It doesn't really answer the question and I've no idea how accurate this is but according to
Bernard LewisIn the lands of Islam remarkably little was known about America. At first the voyages of discovery aroused some interest; the only surviving copy of Columbus's own map of America is a Turkish translation and adaptation, still preserved in the Topkapi Palace Museum, in Istanbul. A sixteenth-century Turkish geographer's account of the discovery of the New World, titled The History of Western India, was one of the first books printed in Turkey. But thereafter interest seems to have waned, and not much is said about America in Turkish, Arabic, or other Muslim languages until a relatively late date. A Moroccan ambassador who was in Spain at the time wrote what must surely be the first Arabic account of the American Revolution. The Sultan of Morocco signed a treaty of peace and friendship with the United States in 1787, and thereafter the new republic had a number of dealings, some friendly, some hostile, most commercial, with other Muslim states. These seem to have had little impact on either side. The American Revolution and the American republic to which it gave birth long remained unnoticed and unknown. Even the small but growing American presence in Muslim lands in the nineteenth century -- merchants, consuls, missionaries, and teachers -- aroused little or no curiosity, and is almost unmentioned in the Muslim literature and newspapers of the time.
The discovery of America was in a sense an unintended consequence of a military, economic and religious conflict, with Portugal and Spain on the one side and Muslims on the other, that had lasted through most of the fifteenth century. 1492 was also the year when the Spanish expelled the Jews and conquered Muslim Granada. At the time all this would presumably have seemed far more important than the discoveries. Barnaby Rogerson covers this in
The Last Crusaders. Review
here.
Topic: 1492 and Islam