One of the examples of the current division of humankind into conflicting sides and the remaining tensions between them is the interrelation between Western and Islamic societies. The post-communist era and the widely acclaimed victory of the Western liberal-democratic model as the single universal civilized form of social development does not guarantee that this victorious model may not meet major future challenges in the areas of the defeated Communist ideology. More than that, one of its possible opponents is not new to the European religious and scientific thought, namely, the Islamic world, which represents another, Eastern, form of civilization. In Europe, Islam had been regarded as an opponent even before the emergence of Marxism. Among the defenders of the Western value of an "open society," many also regard the Islamic world as an embodiment of a "closed society" because they (wrongly) equate the Islamic world with Islamic fundamentalism.

As history shows, for more than a millennium the problems of Islam have lost their relevance to European thought. The pessimistic evaluations of development trends in Islamic society, for the last 300 years, by various European thinkers were unjustified. Islamic society continues to develop and is open to the future. In contrast to numerous forecasts, it retains its vitality and importance for humankind.

Theoretical interest about the role of Islamic society on the world scene is constantly growing and can be traced throughout many humanitarian disciplines. For European thought, which is not at all self-sufficient, close attention to the image of Islamic society is an important condition of its self-understanding (and self-recognition). The "Indomania" of the romantics of 18th and 19th centuries is better known than the constant reference, in the last three centuries, of many great European thinkers to Islamic problems. The attitude toward Islam became an element of the European philosophical development, a part of the creative biography of some of its greatest philosophers. In characterizing the cultural-historical context of the interaction of Christian and Islamic societies, the dogmas of Christianity as a world religion have, to a large extent, taken shape in rivalry with, and opposition to, Islam. The emergence of the image of a "Christian world" in the minds of Europeans was an outcome of centuries of contacts with Islamic society. From the Middle Ages until the present, many important concepts of religious and philosophical thought (monotheism, mysticism, prophecy, fatalism, fanaticism, rationalism, natural religion, despotism, democracy, humanism, private property, and religious fundamentalism) were considered while taking into account the socio-cultural development of European as well as Islamic societies.

It is necessary to clarify the notion European" used since its connection with a concrete geographical place. We mean by this term a centuries-old scientific tradition established on Ancient, Christian, Renaissance, and Enlightenment cultural and historical bases. In this broad scientific tradition, we place of West European, Russian, and North American thinkers. But this does not mean that we reduce Russian historiosophy to a West European philosophy of history. They have much in common, but, at the same time, the Russian philosophy of history has its specific features. Specifically, these include the Eastern-Christian cultural and religious basis of Russian civilization and the geopolitical features of Russian history because of the centuries-old contact with Islamic peoples in both internal and external state relations unknown to Europe. Thus, we shall use the term "European Philosophy of History" as a generic term for the scientific sources originating in the Christian world, except for those cases, where we specify certain features of the Russian Philosophy of History.

From the European point of view, the existence of the Islamic East as a nonclassical variant of social being constitutes a problem for philosophical and historical concepts. It is also a serious test for theoretical and methodological instruments of social knowledge from the viewpoint of its humanistic content and universalism. From the early Middle Ages now, Islamic society presents a riddle for its interpreters. Hence, the question arises about the ability of European philosophy to interpret the unity of history in a diverse world, to combine the idea of a unified world history with that of the diversity of concrete-historical social organisms. The answer lies in a critical analysis of ideas about Islamic society in the European philosophy of history, that is, a study of the evolution of ideas about the diversity of humankind based on the concrete understanding by European thinkers of the place of Islamic society.

The study of European thinkers’ ideas about Islamic society and its culture is complicated by the fact that European history of philosophy is not conceptually homogeneous, but dependent on the political situation and religious outlook, on prejudices and stereotypes. The scientific terminology used is heavily value laden and reflects the spiritual maturation of European society. For this reason, a philosophical analysis of this problem should take into account the complicated and constantly changing correlation of the cognitive and value-laden content of the concepts employed. The value component of the European philosophy of history is, in many ways, connected to the religious ideas of Christian Providentialism. In many ages, Providentialism had been explicit; from the middle of the 18th century it became implicit in the form of an Eurocentrist socio-cultural orientation. Providentialism greatly influenced the perception of Islamic society in European philosophy.

The task of this paper is to analyze the theoretical means that one part of humankind (European society) perceives the other (Islamic society) within the framework world history. In our case, it is insufficient to obtain a general image of the philosophical and historical concept of any European thinker, as this is not utilized for an immediate understanding of Muslim society’s place in the history of humankind. When a researcher turns his explanations from his own society (European) to another (in this case—Muslim) qualitatively different culture with own its religious basis, his views undergo certain modification. Touching upon the conflict of world outlooks in the analysis of the common issues of culture, Max Weber wrote that superior ideals which move us most of all, always express themselves only through struggle with other ideals which are as sacred for others as ours are for us. In this process, a two-faced European culture emerges: one position looks at one’s own society, the other for Islamic society. As these positions do not coincide, the main complexity of the analysis consists in the definition, comparison and clarification of the reasons for the given phenomena as characteristic of the contradictory process of formation of European humanism and universalism. In this respect, inconsistent thinking appears almost as a methodological principle in the works of such philosophers as Leibniz, Hegel, Karl Marx or Arnold Toynbee. In the same work, concerning the same object (Islamic society), philosophical and historical conclusions stand against the philosophical and religious, naturalistic-rationalistic against deterministic against voluntaristic. This give gives the impression that every such work is written by two different authors. As a rule, in historical-philosophical studies, the strategy utilized is to separate the contradictory tendencies into main and ascendant, on the one hand, and minor and regressive, on the other hand. The whole of the ideas of a concrete thinker would be reduced to one of their components. However, in this way, the contradiction of ideas is not explained, but arbitrarily eliminated. One cannot subjectively select one part and ignore other parts of the philosophical and historical concepts of concrete thinkers. An objective analysis of the ideas of Friedrich Engels about Islamic society shows that, in no small measure, he adheres to the civilized, rather than the formational paradigm. Therefore, the reconstruction of the philosophical and historical opinions of European thinkers about Islamic society appears as a process of recovering the conceptual unity of these views, of what unites their world outlook.

