Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Dear Moderators,
Please edit what's written about Allah in his page, its kind of causing problems for many of us (underestimation of the creator) and its ultimately wrong. It says in Arabic that Allah was born somewhere, and that Al Quran is his latest books.
Allah is not an author and should not be treated in such way.
This website is a very respectful place and should not deal with such sacred topics in such a comic silly way.
Thanks.
Eman Herzallah, Translator

Eman, are you referring to this profile, or is there another one?

(I'll leave it to more religiously knowledgeable librarians to make actual changes. There are a few Quran/Koran editions under Anonymous, our usual religious text holder, which might be combinable with the ones currently citing Allaah.)

This website is a very respectful place and should not deal with such sacred topics in such a comic silly way.

Very true, and thank you for bringing this to our attention!

Abigail wrote: "I'm confused. I thought the decision was made to list all sacred texts under the author "various," in order to avoid this sort of theological entanglement."

The decision was for Anonymous, actually, and for "religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author". (Here's the discussion.)

I'm with you, Abigail, I'm pretty sure that the whole point of the thread Cait linked was to avoid attributing books to "Allah" or "God" and other deities where even participants of the religion are conflicted about the accuracy of such things.

Cait,
Yes I mean that Arabic profile you linked to,
No doubt that Koran is by Allah, not by anonymous,
My point is that Allah is not an author, he did not "wrote" the Quran or the Bible, or any of his holy books like Kondera or Miller wrote theirs. Second the words written about Allah (in that Arabic profile) are not only wrong, but also abusive, and very arrogant.

Or better yet, to merge it with "Anonymous".

I merged it.

Ahem.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64...

In addition, there must not be a lot of Buddhists on the site. ETA: This is also unclear. By that I mean, that since the final verdict, few changes have been made to change the entries over to Anonymous.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15...

I just edited another version, planning to merge it with the most common entry (which I wrongfully assumed would be right and follow the librarian manual).

This, I think, is going to be an on-going problem. When you mix people not reading all too carefully (that's me sometimes) plus strong religious views...

ETA: In addition, perhaps the Anonymous author's page could be edited to make it a bit clearer.

* They are religious texts not generally attributed to a specific author

I can't speak for other religions, but the Dhammapada is, generally, attributed to Siddhartha Gautama. Thus, a Buddhist may read what is written in the Anonymous and not know of the controversy and think it applies more to books written by a number of people, such as the Christian Bible.

I took care of the former; I don't know enough about the latter to have an opinion.

I'll take care of it. :) I mostly just wanted to point it out.