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.

Munther Younes is Reis Senior Lecturer of Arabic Language and Linguistics and Director of the Arabic Program in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University, USA. He is the author of The Routledge Introduction to Qur’anic Arabic and the ‘Arabiyyat al-Naas textbook series.