Tremendous amount of work and effort you have put into this and shows what an incredible journey you have had in studying the Quran. Personally I do not know many who would have take it on. As you said the book itself is not short and not easy to read by anyone´s level. Forgive me if I misunderstand, but I believe that you were trying to discover for yourself if Islam is a religion of peace? If so, from reading this post, it appears you have discovered much violence as well as some contradiction in the book. Of course in every religion there are contradictions which is why I personally do not follow any. However, I consider myself a Jesus follower rather than a "Christian" as in I do not follow the traditional established religion, more that I believe in the wisdom and philosophy of the man himself. I must confess that I have not read the Quran but I do have two friends who are of the Islam faith and, just as your good self, they also once mentioned to me that I should read the "great" book. My answer to that question was this: "Before I consider reading the Quran would you answer one question regarding your faith?" They both agreed. This is what I asked. "If for some crazy reason I went and killed one of your family members, what does your religion say you do about that, I mean does it give you the right t take revenge, an eye for an eye?" They both answered emphatically "yes". I then replied "That is interesting, I idid not know that. I will then explain what my belief says if you killed one of my family members. I follow Jesus, and he said that I should not take revenge but in fact I must forgive you. No mater how hard that might be to do that is what I must" . I went on to explain that in my view it is somewhat easy to take the route of an eye for an eye but substantially more difficult to take the route of forgiveness. Thus to forgive must be of a higher level of understanding and thus of a higher level of thinking. I am not brave enough or clever enough to argue against the Quran, nor do I wish to and so will I take on the question of whether Islam is a religion of peace. However, what I am willing to say is this. No one can say that Jesus was NOT a man of peace. I must stress that I am not talking about the Catholic faith here or any other organised Christianity based religion, what I mean is just Jesus the man himself. As far as I know, Jesus never once killed anyone, nor told or ordered anyone else to kill another. In fact Jesus was the first human being in history to say that we should in fact "love our enemies". Something that the human race still has has not been able to do 2000 years after his existence. I believe in the man not the religion. He spoke of peace and lived peacefully. He spoke of love and gave love unconditionally. He said we should not judge each other and indeed he condemned no one. He spoke of forgiveness and even forgive those who killed him brutally. With regards to women, it is clear he treated them as equals which was revolutionary at the time to say the least. Just to reiterate that point, women were not allowed to enter the main area of the synagogue and the were not even allowed to give evidence in a law court. And yet when Jesus "allegedly" rose from he dead the first person he revealed himself to was a woman. This was not a good move if you wanted to have a reliable credible witness in those days. Forget the miracles, just the example of how he lived is spectacular in itself. Like I said, I have not read the Quran as you have, therefore I do not know if Islam´s Mohamed can stand up against the incredibly high standard Jesus set as a human being of peace.