Islam is boring

by Mary Jackson (March 2007)

It’s dull, dull, dull. My God it’s dull. It’s so desperately dull and tedious and boring and unimaginative and irrepressibly drab and awful and desp-er-ate-ly dull.

Python’s Michael Palin was talking about accountancy, but he could just as easily have been talking about Islam. And accountancy is not violent or dangerous, although there have been heated arguments over cash flow hedges and calculators at dawn over embedded derivatives.

Islam is like global warming. It’s very boring but very important. It would be better if the important things were interesting, so we would all take notice of them.

Why is Islam so dull? There are a number of reasons.

Dull things feed off themselves. Writers who review other writers’ books – favourably for fear of a bad review in revenge – end up dull, even if they start out interesting. Television programmes about television are usually dull. Actors are dull when they talk about acting.

The purpose of Islam is Islam – the spread of Islam, the subjugation and destruction of all things non-Islamic. There is nothing else to Islam. It feeds off itself and reproduces itself. Just as a human being would, without challenges, Islam becomes tyrannical – and dull.

Allah, in Islam, created man to be his slave, with no thoughts, initiative or ideas of his own, and in consequence no morality, for morality is only possible if one can choose between right and wrong. As well as being tyrannical and cruel, this is tedious. There is none of the debate that the Judeo-Christian God has, for example with Job, because the perfect Muslim is not autonomous: he is an automaton.

Islam’s rules are quite arbitrary. Muslims are enjoined to put their right shoe on first, but it could just as easily be their left. The rules are arbitrary because Allah is arbitrary. He can make anything happen, and change his laws at will. This makes Allah terrifying, but boring at the same time. Any child knows that a story without rules would be tedious. The rules are different from the rules we have in real life, but there must be internal consistency. And games without rules would be pointless; nobody would pay to watch two top-class tennis players hit the ball into the net and call it a goal.

There are many other reasons why Islam is boring, but I can’t be bothered thinking about them, as I have a freshly painted wall to observe drying. The problem is that we are obliged to think about Islam because, although it is boring, it threatens everything that isn’t boring: art, music, cathedrals, literature, jokes, dogs, love, perfume, bacon, statues, science, wine, beer, Catherine Tate, limericks, films, plays, democracy and Spinal Tap.

How can something as boring, stupid and pointless as Islam destroy something as great as Western Civilisation?

It happens. Think of friends or relations you have known, lively interesting people, who acquire dull wives or husbands. Nine times out of ten, the dullness prevails. A late relative of mine used to remark when two boring or nasty people got together: “Well, at least they won’t spoil another couple.” People level down more than they level up. Something as dreary and nasty as Islam will drag us down to its level rather than allow us to change it for the better. That’s the way it goes.

Anyway, I’m bored with Islam, so that’s it for now.

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Mary Jackson contributes regularly to The Iconoclast, our Community Blog. Click here to see all her contributions, on which comments are welcome.