Goldfish, a good friend of mine is a muslim, and he enlightened me on a few issues, basically what you have said in your post. I'm not trying to antagonize anyone, I just want to share some knowledge, or at least my friend's knowledge
Jews have told me they have completly plagiarized the torah (The first testament).
What my friend has told me, that the quran was the continuation of the torah and the bible, thats about it.
I personally feel that Muslim have manipulated much of the orriginal text and in fact it is written that Jews and Christians are considered second class citizen to islam and that we should be forced to pay taxes and that anyone who is not religious should convert to islam or die. and it also says "To take sword to the infedels who will not obey these laws) which is basically Pagan, Athiest, Jews and Christians.
I really pissed my friend off when I told him about killing the pagens that do not obey the laws. He showed me the quote in the quran, and apparently it does not say "laws" but it said "treaty, agreement, accord, etc." I asked him why, and he told me that arabic is a werid language.
The part about Christains and Jews being second class citizens make sense if the goverment was a theocracy, a muslim theocracy. And you have to admit we did do that too, with like slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, and other stuff. But I'll get back to on that with a probably more accurate response.