after their slave trading gig expired in Africa.

What if it wasn't just black Africans and what if it wasn't just at the end of the Civil War?

It's about room. When their source of foreign trade collapsed, perhaps the traders couldn't just retrain as something else. Perhaps their societies had no means of upward or sideways mobility.

What if all throughout the early 19th Century, more and more former Ottoman or Berber slave traders came here as more and more nations banned slavery or the international slave trade?

What if the plan was to create their own independent Caliphate?