To understand it properly (to the extent this is even possible) one needs to learn classical Arabic, and then also be able to understand all the literary structures and allusions in whats basically a poem. An awful lot of the Koran reads like gibberish, and plenty of it is contradictory. I understand that its a very difficult translation job. It doesn’t help that the thing is basically unstructured, with no coherent organization by topic or temporally, like the Bible.
Its probably a bunch of inside baseball for which we no longer have the context. Maybe this stuff made sense to a resident of Mecca in the year 690 but its probably fair to say that much of the meaning of the thing to a modern reader depends on the assumptions the reader brings to it. The Bible, for the most part, is a model of clarity compared to the Koran.
The Koran is fairly short, but commentaries and expansions(based on oral traditions) on the Koran are as significant, and arguably in the matter of Islamic law and day to day customs, much more so. Much of the stuff there actually supercedes the practices demanded in the Koran. The Hadith (primary collection of oral tradition) run to dozens of volumes, a few much more significant than the rest, and govern some rather basic things like the five daily prayers - the Koran is not itself very clear on this point and can be read to require only two or three prayers.
Interesting. (: