@ Titania:
Actually, Allah is Arabic for god and some of the stories I've read in the Quran are very similar to the Bible. Almost like they were originally different regional version of the same thing.
Compared to some of the other holy texts of the Abrahamic faiths, I focused less attention on Qur'anic literature and interpretation until relatively recently (when I realised just how much I'm going to need this informatiom). Before that, I knew the basics, maybe a little more, but had focused on Judaism and Christianity.
Qur'anic texts pay high homage to both Jewish and Christian scriptures. Dozens of persons who are mentioned in the Bible, including a prophet called Isa ibn Maryam - Jesus, son of Mary also appear, but from a different perspective.
The creation stories are much alike, but there are difference, the most striking of which, in my opinion, are these:
* Eve, given the name Hawwa by Muslims (as she isn't named in the Qur'an) isn't blamed primarily for the sin of falling into the trap set by Iblis. Both she and Adam, a being from which male and female were made, took unique blame since one person can't take on the blame or punishment of another in Islam. (And it seems the belief Adam was not precisely male before the split between male and female could be read into both the Hebrew creation accounts as well as the Islamic account.)
* By virtue of their having eaten from the forbidden tree, thus gaining the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Hawwa could no longer live in paradise, and Iblis becomes an even more bitter enemy of both. Allah forgives the pair, however, but says they must now abide on the Earth where the necessities of life can be found through work. They are not cursed, except with the fact paradise would be denied to them during the fixed terms of their lives.
I would enjoy talking about this and going deep into it, but that's not what this site is for so I just stick to the basic story.
On a related note, rightists are quick to point out how bloody the Qur'an is: The passages, or even mangled bits, from the Qur'an, as fed to gullible people by "news" outlets with political agendas would leave anyone who never looked any deeper than those passages the claim the Qur'an is nothing but a manual for barbarism. They're wrong and even more wrong to claim the Bible is better. Nope. The Bible contains some spectacular acts of violence. If I cherry-picked from the Bible, and mangled the contexts, I could produce a hair-raising document no different from those allegedly "impartial" stuff circulated about the Qur'an.
Truth is, the Qur'an is no more violent that the texts to which it owes a literary debt.
This is also a good place to point out that Shari'a is the overarching term for Islamic religious law codes (good, bad, or neutral). It's no different in function and somewhat different in content that the 613 laws (or commands) that form the backbone of Jewish law.
