 Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. In the previous section of chapter four we studied methodology for social change. In this section we will give some examples to illustrate this methodology. In particular we look at the transition from hunter-gatherers to feudal societies to city-states to nations. But before we start it's useful to clarify a pedagogical principle. Every concrete example can be understood only as an instance of some universal principle. So when we talk about a tree this is a category which exists in our minds. It's a universal and a particular tree is an illustration instance of that. Similarly a tree is part of a forest. Forest is a category a collection in our mind. Now this is a bit difficult philosophically but basically we can understand Universal's abstract concepts only in terms of their manifestations as the particular. But also we can understand a particular item only as a representation of a universal principle. A specific tree in all its detail as a unit, as a very particular entity cannot be understood because there are just too many such entities to be comprehensible. So this idea that looking at the one particular instance and extending it to a universal and similarly trying to understand a universal in terms of its exemplification via concrete aspects is different from the standard methodologies discussed in West which are induction deduction and transduction for the acquisition of knowledge. Anthropological studies show that early human societies were hunter-gatherers. They either hunted or they gathered food for to make a living. As a Marxist analysis suggests this mode of gathering food and this economic organization imposes some patterns on thoughts and actions of societies. So for example it suggests that these societies would be nomadic because local supplies of food and game would be exhausted so they would move from place to place. It would have a natural philosophy that of Mother Earth that the earth provides for us and we will take care of the environment as opposed to urban life today which detaches us from our environment by hiding the sources which provide our food to us. In politics nomadic society tends to be egalitarian because anybody can move out of their own place. They are equipped to move and travel and so subgroups which are discontented can move away and there would tend to be no slavery because you're living so close to subsistence that you cannot afford to have a person and provide the food for him so that he would provide service for you. Similarly there would be no concept of private property in such a society because just keep moving and you take the advantage of whatever the land has to offer. So this analysis shows how the economic system can condition the thoughts and philosophies of people. Now in the process of social change suppose that these people learn how to cultivate crops then they must abandon the nomadic lifestyle because you have to settle in one place to plant and then to harvest and also you have to have a notion of private property because once you plant you don't want other people to come in and harvest. So one would think that a natural division would emerge that the gatherers the people who used to collect food would become farmers but the hunters would become soldiers and they would find that robbing farmers who have ample supply of food is more is easier than hunting and so the farmers would tend to need protection from these roaming bands of soldiers and this would basically be the impetus for a feudal society where a feudal lord who has a collection of soldiers protects the peasants in return for collecting some tributes in farms of food and there would be a neighborhood castle and the farms would be planted in the environments of that and so roaming bands of soldiers would be discouraged by the armies with the feudal lord. At a higher level a collection of feudal lords living nearby would tend to prefer a peaceful relationship which would give them greater power and that would lead to the creation of city states which and once you have a city state you need to have a governance structure and with this economic power you can maintain an army and basically the history of Europe was the emergence of lots of city states and their continuous battles with each other for power. Now if multiple city states align they can command greater power and that is basically what led to the emergence of the nation. One of the key insights of Ibn Khaldun was the need for a collective identity which allows for collective action so in creation of nation this is an essential component the need for the people to imagine themselves as a part of a community and this must be strong enough that you're ready to live and die for it because you will need armies to protect the nation and so the imperative to create a national identity and this was done by the means of newspapers according to Benedict Anderson and many other media. How well does this nation concept fit into Islam? Today we take it as natural because we are born in nations but actually Iqbal said that this is a newly minted god and the clothing it wears is the coffin of religion as opposed to this Allah Hussain Ahmad Madani was interested in using the power of the state to oust the British and they had a big debate about this and ultimately it was clear that both for an agreement that the nation is in fact contrary to Islamic ideals but Allah was interested in using the nation as a pragmatic strategy to use the power of the nation in order to oust the British and achieve liberty. This topic of the nation state continues to be of central importance and very divisive in Muslim debate while Allah has suggested that the nation state is intrinsically incompatible with Islam and therefore attempts to use the state to implement Islam are bound to fail because of the contradictions between the ideological frameworks which create a nation and the ideological frameworks of Islam. So this concludes our discussion of section 4.3 and basically the idea was to show how naturally social change occurs through the pressure of various environmental factors as well as various ways of organizing society. These emerge naturally under historical sources and these can be studied systematically. Of course what we have given is a sketch of social change actual change is much more complicated and doesn't proceed smoothly like this and studying particular instance of how it actually happened in any specific time and place gives a lot more insights which cannot be conveyed in this overall broad picture schematics.