From the civilizational standpoint, the interpretation of Islamic society has several stages, among which it is possible to note the Enlightenment period (Leibniz, Voltaire, Diderot, Holbach, Condorcet, J.-J. Rousseau, E. Gibbon, J. Herder); Romanticism (F. Schlegel, Chateaubriand, T. Carlyle); Positivism (E. Renan, G. Le Bon); and the methodological synthesis of the 20th century, where the ideas of the philosophy of life, phenomenology, philosophy of anthropology, existentialism, structuralism, and philosophical hermeneutics enrich each other (O.Spengler, A.Toynbee, M.Hodgson). In pre-Revolutionary Russia, this task was accomplished mainly by the historiosophical school of social thought (P. Chaadaev, A. Khomyakov, N. Danilevsky, V. Solovyov).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1850-1880s were the first to realize the formational explanation of Islamic society. Later, in the 1920-1930s, this question attracted the attention of the first Soviet researchers into Islam (E. Belyaev, V. Detyakin, L. Klimovich, Kh. Naumov, M.A. Reisner, N.A. Smirnov, S.P. Tolstoy, S. Tomara). In the 1960-1970s, there appeared some interesting researches (E.A. Belyaev, L.I. Nadiradze, I.P. Petrushevsky, M.A. Usmanov), and also in the 1980-1990s (O.Kh. Guliev, B. Lapshov, M.F. Mekhtiev, I. Khalevinsky). The neo-Marxist interpretation of this question appeared also in Western Marxism during the 1950-1970s (M.Rodinson, B.Turner).

For many centuries, one of the means for the self-identification of European society has been the comparison of its own way of life with that of Islamic society, but within the framework of both a religious and secularized world outlook. Islamic society has not often been the subject of socio-historical cognition, but has served as a means for the self-reflection and self-assertion of European society, a subject of theological and philosophical-historical speculation. Only in the second half of the 19th century, did European culture began to shun the Enlightenment concept of linear progressivism, and realized the dramatic character of its history as a common fate with all cultures.

Being the basis of European civilization and European philosophy of history, Christianity had a decisive influence in shaping an image of Islamic society. In medieval Europe, the essence of Islamic society was explained mainly from the position of a religious understanding of history on the basis that there exists only one true religion. From the standpoint of its doctrines about the human being and society Islamic society, which appeared some centuries after Christianity, seemed to be an error of providence. In the epoch of the Enlightenment, with its rationalistic attitudes towards history in the form of a philosophy of history, the influence of religious Providentialism on the perceptions of secular thinkers about Islamic society loosened. Within the framework of the philosophy of history, the civilizational approach became the basis of new theoretical studies and obtained new importance as a world outlook. This concept began a new paradigm of socio-historical thought and the formation of a conceptual dualism of immanentism and transcendentalism which defined the philosophical-historical views of European thinkers who, while thinking about Islamic society, belong to the civilizational paradigm. A new process of creating a scientific methodology of Islamic studies commenced.

In contrast to 17th century metaphysics, representatives of the 18th century Enlightenment (Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet) overcame their separation from the practical problems of life by directly connecting their social philosophy with the tasks of the antifeudal and anticlerical struggle. Aside from understandable cognitive interest, Islamic society attracted the attention of Enlightenment thinkers, specifically the French, as a convenient object for sharp criticism of feudalism and for exposing the Church as the source of superstitions, fanaticism, and intolerance. The opposite tendency heralded by Pierre Bayle was expressed less clearly, namely, to approach the Islamic world in search of those specific features of social life that Europe lacked, for example, religious tolerance and rationality, and a reasonable balance between the spiritual and material aspects of life. Idealizing Islam, representatives of this tendency showed Islam’s correspondence to the deistic views characteristic of most enlightenment philosophers.

The Enlightenment approach, doubtless, prompted sharp expansion of the spatial-temporal boundaries of historical research and the creation of a conceptual and methodological apparatus for the philosophy of history. Even the negative traits of Islamic society, especially marked by European thought as cruelty, barbarity and despotism, could be subjected to scientific analysis and explained by geographic or social reasons. Beginning with Montesquieu, such phenomena could be considered as naturally intrinsic to any, including European, society. On the basis of rationalistic universalism, a new synthetic picture of the world appeared, whereby the East acquired its place alongside the West, and Islamic society is interpreted within the context of the military-political and cultural-historical history of humankind. But this rationalistic universalism, and the universality of historical analysis gained by it and within the framework of civilizational paradigm, stands on a shaky basis. The Enlightenment thinkers proceeded on the basis of an immutability and universality of human nature, according to them its essence is based on the ability to reason. They regarded the existing differences among peoples as purely quantitative. To them, human nature as an embodiment of maximizing the intellect is represented by the European society of the 18th century. On the basis of this methodology, Islamic society is viewed as not yet having developed to the level of European society, owing to the prevalent influence of Islam. The next generation of thinkers (Rousseau, Herder) began to overcome this framework by trying to explain the place of Islamic society in world history from the viewpoint of a romantic world outlook. Rousseau and J. Herder can be regarded as transitional figures who embodied the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of a romantic philosophy of history.

In his famous book, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1800), Herder contributed positively to rethinking the history of Islamic society within the context of a universal picture of the world by using the principles of humanism and historicism. His standpoint emanated from recognizing the uniqueness of every culture; at the same time, it quite often used the method of analogy comparing Arab and ancient civilizations. Later, such comparison was widely used by O. Spengler and A. Toynbee. Herder managed to produce the most consistent and methodologically well thought out expression of the philosophy of history of Islamic society. He based his studies on the early romantic monotheistic universalism, not deformed (as happened to F. Schlegel, Hegel, V. Solovyov) by national, racial, or confessional influences. He went further than the Enlightenment thinkers with their idea of the immutability of human nature, showing the plurality of unchanging human natures in his doctrine of racial differences. This made it possible for them to accept a pluralism of civilizations and pinpoint the idea of cultural relativism. However, the idea of inferring the specifics of any culture from internal and constant mental features of a concrete race is ahistorical. From this standpoint, it is impossible to understand the difference, for example, between the Islamic and European Christian civilizations as historically conditioned.

