Dr. Shades wrote:How closely wedded to the Qur'An / Koran (however it's spelled) is Sharia law? Can one believe in the former and reject the latter, sort of like how Christ accepted the Old Testament but rejected "the traditions of the Elders?"
Shari‘a law was developed in its essence over the two or three centuries following the death of Muhammad. It relies to some extent on the Qur’an, but to a far greater degree on the so-called hadith -- traditions about the sayings and actions of Muhammad and the earliest Muslim community.
In my opinion (and not mine alone) the quasi-canonical hadith collections are heavily larded with spurious traditions, created for partisan ideological purposes by competing Muslim factions and reflective not so much of Muhammad and his time as they are of the imperial period that followed.
Boaz & Lidia wrote:Do you believe Allah is a God like you believe Elohim is a God?
Allah is simply the Arabic equivalent of the English word God. It's the word used in Arabic translations of the Bible, and, for that matter, in the Arabic translation of the Book of Mormon, the Articles of Faith, and so forth. It's used by Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews, as well as by Muslims.
And, in fact, it's cognate with the Hebrew word Elohim -- which is especially obvious when you remove the sound masculine plural ending from Elohim, thus yielding Eloh, and when you realize that Allah is simply a contraction of the words al-ilah, which mean "the god." (Arabic script has no equivalent of capitalization.)
Boaz & Lidia wrote:Do you believe Islam is TRUE?
It's partially true.