Charging Steeds or Maidens Performing Good Deeds: In Search of the Original Qur'ān brings an important contribution to understanding the development of the Qur'ānic corpus. Through a selection of meaningful case studies, the author convincingly argues for a different interpretative approach to the Qur’ānic text. Taking as a starting point the consonantal skeleton of the holy text, known as the ‘Uthmānic rasm, and offering a critical reading of the Muslim interpretive tradition, such an approach produces a clearer understanding of parts of the Qur’ān which have defied Muslim and non-Muslim scholars since the early days of Islam.