On the verge of the 18th to 19th centuries, Romanticism widely influenced the perceptions of European thinkers about Islamic society. This cultural current, although born in the bosom of Enlightenment, began to negate it. The philosophical-historical perceptions of European Romanticism are widely and, more or less, fully represented in the studies of the theoretician of German Romanticism Friedrich Schlegel; the French publicist and writer Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand; and the English philosopher, writer, and historian Thomas Carlyle.

The deeply experienced crisis situation of society, frequently explained by the unfavorable results of the Renaissance which sought its inspiration from the Ancient world, led the romantics to study civilizations other than the European. However, European thinkers mainly found the romantic East in India, instead of in the Islamic East.

F. Schlegel and Chateaubriand proceed from the fact of a certain Islamic culture permeated with an Eastern spirit. They identify it with barbarity, and therefore as hostile to Western civilization, which they think should triumph in the Islamic East and all over the world. In contrast, T. Carlyle is tolerant of Islam in his work, On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), but this tolerance is based on the fact that he identifies the history of human society with the history of the Christianization of humankind. He obviously excludes the very existence of other civilizations. He assumes that as Muslims are representatives of Abrahamic monotheism, their religion is either a simplified version of Christian civilization, or barbarism; there is no third way. The cultural-historical relativism initiated by Herder is excluded not only by Carlyle, but also by F. Schlegel and Chateaubriand.

Romantic thought inevitably reproduced the Eurocentric approach of Enlightenment historicism in relation to Islamic society: The latter necessarily serves as an instructive example of a "wrong" model of religious belief and of socio-cultural development. The cyclical idea of world history boils down to a linear interpretation of historical development common to all romantics, which supposed the evolution of humankind from barbarism to the triumph of social Christianity in its European variant. In this approach, Islamic society appears to have long ago completed its cycle of development, while European society is continuing its progressive development.

In comparison with the Enlightenment, Romanticism took an important step forward in the development of the universalism of European socio-historical thought. While inevitably taking an Eurocentric form, romantic historicism, nevertheless ensures the integration of the Islamic east into universal history. Together with the philosophical-historical heritage of the Enlightenment, it thereby contributes to the creation of real theoretical prerequisites for systematizing the perceptions about Islamic society attained in the synthetic philosophical-historical conception of Hegel.

Hegel’s concept is an original summing up of the scientific research of the 18th and 19th centuries related to the formation of European bourgeois society after the social upheavals heralded by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The history of Islamic society is interpreted by Hegel by contrasting Islam to Christianity as an antithesis to Western development and as its simplified version obviously doomed to stagnation. In Hegel’s understanding Muslims, having fulfilled their historical task in the early Middle Ages, ceased further development: they have ceased to exist for universal history, because, being abandoned by the world spirit, they became an ahistorical people. That is the past. As for the future, not only Muslims, but humankind as such has no chance of further social evolution because, according to Hegel the world spirit attained in the Germany of his days (Europe) at its highest stage. Muslims, being foreign to Western civilization, remain on the sidelines of history; their only hope is to repeat the Western road of social development. Proceeding from the logic of Hegel’s philosophy of history, an Islamic civilization was not created because the world spirit did not pay attention to that society. Their history has never been a concrete stage of universal historical development whose principle is the expression of the spirit. The insurmountable difficulties faced by Hegel’s philosophy of history in explaining the history of Islamic society have their origin in his Eurocentrism, apology for bourgeois society, nationalism, and the absolutization of the state-legal forms of Christian society. These propositions, which are immanent in Hegel’s philosophy of history, explain the ahistorical and basically ideological character of his evaluation of Islamic society and its religion. However, one can merit the German thinker for his serious attempt to analyze the history of Islamic society within the history of humankind, and Islam within the context of the history of religious doctrines as a single law-governing process. The civilizational aspect of explaining the history of society within the framework of the relations of West and East, deeply worked out by Hegel, had had colossal influence on the later perceptions of Islamic society in European science and culture.

In the second half of the 19th century, Positivism achieved a major influence in European Oriental studies. Proceeding from its dictum of the common character of natural and historical laws. Representatives of this trend proclaimed the end of speculative philosophical-historical thought, and instead proposed sociology as a positive science of the universal natural laws of social evolution. Positivists supposed that through sociology they achieve authentic and trustworthy knowledge about society and are capable of playing the role of its reformers. In this connection the Islamic East, as part of a single humankind, attracted their attention; they saw there an extensive field for their transforming activities. The rational-universal approach of Enlightenment to non-European societies is replaced by another extreme approach—an irreducible cultural-historical or racial-anthropological pluralism, in which the only viable society is believed to be the European model of social development.

An analysis of the studies of Ernest Renan and Gustave Le Bon, two leading European positivist thinkers who paid great attention to Islamic society, show that their concepts maintained certain ideas expounded by the Enlightenment thinkers and romantics, but already integrated into a naturalistic world outlook and coupled with a racial theory oriented towards the idea of a progressive inequality of races. Positivist sociology pretends to discover a racial principle as the true ubstance of social life, of which all the elements of civilization are but outward expressions.

For Renan, who is convinced that exact and precise knowledge allows not only the explanation, but the reformation of human society, universality means not only a socio-philosophical principle for explaining the world, but also a principle for transforming Western society into a global society. European civilization, so he thinks, is potentially a universal civilization: however, its mission is endangered by external and internal barbairsm, which have to be actively liquidated, without relying on the activity of natural laws of social development. Thus, universality turned into an important aspect of the current policies of European states and served as a substantiation of the ideology of colonialism. This approach leads to Islamic society being regarded as a typical embodiment of barbarism from which the world has to redeem itself through cultural and political means.

G. Le Bon’s pessimistic variant of interpreting universality, with an accent on the irrationalism and diversity of socio-historical forms, touches upon the problems of Islamic society in his book La civilisation des Arabes (1884). But since the very principle of a scientifically substantiated transformation of society is under doubt, his attitude to Islamic society is not that of an object liable to European intervention and transformation. Islamic society is for him an embodied example of the inevitable action of the natural law of racial and individual inequality, a law that has led to an end for the history of Islamic society, and which endangers modern European society that ignores the dangers emanating from socialist movements. Positivism, apparently, continues Hegel’s line of historicism based on an a priori antithesis of European and Eastern principles of development. The only difference here lies in the racial-anthropological and socio-psychological explanations they used, which gave additional arguments to the Eurocentric conclusion (formed in the 17th century): European civilization must both theoretically and practically negate Islamic society for the sake of its own globalization.

The interpretation of Islamic society by Marx and Engels is composed of two different approaches—the then dominant civilizational and the formational they created. In political activity, they proceeded from the perception that the civilizational stage of human history with its private property and class exploitation is exhausted. However, in their scientific and publicist activities, they were unable easily to bypass the theory of civilization, which remained the major explanatory paradigm of history in European science. By gradually overcoming it, they were able to create their formation theory. In this endeavor, they succeeded least of all in explaining the history of Eastern society.

Some researchers indicate the incompatibility of the "structural" and the "subjective" components of Marxist theory (P. Anderson), or the "historicism" and "pragmatism" (K. Popper) of Marx. The idea is that Marx was unable to give a clear answer to the question of the major driving forces of history—whether to consider these as a contradiction between the productive forces and relations of production, or class struggle. From here comes, for Marxist historicism, the insolvable antinomy of materialism and idealism, economism and voluntarism, evolutionism and revolutionism evolves. One of the expressions of the ambivalence of Marxist historicism is the contradictory correlation between civilizational and formational concepts, which became obvious in analyzing Marx’s and Engels’ attitudes to the problems of Islamic society.

To include Islamic society in their historical materialist scheme, they began by characterizing it in terms of an Asian Mode of Production (AMP). Within it they proposed the idea of the influence of a dry climate, the absence of private property, the dominant position of state property, and the need to carry out social works by artificial irrigation masterminded by the central power. However, one can say that the AMP concept first proposed by Marx in 1857-1858 was created under the influence of his studies of Islamic society. Later, Marx and Engels obviously shunned this concept in explaining Islamic society and repeatedly spoke about feudal property and "Oriental feudalism" in evaluating the socio-economic structure of Islamic society. These ideas never received systematic development from which one concludes that in the transitional methodology which the founders of Marxism applied in explaining Islamic society, elements of Hegel’s civilizational concept dominate over those of formation theory. Thence follows the ambivalence of Marx and Engels on the question of whether a civilization was created in the Islamic East, because, in many aspects, Islamic society did not answer the European criteria for civilization shared and upheld by Marx and Engels.

The most important peculiarity of 19th century Russian culture, which had a major influence on the philosophical-historical perceptions of Russian thinkers, was its questioning of the applicability of West European experience to Russia and to other parts of the world. Many elements of civilization (state, church, private property, urbanization, science) were either put under question or rejected as worthless for Russia. The West as dynamic but traveling on a "wrong road," is opposed to the stagnant East which has lost touch with world history. Russia is trying to find its bearings between them. The elaboration of the philosophy of history of Islamic society in Russia took place within the context of this cultural-historical structure: West, Russia, East.

A study of the research of Russian thinkers shows that the process of Russian cultural-historical self-cognition, having its original images in the form of religious-philosophical reflection, organically includes the problems of Islamic society while retaining the socio-Christian sense of Providence. The relation of Russian thinkers in evaluating Islam and the place of Islamic society in the history of humankind depended on their orientation towards either Catholicism or Orthodoxy as an active social principle. The Orthodox world outlook of the majority of Russian philosophers of history has not allowed them to accept, in contrast to such supporters of Catholicism as Chaadayev and Solovyov, to accept that Islam is a close relative of Christianity, and thus conditioned their negative attitude to Islam and Islamic society. This is their common position of whether they perceive human history from the Christian position of God and humankind (in unity with Europe—I.V. Kireyevsky; or in contrast to it—A..S. Khomyakov), or on the basis of the cyclical naturalistic concept of cultural-historical types (N.Y. Danilevsky).

Orthodox thinkers supposed Islamic society not to have its own justification, but in the plan of Providence to fulfill the limited role as an intermediary between the ancient and European societies, between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds.

Among Russian philosophers of this trend, the most antinomial religious-philosophical perception of the Islamic problem was expressed by V.S. Solovyov. In his synthetic conception he analyzed and critically evaluated different philosophical-religious and philosophical-historical explanations of Islamic society. Proceeding from belief in the coincidence of modernized Christianity and the historical explanation of social life, Solovyov tried to interpret the civilizational process from the point of view of Christian Providentialism, and to synthesize the philosophy of history with the philosophy of religion. This synthesis, which called for giving more weight to the philosophical-historical utopia of the Russian philosopher, appears unsuccessful.

Solovyov’s research into the history of Islam and Islamic society retained throughout the clear-cut religious-ideological character of his Christian monotheism. The mobility of concepts used by him is due to their axiological, rather than their substantive content. Solovyov constantly changes his attitude and position towards the key concepts of his philosophy, mainly West-East, and the related opposite terms: Christianity-Anti-Christianity, Civilization-Barbarism. In the first stage of his studies, Solovyov evaluated Islam and Islamic society as anti-Christian and barbaric. Later, he concluded that Islam, both as a doctrine and as a society, is genetically close to Christianity (this mainly concerns early Islam and Islamic society), and therefore, embodies certain elements of civilization. Furthermore, Solovyov gradually detected and revealed anti-Christianity (paganism) and barbarism in European and Russian societies, which he formerly considered as both Christian and civilized. At first, Solovyov assumed that Russian Orthodoxy had a capacity to renew Christianity, but later he recognized it as anti-Christian, and even identified Russian Orthodox society with Islamic society.

