By Ibn Katakpingi

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you
understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss
yours." -Stephen Roberts.

Islam appears to many as very a interesting phenomenon. The intrigue felt by many for the least
interesting of the world's monotheisms stems from the opacity of its teachings and the exotic nature
of the language of the supposed revealed text. On the one hand, this is a religion that preaches peace
among humans and total submission to the will of Allah (the Muslim sky god). On the other hand,
Islam has re-emerged as the greatest threat to our collective progress as humans; notorious for some
of the most horrific acts of violence in recent history. Islamic regimes not only oppress their
citizenry but seek to impose their brand of justice on citizens of the free world. To be fair, violence
has always characterized the religions calling themselves monotheisms. It seems that since the
invention of the idea that there is only one God, there have been genocides, homicides, suicides,
rapes, arson, swindling, and other despicable acts committed in his name. Islam attempts to set itself
apart from the other monotheisms, which it claims are a corruption of the true revelation of
Mohammed, given to him as God's final act of redemption for sinful humankind. But what is at the
core of the Islamic faith? Who was Mohammed, the founder of Islam? What were the origins of the
Qur'an and the hadith? Why do Muslims reject attempts (with the threat of death) to subject the
Qur'an to literary and textual scrutiny like all other books? Does anything in Islam justify its claim
that the Qur'an is the final and unalterable word of God? In this article, I will give my lay view on
these questions and attempt to show that Islam suffers the same objections as Judaism, Christianity
and indeed all of religion. I hope to show by this that the confidence of Muslims in the veracity of
their faith stems from a mixture of illiteracy and extreme credulity resulting from the harsh and
swift manner in which disagreements with the Islamic revelation are resolved, the least of which is
the death sentence. Islamic apostasy by one individual can cause an entire family to be targeted for
“termination”, which makes the death of the individual a lesser punishment.
The story of Islam, in brief, goes like this. During the 7th century of our approximate calender, an
illiterate merchant in Mecca reportedly received revelation from Allah, or God, through the same
intermediary who was claimed to have announced the glad tidings of the conception of Jesus to
Mary; the ever-useful archangel Gabriel. The merchant was Mohammed. He had gone into the
mountains during the month of heat, or Ramadan, and was asleep or in a trance when the said angel
twice commanded him to read. Asking the angel what he should read the third time he was given
the command, Mohammed was told to read in the name of the benevolent God who fashioned man
out of a clot of blood! Mohammed, deciding that the experience was an unusual one, recounted it to
his wife Khadija, an elderly but conveniently rich widow whom he had married. Khadija sent
Mohammed to her cousin, a man named Waraqa Ibn Naufal who knew the Torah of the Jews and
the gospel of the Christians. Waraqa Ibn Naufal confirmed the prophethood of Mohammed.
Apparently, Ibn Naufal didn't know enough to inform Mohammed about the Bible's claim that
humanity should not expect any more prophets. If he did, the world might have been spared of the
additional trouble wrought upon it by this depravity called Islam.
Mohammed then received many more revelations, the Suras, in which the truth of history and the
will of Allah were made known. When the idolatry of Mecca was challenged by Mohammed's
revelations, he and his followers were forced to flee to Medina, the migration known as hejira that
marked the beginning of the Moslem calender. Many bloody battles were fought through which
Mohammed and his followers established Islam as a system.
Secretaries of the prophet were at hand to write down the revelations as they came to him, and some
followers then committed the texts to memory, the hafizes. Some years after the death of the
prophet, his successors, necessitated by the deaths of the hafizes during the bloody campaigns by
which Islam was disseminated, decided to have the Qur'an compiled into a book. It is said that, bits
of paper, wood, skins and other artefacts on which texts were scrawled as well as witnesses were
assembled during the first caliphate of Abu Bakar, and the Qur'an was made out of this. Other
accounts claim that it was during the reign of Ali Ibn Abi Talib, the fourth Caliph that the Qur'an
was compiled. Yet, other accounts credit the compilation to Uthman Ibn Affan, the third Caliph.


This time it was claimed that the appearance of different versions of the revelation in different
quarters necessitated the collation of an authorized version. Copies of the standard version were
distributed and all other versions destroyed. There are some Muslims who think that the Qur'an fell
down from the skies, an idea that was suggested to me during the disastrous early years of my
young life. So confident are Muslims in their delusion!


