BOOK REVIEW 67 states, but they knew no land tax and hence had no bureaucracy. The non-monarchical tribal republics of ancient India, called sangha-ganas in Buddha's time,, right from the Yadavas of Mahabharata to the Yaudheyas of the Gupta period, were slave states, but still had no standing army. The Kshatriyas, the only ruling varna and class of these sangha-ganas were a self-acting armed organization. The a-rajaka (non-monarchical) ganas and rajaka (priest-kingly) ganas that preceded them were states of the slave-owners who communally exploited and ruled their communal slaves, the Dasa-Sudras.11 Engineer is careful to note the social reality of the Prophet's time. He quotes W Montgomery Watt as follows. Mecca was more than a mere trading centre, it was a financial centre...But it is clear that financial operations of considerable complexity were carried on at Mecca. The leading men of Mecca in Muhammad's time were above all financiers, skilful in the manipulations of credit, shrewd in their speculations, and interested in any potentialities of lucrative investment from Aden to Ghaza or Damascus. In the financial net that they had woven not merely were all inhabitants of Mecca caught, but many notables of the surrounding areas also. The Quran appeared not in the atmosphere of the desert, but in that of high finance.12 Classes and Strata The wealth of these 'leading men9 was derived not from agriculture but from long distance trade.18 The tribal council of Mecca was constituted by these commercial capitalists. According to A R Gibbs it was a class society having "extremes of wealth and poverty, an underworld of slaves and hirelings, and social class barriers.5915 Though Islam in its origin was a 'middle-class led' movement, its primary 'emancipatory5 appeal was for the dasa-karmakaras of the Meccan tribal society. But this does not mean that Mohammad had no followers from amongst the downtrodden or the poorest secton of the society. There were a number of slaves of foreign origin who had been persecuted by their masters and who saw a glimpse of chance of their liberation in the proclamations of Mohammad to set the slaves free. There also were lowly-paid craftsmen who either had foreign origins or belonged to those tribes which did not enjoy any prestige for having no monopoly of trade.16 In the Buddhist scriptures the words dasa (slave) and karmakara (craftsman labourer) are usually compounded into one word. The craftsmen labourers were nominally free. The slaves of the Indian slave society were predominantly agrestic slaves, while those of the pre-Islamic Jahiliyah period were predominantly shepherds and craftsmen. The great poet of Jahiliyah, 'Antarah ibn-Shaddad al-'abri (c. AD 525-615) was a pastoral slave.17 They sustained their masters, but did not create the surplus product appropriated by their masters through trade. It was not