Needless to say, Solovyov is one-sided in his pan-Christianity and in absolutizing the Christian principle in human history. In his analysis of civilization this tendency becomes obvious when he tries to overcome the limitations of the theory of cultural-historical types developed by N.Y. Danilevsky through a new concept whereby he identifies the history of human civilization with the history of the peoples of Europe professing Christianity. More than that, he understands progress as Christian progress, that is, the internal unity of Christian theory and social-state practice. This position is obviously biased since it excludes the existence of other civilizations and their significance for the present and future of humankind. The need to synthesize different religious, philosophical, and social forms comes into direct contradiction with the priority of Christian principles in his worldview. Thus, Solovyov was incapable of transcending the framework of the Christian worldview and of Christian humanism.

Neither variant of understanding the civilizational paradigm by Russian thinkers (the conception of social Christianity, the theory of cultural-historical types) could solve the problem of the unity and diversity of human history. The Pan-Christianity of Russian thinkers determined their philosophical-historical perception of the place of Islamic society in world history; they perceived the past, present, and future of humankind exclusively through the categories of Christian thought.

The philosophical-historical concepts of O. Spengler and A. Toynbee became very popular in 1920-1930s. Both negated the ideas of social progress and the unity of human history; instead they proposed a diversity of independently exs. Both thinkers, in the last analysis, removed European civilization from the framework of cyclical fatalism, asserting that in contrast to all other civilizations, it has kept its creative potentiality and hence has the capacity to avoid death. In the 1950-1960s an optimistic tendency in the philosophy of history of humankind in general, and that of Islamic society in particular, is expressed in the works of the American historian and Islamologist, Marshall Hodgson. He totally rejected the fatalistic cyclical approach predominant in the early decades of the 20th century and proceeds from the idea of the unity of human history, including the history of Arab-Islamic society. His philosophy of history as a religious-moral development of humankind is based on recognition of the idea of the progress of humankind as an integral whole.

The anti-Christian beliefs of Oswald Spengler were the formative factor in his eclectic methodology. He was bound to recognize that religion is the essence of every culture or "national soul." At the same time, he contends that nonreligiousness is the essence of every civilization and tries to prove the nonreligious character of modern Western society. The Decline of Europe (1918-1922), according to Spengler, is a study of the crisis of the West as a Christian society, and also the crisis of the whole Christian world as a spiritual entity. Spengler challenges the European tradition whose philosophy of history is based directly or indirectly on a Christian view of world history. He goes further than his predecessors of the French Enlightenment and Marxism in elaborating an anti-Christian view of world history. Spengler accuses modern Christianity of being guilty to a large extent of the decline of the West. But this is not enough for him since he has to prove the bankruptcy of Christianity throughout its long history. For this he uses the Islamic problem as a means to confute the Christian view of human history. A fantastic interpretation of the history of Islam serves him as a means of "eroding" Christianity, rejecting its essential internal unity, depreciating it, and even factually negating its significance as the spiritual bedrock of European culture. One can argue that Spengler overturns Hegel’s conclusion that European society is a product of the development of Christianity, and the history of Islam is a minor episode in the formation of Christendom. To Spengler, Islam (or broadly all magic culture) takes on gigantic forms which overshadow Christianity and turn it into an insignificant phenomenon. Spengler’s consistent refutation of Eurocentrism, and his criticism of the historical scheme—the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Modern Age—in essence represents one of the arguments for rejecting the Christian philosophy of history.

If Spengler, by rejecting Christianity, expresses deep doubts about the future of the Western world, Toynbee in A Study of History (1934-1961) by arbitrarily using historical materials, expresses his hope that the Western world will survive thanks to the role of its true religion, namely, a reformed Christianity understood in a pantheistic spirit. His theocentric understanding of human history, coupled with his criticism of racism and geographical determinism, leads Toynbee to conclude to the unity of human nature. He delimits the progressive character of world history to the religious sphere, the process of the development of religions. Of all the major religions. Of all the major religions (he refers to Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), only Christianity successfully developed. It alone is capable of assisting Western society—which is in crisis situation owing to the destructive character of the productive industrial forces, class struggle and wars—to avoid death and rescue all humankind. The other civilizations inevitably should perish after exhausting their natural life potentialities. Toynbee’s philosophy of history is closely connected with the philosophy of religion and his rationalism with irrationalism, mythology and mysticism. A philosophical-historical analysis of Islamic society and recognition of Islam as one of the highest religions with a single common God for all, its opposition to modern post-Christian neo-paganism (nationalism, communism, fascism) is coupled by him with traditional Eurocentric value of the superiority of Christianity to Islam.

Among a large body of studies carried out in the 1950-1980s by Western philosophers, sociologists, economists, political scientists, historians, and students of religion about the place of Islamic society in world history, the studies of Marshall Hodgson deserve to be singled out. In his work, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (1974), Hodgson substantially criticized Eurocentrism, and proposed his own interpretation of the history of Islamic society based on a precise methodology worked out within the civilizational paradigm. According to some Western scholars, this conception represents the culmination of the Western tradition of Islamic studies.

Hodgson’s methodology synthesizes the speculative approach to world history worked out by Hegel, with a basically neo-Kantian sociological analysis of culture on the basis of M. Weber’s ideal-types model. His acceptance of Weber’s thesis that culture is the final fragment of a world which from the point of view of humankind has sense and significance, enabled the American historian to achieve more consistency (in comparison with Spengler and Toynbee) in overcoming Eurocentric evaluations of the history of Islamic society. Such an approach assumes comprehension by the scientist that cognition of a cultural reality is carried out always from a completely specific point of view, and that its major task consists in correlating historical facts with the universal values of human culture.

