The Media does not report this for the same reason they do not report,say,black disfunction here and the reason is racism.

Primative Non-whites must always be protected from their own words and deeds.

I am not an Islamic scholar, but my understanding is that the Koran does have a variety of contradictory Suras. The earliest Suras tend to be more "liberal," while the later ones are harsher.

The discrepency seems to come when the Prophet Mohammed went from being a religious mystic to a political war leader.

Islam does have schools of jurisprudence (4 of which are the dominant) which dictate which Suras are pre-eminent. All major schools state that the later Suras take precedent since they are the final revelation. I don't believe there has been any significant advances in developing more schools of jurisprudence since the Middle Ages.

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible for an uninformed reader to determine which Suras come first or last. The Koran is organized on the basis of length of the Suras, not in chronological or topical order.

Another thing that is important is the hadith, or sayings of the Prophet. This is not in the Koran, but is also vital in interpreting Islam. Certainly anyone who has only read the Koran, but does not know the hadith cannot say they can correctly interpret Islam.

I'm fairly certain this applies to Sunni Islam which is around 80%+ of the Muslim population. I do not know how Shi'a may interpret the Koran differently.

If anyone knows differently and can add more or correct any mistakes I made, please do so.

The co-existence of various schools of thought regarding Islamic scripture may be a bit misleading. The basis of Islamic religious teaching, seems to be, at least from my limited reading, is it's belief in it's ultimate superiority as THE final and complete revelation. It then follows that all who reject it as such are due less than full respect as thinking human beings and are categorized, legally, as such within Islamic legal systems whenever instituted as the temporal authority. It is a spriritual outlook which seems to be uniquely preoccupied with the here and now but from an early dark ages perspective. The world view of Mohammed and his contemporaries regarding the natural world is thus frozen in time while still guiding Islam's particular outlook which is beginning to look very much out of tune with the dynamics of the open society which is, secularism aside, a product of the western/Christian tradition.

The character of pagan, pre-islamic Arabia is to a large extent enshrined in Islamic thought in what appears to be a reaction to the spread of Christian monotheism througout the Arab world.

Some might find this series in The Atlantic, Jan. 1999, on the Koran interesting: What is the Koran?. Here is an excerpt from Part 3 regarding its inerrancy:

"Gerd-R. Puin speaks with disdain about the traditional willingness, on the part of Muslim and Western scholars, to accept the conventional understanding of the Koran. "The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or 'clear,'" he says. "But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims -- and Orientalists -- will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible -- if it can't even be understood in Arabic -- then it's not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not -- as even speakers of Arabic will tell you -- there is a contradiction."

Ibn Warriq (in "Why I Am Not a Muslim," a courageous book) says it's a third gibberish.

The inerrancy of the Koran, like the inerrancy of the Bible, causes a lot of suffering.

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13371

The Sacred Muslim Practice of Beheading
By Andrew G. Bostom
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 13, 2004

Reactions to the grotesque jihadist decapitation of yet another "infidel Jew," Mr. Berg,
make clear that our intelligentsia are either dangerously uninformed, or simply unwilling to come to terms with this ugly reality: such murders are consistent with sacred jihad practices, as well as Islamic attitudes towards all non-Muslim infidels, in particular, Jews, which date back to the 7th century, and the Prophet Muhammad's own example.

According to Muhammad’s sacralized biography by Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad himself sanctioned the massacre of the Qurayza, a vanquished Jewish tribe. He appointed an "arbiter" who soon rendered this concise verdict: the men were to be put to death, the women and children sold into slavery, the spoils to be divided among the Muslims. Muhammad ratified this judgment stating that it was a decree of God pronounced from above the Seven Heavens. Thus some 600 to 900 men from the Qurayza were lead on Muhammad’s order to the Market of Medina. Trenches were dug and the men were beheaded, and their decapitated corpses buried in the trenches while Muhammad watched in attendance. Women and children were sold into slavery, a number of them being distributed as gifts among Muhammad’s companions, and Muhammad chose one of the Qurayza women (Rayhana) for himself. The Qurayza’s property and other possessions (including weapons) were also divided up as additional "booty" among the Muslims, to support further jihad campaigns.

The classical Muslim jurist al-Mawardi (a Shafi’ite jurist, d. 1058) from Baghdad was a seminal, prolific scholar who lived during the so-called Islamic "Golden Age" of the Abbasid-Baghdadian Caliphate. He wrote the following, based on widely accepted interpretations of the Qur'an and Sunna (i.e., the recorded words and deeds of Muhammad), regarding infidel prisoners of jihad campaigns:

“As for the captives, the amir [ruler] has the choice of taking the most beneficial action of four possibilities: the first to put them to death by cutting their necks; the second, to enslave them and apply the laws of slavery regarding their sale and manumission; the third, to ransom them in exchange for goods or prisoners; and fourth, to show favor to them and pardon them. Allah, may he be exalted, says, 'When you encounter those [infidels] who deny [the Truth=Islam] then strike [their] necks' (Qur'an sura 47, verse 4)”....Abu’l-Hasan al-Mawardi, al-Ahkam as-Sultaniyyah." [The Laws of Islamic Governance, trans. by Dr. Asadullah Yate, (London), Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd., 1996, p. 192. Emphasis added.]

Indeed such odious “rules” were iterated by all four classical schools of Islamic jurisprudence, across the vast Muslim empire.

For centuries, from the Iberian peninsula to the Indian subcontinent, jihad campaigns waged by Muslim armies against infidel Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Buddhists and Hindus, were punctuated by massacres, including mass throat slittings and beheadings. During the period of “enlightened” Muslim rule, the Christians of Iberian Toledo, who had first submitted to their Arab Muslim invaders in 711 or 712, revolted in 713. In the harsh Muslim reprisal that ensued, Toledo was pillaged, and all the Christian notables had their throats cut. On the Indian subcontinent, Babur (1483-1530), the founder of the Mughal Empire, who is revered as a paragon of Muslim tolerance by modern revisionist historians, recorded the following in his autobiographical “Baburnama,” about infidel prisoners of a jihad campaign:

"Those who were brought in alive [having surrendered] were ordered beheaded, after which a tower of skulls was erected in the camp." [The Baburnama -Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, translated and edited by Wheeler M. Thacktson, Oxford University Press,1996, p. 188. Emphasis added.]

Recent jihad-inspired decapitations of infidels by Muslims have occurred across the globe- Christians in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Nigeria; Hindu priests and "unveiled" Hindu women in Kashmir; Wall Street Journal reporter, and Jew, Daniel Pearl. We should not be surprised that these contemporary paroxysms of jihad violence are accompanied by ritualized beheadings. Such gruesome acts are in fact sanctioned by core Islamic sacred texts, and classical Muslim jurisprudence. Empty claims that jihad decapitations are somehow "alien to true Islam," however well-intentioned, undermine serious efforts to reform and desacralize Islamic doctrine. This process will only begin with frank discussion, both between non-Muslims and Muslims, and within the Muslim community.