WARRIS SHAH 33 change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations, and in his social life ? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed ? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the fact that within the old society the elements of the new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.2 The existence of revolutionary ideas in a society presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class against the established order. When a class rises to challenge the established order in a revolutionary way, it looks at life from the standpoint of its own interests and considers them to be moral. It throws up its own ideology and its own world view. Its outlook and morality challenge the established outlook and morality and declare them immoral. Its ideology justifies its own rise. Engels writes, We maintain that all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic stage which society had reached at that particular epoch. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality was always a class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or, ever since the oppressed class has become powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against the domination and the future interests of the oppressed.3 When Brahmanical system of the Hindu society fell into a deep crisis in the early Middle Ages, it began to lose the allegiance of its own people at all levels of existence. Being in the process of dissolution and having lost the allegiance of its own people, it was too weak to resist the foreign onslaught. The Muslim feudal rulers coming from outside defeated the local feudal rulers of the Brahmanical Hindu society and established their own sway in most parts of northern India. The ideologue and spokesman of the newly established Muslim feudal rule in India was the ka^L He was not only an influential dignitary of official Islam, but also a powerful functionary of the Muslim feudal state then established in India. In those days the dogmas of the established religion were at the same sime political axioms, and the quotations from the scriptures had the validity of law in every court. When Islam had conquered Iran and formed an empire, its Quranic content, its revolutionary content, was quietly buried. Islam henceforth had become the official religion. So the ka^i was the spokesman of the established Muslim state and justified its interests and actions, and declared them moral and acceptable in the eyes of God. The establishment of the Muslim feudal rule in place of the Hindu feudal rule, was not a smooth changeover from one feudal state to another, or from one dynastic rule to another. It was not a question of the change of one government for another. Since the whole social order was in the process of dissolution,