In comparison to his great predecessors, Spengler and Toynbee, Hodgson takes one step forward in explaining the spatial-temporal aspects of civilizational development by considering the processes unfolding in the Afro-Euroasian oikoumene from the beginning of history until now. Such an approach allows him to boldly outline the history of Islamic society in the context of the history of humankind as an entity.

The philosophy of history of Islamic society based on the civilizational paradigm reached its highest heuristic limits in the creative works of Hodgson. Some Western representatives of Islamic studies, in the 1970-1980s, recognized his work and called for a search for new methodological approaches with no universalistic claims and significance. Among the new concepts, one can point to the methodological approach in studying the economic life of society proposed by the French historical "Annals" school, and also the neo-Marxist methodology in modern Western sociology. This rightly criticizes the mechanistic forms of Marxian and Weberian sociology, which are unable to give a satisfactory explanation of the relations between the material and spiritual factors in the history of Islamic society.

The evolution of a formational paradigm in Soviet Islamic studies is also of great interest. The peculiarity of this process is connected closely with the transformation of a Marxist philosophy of history and the eventful political life of the country. The intensive evolution of philosophical-historical perceptions of Marxism about Islamic society in the first quarter of the 20th century cannot be explained outside the context of the political upheavals which engulfed Russia: the Russian Revolutions, the civil war, the building of socialism in one country, and the expectations for a worldwide proletarian revolution.

Marxism pursued the radical transformation of Western bourgeois society as the most developed society in human history. Therefore, it is quite clear, that being prepared for a world socialist revolution, the Russian Marxists devoted themselves to studying the Western capitalist economy and the development of capitalism in Russia, and hence were apparently less interested in the East in general and in the Islamic East in particular. On a world scale, their main attention was focused on the West, and within the Russian Empire on its European rather than its Asian part. Lenin, following Marx, defined the place of the East in world history in the Hegelian Eurocentric manner. However, the actual development of events in the first third of the 20th century caused an evolution in the attitude of Russian Marxists to their Islamic society: (1) from ignoring and underestimating it, (2) through declaring an anti-imperialist union on the basis of the principles of national self-determination and freedom of conscience, and (3) to violent social transformation of Islamic society and the declaration of war on Islam.

A different policy was conducted in the international arena, where Soviet Russia continued to search for any allies in its anti-Western and anti-imperialist struggle by encouraging and supporting both nationalist-religious and communist movements in the countries of the Islamic East. This foreign policy simultaneously determined two tasks: maintenance of the USSR state interests (policy of peaceful coexistence) and realization of the doctrine of world revolution.

The thrust of this study is also to clarify a fashionable perception of Leninism (mainly in the West) as a peculiarly Russian version of Marxism. That is, that being a principled supporter of the Western path of transformation of the Russian revolution into a world, Lenin nevertheless was periodically inclined to the Eastern variant, which included anti-European elements, talking about a "backward Europe and advanced Asia." However, these oscillations were also characteristic of the founders of Marxism in the 1870s. It is obvious, that Lenin only continued, in new conditions, the process of orientalizing Marxism, begun by its founders. This is reflected in the recognition by Lenin in the 1920s of the decisive significance of the East in the salvation of Soviet Russia, and the continuation of struggle with the capitalist world on its colonial periphery—proposed the idea that Russia, India and China as representing the largest part of world population will decide the outcome of the anti-imperialist struggle. All these ideas meant one more retreat from the positions of Eurocentric Marxist orthodoxy, and a move in the direction of transforming the Russian variant of Marxism into an anti-Western, theory and practice oriented to the East. This turn had beforehand been predicted by G.V. Plekhanov and K. Kautsky.

Having taken from the heritage of the European philosophy of history the principle of Eurocentrism to explain world history, Marxists have tried to reject the main element in this heritage, namely, the concept of civilization, replacing it with a formation theory. The formation scheme of the history of society, created on the basis of European historical material was accepted by Bolsheviks as a universal theory, that is quite applicable to the history of both Russia and Islamic society. The further evolution of this basis was stipulated by two major tendencies in the development of Soviet social science in the 1920-1930s: economic materialism and the ideologization of science. The works of Western positivist Islamic researchers left an indelible impression on the early Soviet Islamic researchers who took those works as truly materialistic. In this case, the trend of economic materialism in Soviet research on Islam was manifest in the identification of economic factors with material and in particular with the natural environmental conditions of the life of society: for example, the ethno-immigration origin of Islam and Islamic society of the Italian Islamologist L. Caetani (Islam has arisen as a result of the last big immigration movement of Semites from Arabia, caused by the progressive "drying" of Arabia); the German orientalist, A. Sprenger’s idea that Islam is the religion of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples; the trade-capitalist hypothesis of Islam’s origin by M. Hartmann; the German orientalist H. Grimme’s hypothesis of the origin of Islam as a socialist movement. To all these could be added the influence of the geopolitical ideas of the German geographer and ethnographer F. Ratzel. The trade-capitalist hypothesis of the origin of Islam by M. Hartmann received in Soviet Islamic studies the status of a truly Marxist concept thanks to the influence of the historical school of M. Pokrovsky, in which the idea of trade-capitalism was studied as a special socio-economic formation.

By the end of the 1920s, the ideologization of science began to have noticeable influence in the methodology of Islamic studies. The essence of this influence lies in the fact that the idea of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat spread over all spheres of scientific life. In Islamic studies, this resulted in the elimination of any doubts about the universal character of the theory of socio-economic formations and the truthfulness of that methodology, left by Marx and Engels for understanding Islamic society. The former perceptions about the progressive and democratic character of early Islam as an ideology which defended the interests of the poor of Mecca and of the peasantry or nomads, were rejected at the beginning of the 1930s as a result of the emergence of a new ideological prescription about the reactionary character of this religion from the moment of its origin. It was necessary only to determine those exploiter classes of which Islam was only the "ideological veil". Among those named were: tribal aristocracy, slave-owners, feudal lords and trade capitalists.

