4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST in other spheres of social relations the conceptions and ideas of a particular religion are constantly changing in both substance and form. These changes again not only tend generally to conform to the social principles thrown up by radical adjustments in the production relations in a given historical situation, but also contribute to shaping them. As Engels prefers to put it, with the rise of world religions, "particularly of Christianity and Islam, the more general historical movement acquires a religious imprint"." This phenomenon manifests itself more sharply in the history of Asian societies which induced Marx to pose the question: "Why does the history of the East appears as a history of religion?"8 By posing this question, apparently, Marx was hinting at the social efficacy of world religions being inversely related to the proximity of the host societies to civilisation. The above theoretical schema can be very useful in the study of Islam which along with Buddhism and Christianity, has been characterised by Engels as one of the world religions.9 It goes without saying that in the Marxist perspective, the study of a world religion like Islam would be inseparable from the study of the civilisation which it generated and is still sustaining in a major part of the world. In fact there already exists a wide range of writings on the history and character of Islamic civilisation in which the use of different &ets of conceptual tools and frameworks derived from tKe Marxist theory have led ^the individual authors to vastly divergent conclusions. On the one hiand, for example, is the view of the Soviet authors of .4 Short History of World, who regard "the emergence of feudal relations in Arabian Peninsula" as the central feature of the social setting in which Islam arose. The unification of the Arabs through the propagation of Islam is -seen , by. these authors as "coinciding" with the "f^udal^sation.of both the nomad and settled people".10 This view, which ^lt<^gether ignores* th? crucial feature of long-di&Unce trade giving tj^tp a merchant community at Mecca, is obviously not based on/the actual ev'^ewe relating tp the Arabian society of the 7th century, ^lorcpver, it apparently stems from n theological acceptance of only-one; &et of Marx's and Engels's stray observations on Islarm-whi^hi ?t times tend to imply its in-built propensity towards prop|oting feudal relations in the territories under it& s^^y. As against this r^ther<)ogmatic view, are the interpretations put forward by orientalists like Montgomery Watt and Maxime Rodin&on who have combined their painstaking research of the original source material with a sociological method of analysis based on a liberal use of Marxist concepts. These authors, despite many disagreements on important questions relating to Islam's role in promoting social and economic changes, share the characterisation of Islam as a product of the highly commercialised social environment of the 7th century Mecca. They seem to interpret the rise of Islam in terms of the ideological response of the sedentary, and hence more civilised,