Culture, as the specific method of organizing and developing human activity must characterize the consciousness and activity of a people according to their national, ethnic and confessional environment. As international and intercultural links are develop and broaden it is important to define the place and role of Muslim culture in social progress and its influence on the formation of world culture.

People are now conscious of fundamental and dynamic changes in the formation of world outlooks. These require a new mentality and new methods of action. Moreover, the internalization of social life has given people a chance to know the cultures of other nations. In the present intensive economic, social and informational interaction between people, the problem of the unity of humankind is not just theoretical, but practical. The "New book of belief" by a team of authoritative Protestant and Catholic theologians states that now the history of different cultures is becoming a new type of history without differentiation between West and East, Muslim and Christian. In addition the present is characterized by an increasing role of Islam and its culture in the modern world and the strengthening of the influence of the Islamic religion in the political life of humankind, especially in the region of Western and Central Asia.

The prior totalitarian system carried out active propaganda against religion as the "opium of the people", with the result that people "lost their human face". This propaganda was very strong in the former USSR so that the larger part of its population lost their relation to religion. But after the collapse of the communist system, deep changes took place in the socio-political system of the Republics of the former Soviet Union. In the formation of new socio-democratic institutions the role of religion and of Muslim culture very notably increased.

Beginning from the 7th century in West Asia a rich, many-sided and distinctive Islamic culture arose and spread very fast to the West as far as France, and to the East as far as India and China. The system and mode of life of the Muslim peoples, not only in action but also in thought, spread over most of the world. The Islamic outlook with its regulation of all spheres of social life began in Arabia and brought about radical change in the social life of the isolated Arabian tribes. It was also the foundation of the great Arabian empire as it provided the spiritual basis for the union of the Arabian State. At the same time medieval Europe was divided into many small states which could not withstand the Arab-Muslim advance. The Arabian Caliphate was the greatest center of world culture, science and economics. A high level of agriculture, craft and commerce promoted the development of science. Higher education establishments were founded many years before the foundation of the universities in Europe.

The highest level of Arabian science was achieved by many nations in the Arabian Caliphate, including the Central Asian countries. This reflected the rapid development of Muslim culture. In the 9th century, when Caliph Al-Mammun reigned, Baghdad became the greatest centre for the sciences of mathematics, logic, mechanics, geography and medicine. In Baghdad and Damascus astronomical observatories were opened. For the first time Arabs carried out difficult mathematical tasks and had great success in such science as physics, mechanics, optics and chemistry.

The first scholars of Central Asia also made valuable contributions to science by developing dialectics, logic and the Aristotelian theory of knowledge. The influence on the Christian world was very deep and was expanded in the works of the greatest scholars born in Central Asia, al-Farabi and his followers, Biruny, Ibn Sina and others. The culmination of the work of al-Farabi was his commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. In the East, al-Farabi was called "the second teacher", "the first teacher" being Aristotle.

The medieval scholars of Central Asia made a great contribution to the development of philosophical culture. The greatest influence was the 11th century scholar Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna. Ibn Sina authored more than 300 works, the most popular being his "Canon of the Medical Sciences", which work retains significance even in modern times. His encyclopedic Book of Healing had great influence on the philosophical thought of Europe. It consists of 18 parts divided into logic, physics, mathematics and metaphysics. Also well known in Europe was his work "Book of Knowledge". The greatest achievement of Ibn Sina was his classification of knowledge. However, his priorities were philosophy and medicine. Philosophy is healing of the soul; medicine is healing of the body; the good health of the body depends upon the good health of the soul, because body and soul have an organic connection and one cannot exist without the other.

The highest authority at that time was another Muslim philosopher, Ibn Rushd, or in Latin Averroes. According to his doctrine matter is eternal, but limited in space. The material elements in his world outlook alternated with an idealistic world understanding, culminating in divine life as God thinking himself. His ideas about a double truth were very popular both in the East and in the West. According to this theory, philosophy and religion give humankind the same truth. Religion founded on belief, displays truth in allegorical forms coming from the mouth of God, whereas philosophy is comprehended through knowledge. That is why religion and philosophy have some differences. What in philosophy is accounted as truth, might not be so from the religious point of view. The purpose of Ibn Rushd was to establish the autonomy of science vis-a-vis religion, but he affirmed the highest level of philosophical knowledge to be blissful.

The greatest contribution to "the golden heritage" of Central Asian science was made by the great scholar Abu Raichan Al Beruny. He had a universal education and for his time he was a "living encyclopedia". He was a perfect Muslim, holding the commandments of Islam sacred; but he also praised the power of the human mind, which could open the deepest secrets of nature. In his astronomical research Beruny expounded a doctrine of the characteristics of the movement of celestial bodies; he doubted the Aristotle-Ptolemean theory about a motionless Earth as the centre of the Universe and hypothesized the movement of the Earth around the Sun. These ideas were developed by the grandson of Amir Temur, Mirzo Ulugbec, in his well-known creative work, Zidsh, which included brilliant astronomical tables with four values (macals). Mirzo Ulugbec founded a great scientific school with an observatory in Samarkand the capital of his empire.