Beginning from the 1940s, Soviet Islamic studies began to acquire a more academic character. In historical and religious studies, Islamic society was unequivocally characterized as feudal in the course of its history. However, one question remained unsolved: the formational specifics of Arabian society in the epoch of Islam’s origin, that is, the social essence of early Islam. For some decades, the study of this problem served Soviet orientalists as one of the ways of discussing questions concerning the Marxist formation schematism: the number of exploiter formations, their sequence, and the universalism of the theory of socio-economic formation.

In the history of Soviet Islamic studies there were various answers to the question of to which formation the early Islamic society belonged. In the 1920-1930s, early Islam was understood either as the ideology (1) of the Meccan merchants ("merchant-capitalist" theory of M.A. Reisner), (2) of the poor masses (the "nomadic" theory of S.D. Asfendiarov), or (3) of poor peasants of Arabia (the "agricultural" theory of M.L. Tamara). At that time there appeared two hypotheses which competed with each other in the 1960-1980s, which conditionally may be named "slave-owning" and "feudal." According to the first, at the end of 6th and the beginning of 7th centuries the process of decomposition of tribal relations and the emergence of a slave-owning mode of production were happening in Arabia. However, the latter did not turn into the dominant mode of production because the expansions which followed soon after its emergence turned Islamic society into a feudal system (S.P. Tolstoy, B.N. Zakhoder, I.P. Petrushevsky, E.A. Belyaev). The second concept assumed that in this period the Arabs passed directly from a dying tribal to an early feudal society, and the conquests only speeded up this process ( N.A. Smirnov, L.I. Nadiradze, L.V. Negria).

At the same time, it was rather characteristic of most research in Soviet Islamic studies, that it was still too early to look for a final answer to the problem of the formation of class society for the Arabs. This was the commonly held conclusion, whose main reason was the insufficient conceptual elaboration of the question of the specificity of the development of Arab society on the basis of a Marxist methodology. Researchers on Islam did not see any outlet for the contradictions of formational schematism, while philosophers either did not notice the philosophical-historical problems of Islamic studies or tried not to get involved in a controversy on problems that went beyond the established perceptions of Marxist orthodoxy. As a result, there was a situation where owing to the absence of a real civilizational alternative to the formation theory, the latter lost any stimulus for development. The continuing rupture between empirical Oriental studies and historical materialism, between concrete-historical and socio-philosophical aspects of the theory of precapitalist formations deepened. In the continuation of the debate about the AMP was in every possible way limited by the authorities, as before the Islamic East found no place in the philosophical-historical Marxist scheme.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Y.M. Pochta proposed new methods for softening the rigid schematism of the Marxist philosophy of history, overcoming the rupture between the general provisions of formation theory and the concrete-historical research on Arabian society at the time of Islam’s origin. While remaining in the mainstream of Marxist historicism, he aspired to reveal the heuristic potential available by creating the methodological concept of middle level, which represents a medium link between the abstract and concrete levels of socio-historical analysis. The categorical apparatus generated for this purpose promoted the achievement of a systematic understanding of formational development, coordinating the spatial-temporal finiteness of a separate society with universal movement and world history. Such a conceptually expressed methodological approach allowed for research of the essential specificity of Arabian society at the time of Islam’s origin from the point of view of such important problems of social development as that of a uniform essence of formation development and the diversity of its revelation in the process of formation transitions, the role of geographical and social environment in the formation of a class society and state, and the dialectics of the internal and external objective and subjective factors of social development.

In explaining the correlation of barbaric conquests and the formation of feudalism the author used the concept of feudal synthesis. Thus, it made possible the consideration of Islam not so much as an Arabic religion, which has achieved the status of a world religion, but as a world religion which in the long process of its formation was connected to the history of Arabic society. As a world religion, Islam was a product of the development of Middle Eastern society in the early Middle Ages. During the conquests, it was not exported from Arabia in a completed form. The process of feudal synthesis taking place in the Middle East and the Mediterranean caused such conditions of social life that the impulse obtained from the military-religious expansion of Muslims led to the formation of a new world religion.

This research helped to reveal not only a certain heuristic potential of the formation theory, but also its defects. In the course of deepening the analysis, serious contradictions between the universalistic claims of the formational paradigm and its limitation to the European cultural-historical experience and perceptions became obvious. Moreover, revealing the tendency of the socio-economic history of the Arabic society does not by itself enable an explanation of its spiritual history. Explanation of the history of Islam entails the need to use elements of civilizational analysis in the consideration of such problems as the place of pre-Islamic Arab culture in the context of the civilizations of the Middle East and the Mediterranean societies, the genesis of Islam in correlation to the history of Judaism and Christianity, and the connection of Islam with the Arabic language, with Arab ethnic self-identity, and with the state-legal traditions of the Arab Caliphate. Thus, there arose the need to join heuristically significant elements of formational and civilizational paradigms into a philosophical-historical scheme of the evolution of Islamic society considered in the context of world history. For the creation of such methodology, it was necessary, beforehand, to reject the idea of a full correspondence of theory and its objective content, and to apply to the understanding of the formational paradigm Weber’s idea about the ideal-type character of any methodological design. The formation theory to say nothing of the "five-formations" schema interpreted in this way does not claim full to the universal-historical tendencies of social development. Yet, it can become a convenient means of philosophical-historical explanation and can be connected to elements of civilizational analysis. This approach was realized by Y.M. Pochta in his subsequent works, which led him to attempt to make a historical-philosophical analysis of the evolution of civilizational and formational paradigms for explaining Islamic society in the European philosophy of history.

