A posthumous work by the most rigorous comparativist in her generation of Islamic studies scholars, Prophecy and Power proposes a major innovative approach to both the Prophet Muhammad and the Noble Qur'an. By the end of the ninth century the Prophet Muhammad had emerged as an intercommunal norm beyond compare, and yet the very constructedness of this model of Muhammad allows historians of religion to see how the process itself requires us to undercut the terms used. We undercut them by qualifying them with multiple meanings, both overlapping and corrective, but we also decapitalize them in order to suggest how much broader they were in earlier contexts, and how much broader they may become, or were intended to become, in later contexts.

Marilyn Robinson Waldman (1943-1996), the last graduate student of Marshall G.S. Hodgson from the University of Chicago, taught at Ohio State University, where she established the Religious Studies Program and also served as Director of the Center for Comparative Studies. Her research covered the areas of Islamic historiography, the history of religions, and comparative humanities. Bruce B. Lawrence is Nancy & Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor and Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. A specialist in Indo-Persian culture and the comparative study of religious movements, he has authored, co-authored, edited, and co-edited sixteen books. They include translations, monographs and trade books, the most recent being The Qur'an: A Biography (2006) and, with Aisha Karim, On Violence: A Reader (2007).