AHC: Early Islamic Contact with the Americas

[Krall]

I admit I get a lot of my AH ideas from Paradox games, and recently I've been playing a Morocco game which has got me thinking about whether an earlier "discovery" of the Americas by Islamic countries in Western Europe and Africa would be possible, and what the outcome of such a discovery might be. Certainly it doesn't seem implausible to me that an Islamic kingdom in Iberia, the Maghreb, or West Africa could have made contact with the Americas earlier, given their position and level of technology. There are some theories that this happened in OTL, though none are generally accepted.

So is there any way this would be possible? Could the Caliphate of Cordoba, the Almohad Caliphate, or even the Mali Empire have established contact with the Americas before Columbus did in OTL? And if so would they be able to exploit this knowledge to their advantage - would they be able to grow rich off trade and conquest?

[lscatilina]

Most important issue is that there's a really limited naval tradition in Western Arabo-Islamic world. It might sounds strange giving the importance of Islamic in Western Mediterranean history, but it's a quite different feature than exploration fleets.

It came at the point in the XIVth century, admittedly a semi-rationalisation, that naval transportation was seen as "fitting Christians" and going from Spain to Morroco by sea an inconvenience.

Another issue is the motivation : most of medieval North African realms or tribal states came from continental trade with Sudan (as in Sahelian Africa) and almost not from the Atlantic (safe late and relatively exceptional slave raiding). It's telling that the Emirate of Cordoba only funded a fleet worth of mention because of the Viking raids on the peninsula (which, at their credit, they defeated clearly twice on the coasts).

You simply didn't have the same naval and seafare tradition that you had in Indian Ocean, for exemple (mostly, IMO, because it was borrowed from ancient Greco-Persian traditions)

As for Malian expedition, it can safely be dismissed as a narrative decive : long story short, the only account we have is a Syrian chronicle where the most impressive pilgrimage of Musa II, towards east, was mirrored with his predecessor expedition to the west, as in to death and failure.

It would require some big out of the box thinking to get Atlantic expedition along Africa (It's not clear if they actually knew about Canary Islands, which they mostly ignored if they did, and they certainly didn't about Azores ) to say nothing going westwards with a naval technology that would make the trip (assuming one knowing roughly where to go) at least one month-length.

To say the least, it seems to require technological and cultural changes more or less out of nowhere and a severe dose of luck (for that matter, I doubt any European realm could have attempted this as well, at least not before the late XIVth at very best).

[punkrockbowler805]

That Malian sea expedition seems like a good bet. I've read about it. There are some stories that Al Andalusian sailors found the New World a few times.