Benefits for people who don’t live here? Great idea

Yet another exciting discovery from the world of Islamic science. As you are probably aware, Islamic culture has always paid a high regard to science and Muslims will tell you proudly that they invented absolutely nothing. That is, they have provided the world with the mathematical representation of absolutely nothing, what we now know as zero. Where would we be without nothing? In the tenth century the scholar Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Khwarizmi decided that it would be useful to draw a little circle to signify zero if you were doing some complex calculation. He called it sifr. There is some dispute as to whether this really was the first time anyone had recognised the existence of nothing, because the Sumerians may have stumbled across the now-familiar lacuna many thousands of years before Mohammed — the other Mohammed, the really famous one whose image we must not depict for fear of instant decapitation — existed.

But it is churlish to carp and quibble, I think. They want the possession of nothing, I think we should let them keep it. Anyway, that was all a very long time ago — but still Islamic culture keeps giving and will not rest upon its laurels. Just this week, for example, the Turkish Muslim scholar and evangelist Mücahid Cihad Han announced on television that people who masturbate will end up with pregnant hands. I don’t think there is much doubt that Islamic culture is the first to come up with this discovery; I have done my research and can reveal that the Sumerians, for example, thought onanism a perfectly respectable practice and quite undeserving of censure or likely to result in appalling consequences. So this is an incontestable first, and a rather worrying discovery at that. Because let’s be honest — none of us want pregnant hands. It would be a terrible encumbrance, especially if you were trying to tie your shoelaces or endeavouring to put up a flat-pack bookshelf in the spare bedroom.