The hadith are a compilation of hearsay of the sayings and doings of Mohammed and his
companions, put together centuries after the purported events. An authentic hadith is one that is
supported by an isnad, an “unbroken chain” of reliable witnesses. Bukhari, one of the most wellknown
of the six compilers, died in the year 870 AD, 238 years after the death of the Mohammed.
You would be justified in your criticism if you question the length of the isnad (and the twisting of
stories with the passage of time) necessary to fit 20 decades of orally transmitted works. The hadith
determine the everyday lives of Muslims. If it should seem strange that Allah (or God) gave his
final revelation and path to righteousness through this murky business, that is because it is strange.
To use rumour as the basis to put someone to death for adultery, or to carry out unsolicited “surgical
procedures” on people for petty thievery seems to do little justice to our perceptive faculties as
Homo sapiens.
Importantly, Islam presents the same objection as Christianity and Judaism, its clear antecedents; it
is man-made, fabricated by Mohammed and embellished by his later followers, and unctuous
scribes and compilers. The problem does not seem to have occurred to many Muslims, but even a
god with commonsense must realise that revealing their final and unalterable word to an illiterate
merchant in an obscure part of the world and in a language that is barely intelligible even to native
speakers is not the way to sell the message to everybody everywhere. Granted that this god does not
code software and has not heard about high-fidelity copying and storage discs, he (or she) must at
least have the presence of mind, a mind especially blessed by the ability to know the future and for
the sake of people like me, to reveal this final message to one who could make a faithful and
indestructible copy, not an illiterate. Why am I convinced that Mohammed made the story up?
Because his message is borrowed from the myths and fairy tales that littered, and still litter the area.
And by the way, I have wondered why the desert is such an excellent place to reveal the will of
God. My pet theory is that conjuring a benevolent but capricious God in a perpetual tug-of-war with
a powerful but evil antagonist, the devil, explained the harshness of everyday life in the desert.
Weirdly, Muslims believe in desert devils, or djinnis, claiming that though they are invisible to us,
they form the third kind (angels and humans are the other two). It is even claimed in Islamic lore
that djinnis were used to build Solomon's temple. Curiouser and curiouser still! The weirdness of
the Islamic revelation is the subject of another article, so I will not discuss the ridiculous, antiscientific
and small-minded claims of the Qur'an further.
The final straw? Islam is earthly, power-grabbing and and factional. Mohammed was not only a
humble prophet as many Muslims would like to believe. He was also a general and a politician. He
led his followers in the many battles he fought to extend the ideology, and many lives were lost
needless to say. The prophet's military adventures paint a picture of a contradiction: a humble and
pious man holding parchments of his revelation in one hand and a long, sharp bloody sword in the
other. Make your choice, his poor victims were told. Followers were incited (and are incited) to war
with promises of wealth and bliss in heaven if they died in war (or are martyred). I imagined a
martyr was someone who was picked from his home and killed for something they believed in (like
those three justices murdered in cold blood on that fateful 30th June 1982 night for upholding the
law) until Islam redefined martyrdom as the death of a divinely-inspired freebooty soldier justly
killed by people attempting to defend themselves. Consider the following passage from the hadith,
which by the way has equal canonical authority as the Qur'an itself:
Nobody who dies and finds good from Allah (in the hereafter)
would wish to come back to this world even if he were given the
whole world and whatever is in it, except the martyr who, on
seeing the superiority of martyrdom, would like to come back to
the world and be killed again (in Allah's cause).
Yes. Incitement to war and destruction is the right way to describe this warrant for suicide bombing.
But it undermines the intellect of the all-knowing and all-merciful god if he could sell his message
of hope and salvation for humanity under such appalling circumstances. Islam established itself as a
caliphate after the death of the prophet. Problems and conflicts of succession arose and schisms
were soon apparent. Presently, we hear of conflicting fatwas from conflicting authorities all
claiming to be interpreting the will of Allah in matters that very often involve people's lives. Final,
inerrant word indeed!
It is precisely because Islam, like Christianity and Judaism from which it was copied, is the belief
in outdated texts that fundamental Islamic societies are so antagonistic to human advancement. It is
because subjugation of women is outdated that we find the spectacle of a woman dressed from head
to toe in a black burka about the free streets of Europe so appalling. It is because freedom of
conscience is an unalienable right every human must have that Islam should be prevented from
imposing its legislations. Apparently, the punishment reserved for “sinners of conscience” such as
fornicators, adulterers, prostitutes, homosexuals, porno stars and their fans in the eternal fire is not
enough and Muslims decide to apply their own punishment here and now.
But it is precisely for these and other reasons that Islam should be rejected and discarded as a
nonsense, retrogressive ideology, whose claims have no shred of evidence to support them. In much
the same way as I reject the tempting possibility that my cat cooks my dinner instead of my wife
(they are often together in the kitchen!), I distrust the idea that a god capable of creating the
universe, which is almost infinite in space and in time, this paragon of design entrusted his final
revelation to an illiterate merchant in an obscure region of the cosmic speck that earth is, with the
pointless but arduous call to...READ! (Qur'an chapter 96).
email: katakpingi@ymail.com