In the broad sense, Muslim culture was the totality of the economic, social, political and cultural relations built on the foundation of the interchange between Muslim and Christian nations during many centuries of the co-existence of the two religions. These relations between the East and the West are important at the present time, because the future development of nations depends upon their mutual understanding.

The influence of Christian culture on early Muslim culture was felt in the early kalam or the theological discussions about God’s predetermination and human free will. But beginning from 12th-13th centuries this situation changed when Muslim scholars and philosophers became scholastic authorities. West Asia (Avicenna) and Muslim Spain (Averroes) were for Europe sources from which European civilization drew its culture. The influence of Muslim culture on Europe in the Middle Ages was varied and spread among all spheres and levels of European society including its mode of life, trade, economics, politics, science, philosophy and religion.

The "beautiful life" cultivated by Muslim people, particularly the aspiration to magnificence, comfort and higher education, especially in the territory of Spain began to attract people’s attention in other countries of Europe. From the second part of the 10th century some European scholars began to learn "Arabian science". The first Crusade began a process of "cultural connections" between Western Europe and the Muslim world. The main channels, through which elements of Arabian Muslim culture penetrated to medieval Europe were Spain and Italy. Creative works of Jewish and Muslim theologians were considered as authorities for Catholic theologians, and works of the Greek philosophers originally translated by Christians into Arabic were commented on by Muslim philosophers whose work became popular in Western science. Thus, works of the ancient scholars returned to Europe through two or three languages and the work of Muslim theologians such as Al Ghazali, who was the author of "Makasid al-falasifa" ("Aspiration for Philosophy") an important source of Aristotelian philosophy for the Western Scholastics.

In Europe a famous translator, John Spanish, translated the physical, mathematical, logical and psychological works of Ibn Sina. By 1180 all the creative works of Avicenna were translated into Latin. At that time theology was integrated with physics and metaphysics in a process of raprochment between Arabo-Muslim and European philosophy, particularly with regard to the ideas of neo-Platonic thinkers and Aristotle. In the works of Al Farabi, Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali the theories of hierarchy and of the active intellect were of great interest. One important result of the influence of Muslim philosophy in the West was the syntheses of neoplatonic ideas by Ibn Sina with Christian doctrines developed with a Platonic orientation by such authors as Augustine, Boethius and so on. Some works of Aristotle entered medieval Europe through Arabo-Muslim culture. Before the 12th century in Europe only such works of Aristotle as the "categories" and "perihermeneutics," which had been translated by Boethius, were well known. Later other work of Aristotle were translated. At the beginning of the 12th century the Aristotelian heritage arrived in Paris and Oxford, after which in the 13th century the works of Averroes were popular with European scholastics, especially his commentary on Aristotle. Dante called him "the best commentator at the present time." In Europe three basic doctrines of Ibn Rushd were well known: the theory of the eternity of the world, the theory of active intellect, and the doctrine of the correlation between belief and knowledge.

In the 14th-16th centuries there appeared the first signs of the cultural estrangement of Europeans from the Arabo-Muslim peoples. However, this estrangement did not break the connections between the two cultures. There were cultural, diplomatic and commercial contacts and some philosophical sources from Arabian countries were also famous. But beginning from the 15th century, after the conquering of the Balkans and Constantinople by the Turkish-Ottomans, the interest of the European peoples in the Muslim culture began to revive.

In 1691-1698 the Koran was translated and published in Latin by Ludovico Morache. In the first years of the 18th century, the teacher of the Arabian language in Cambridge, S. O’Key, wrote his "History of Saracines"; for the first time in England, the history of the Arabian people was presented scientifically. In the middle of the 18th century, the French scholar, G. Postel, began to teach Eastern languages in the College de France.

Muslim culture was of great interest in the Age of Enlightenment. Walter in his tragedy Magomet (the complete name: Fanatism and Prophet Magomet), Montesque in the Persian Letters, Diderot in the Unmodest Treasures identified issues which were very interesting to their contemporaries. For Europe of the 18th century the Muslim East was seen as a place of absolutism and endless reaction, but after publication of the Thousand and One Nights by A. Gallan in 1704-1708 all European philosophers, writers and poets were enthusiastic about Muslim culture. For Europe the East became a source of the romantic, exotic and erotic.

In the 19th century a great wave of European immigrants — military people, merchants, missionaries, administrators and scholars — coming from the West opened broad possibilities for introducing that new world. The circle of knowledge about life in Muslim countries, about their culture and religion, broadened rapidly. Interest in the Muslim countries was practical in nature, for the origin of Islamology as an independent scientific discipline was connected with the history of colonial conquest.

The great Russian religious philosopher, V. Solovev, wrote about the influence of the religious philosophy of Islam on the cultural history of Western countries. He said that in the development of the history of humanity there are three forces: the first would like to subdue humankind to God; the second would skip "the unity of the world" and give freedom to the individual form of life; the third would reconcile the unity of God with individual freedom. In the modern world, according to Solovev, these forces exist in three historical cultures: the first is the Arabian East, the second is Western civilization, and the third is Slavonic.

The modern relation between the West and the East is a dialogue between two great religions. Now, we begin to see the unity of humankind and of religions. Strengthening and developing cultural connections will both promote, and depend upon, cooperation between Muslim and European cultures.