As has been shown above, in the Russian and foreign Oriental and Islamic literature, broad experience has been accumulated in the analysis of philosophical-historical interpretations of Islamic society as part of the world. At the same time, the fact that many questions are still unsolved, witnesses to the existence of a problem in this sphere of humanitarian knowledge. This can be indirectly inferred from the purely negative reaction of European society, distant from any philosophical or cultural understanding and analysis at the end of the 20th century, to the phenomenon of "Islamic fundamentalism".

Recently, it has been characteristic of most works about the place of Islamic society in the history of humankind to work out the history of this society as peripheral to the history of European society, which was considered as the single dominant perspective. This linear approach, the basis of which was laid down by Hegel, helped explain some questions about the history of humankind as a uniform social organism, unfolding through evolution in historical time and space. But this approach, based on the comparative analysis of the "periphery" from the point of view of the "center," could not disclose what was essential and specific to the historical development of Islamic society. The concept of the philosophy of history of Islamic society is under formation in the contemporary period, not on a monistic, but on a pluralistic image of the world, based on the idea of the nonreducibility of the diverse socio-cultural formations. There is no doubt about the actuality of the question of the main stages of development of these Western European perceptions, the character of their succession, and their links to the ideas and principles of various philosophical systems. Major controversies are still raging about the concept of Eurocentrism whose existence is either rejected totally or recognized along with obvious exaggeration of its negative features and ignoring of its objective character.

The major conclusions of this study can be stated in the following theses:

- The philosophical-historical analysis of Islamic society in the European science of the 18th to 20th centuries moved along the general course of attempting to explain the problem of the unity and diversity of world history. The analysis of this phenomenon, which has its own logic of development and continuity, assumes concrete-historical stages of its evolution, with a qualitative originality as regards world outlook and methodological approaches: the Enlightenment, romantic, positivist, Marxist, and contemporary. In the process of replacing these stages, the picture of the world and the place of Islamic society also underwent changes.

- In contrast to European science, where the understanding of Islamic society went through the comparison of West and East, in Russian historiography of the 19th and 20th centuries, this process mainly represented an attempt at the cultural self-identification of Russian society through the comparison of the West, Russia, and the East.

- The main conceptual means for explaining the diversity of the world for European thinkers as regards Islamic society were the theories of civilization and formation which arose in the bosom of European culture. European thinkers were inclined to apply the theory of civilization in its religio-philosophical or philosophico-rationalistic variants in explaining Islamic society within the framework of an antithesis: civilization and barbarism. As a result, Islamic society in comparison to European society was characterized as only partially civilized, but on the whole as barbarous.

- Russian historiography exhibited a tendency to consider the civilizational stages of the development of humankind, in the last analysis, as a deadlocked path which should be replaced with the establishment of the "Divine Kingdom" on earth. Recognizing, mainly, the providential, albeit secondary role of Islam in the formation of a Christian humankind, Russian thinkers were inclined to the idea that Islamic society was unable to create its own civilization.

- Marxism formulated its own perception of world history, proceeding from the idea of the inevitable "death" of bourgeois civilization. In light of such understanding of world history, Islamic society was relegated to being part of the pre-capitalist Eastern society and the semi-colonial rear of world capitalism. The formational philosophical-historical scheme of Marxism, created on the basis of European historical material, could not explain the essential specificity of Islamic society.

- In the civilizational and formational approaches to the philosophy of the history of Islamic society, interpretation of the direction of historical development is not reduced to the conventional dichotomy of the linear-cyclical, but includes also circular movement as one of the variants of development. In the last analysis, however, the linear interpretation of social development is determined in which light Islamic society is represented as a social anachronism in the European picture of the world.

- Eurocentrism is characteristic of the civilizational and formational paradigms as well. Eurocentrism implicitly contains in itself perceptions of Christian Providentialism about the existence of a uniquely true religion, and an individual and social appropriate to its ideals. Eurocentrism reflects an actual, objectively "centrist" orientation of one culture in attempts to explain other cultures. However, even during the domination of Enlightenment "linearity," European thinkers could not avoid posing the problem of the diversity of the world. The understanding of this problem was reached by means of a Eurocentric cultural orientation, thereby promoting, albeit in a deformed manner, the augmentation of knowledge about the diversity of world history.

But these critical conclusions are not sufficient. We need more positive results from this study and some ideas of postmodern philosophy, especially a narrative methodology, can be useful for this purpose. All the scientific interpretations of the Muslim society, analyzed above, are part of the project of modernity, which has already ended. Postmodern thinking renewed respect for the uniqueness and the diversity of peoples and cultures with their religious roots. As Bryan S. Turner underlines in his book Orientalism,Ppostmodernism and Globalism (1994), we now need a new form of secular ecumenism for every civilization has its religious foundation. As shown, this basis is evident in the stories that European science tells about Muslim society, implicitly in the form of the religious Providentialism or explicitly in rational-philosophical form. This circumstance allows us to state that there are certain limits to the universal, objective and scientific character of the narrative of Islamic society created by the European philosophical imagination. In other words, the truth and meaning of this narrative are context-bound.

At present, there are two extremes in the Western historical narrative that one should avoid. The first implies that after the end of the Cold War, the West will see its values expand all over the world. Francis Fukuyama has described this story about "the end of the history." The second supposes that the end of the Cold War will inevitably lead to a "clash of civilizations," according to Samuel Huntington’s vision. These stories are modernist in origin, the first is optimistic about the final worldwide victory of Western civilization, and the second is pessimistic about the gradual decline of the West. Neither of these points of view can be accepted if we are trying to restore world history and avoid fatalistic comprehension. Modernist language cannot help in this situation because the world is becoming more and more postmodern, but this does not devastate all previous languages. Instead, it understands none of them as fixed or final. None of today’s theoretical constructions, one’s only means of portraying reality, are perfect and none of them are final. According to postmodernism, whatever exists can be reconstructed.

There are several possible conditions for restoring the Western comprehension of Muslim society’s history using the narrative methodology of postmodern philosophy. It is possible to externalize the dominant negative narratives and to look for alternative positive ones. One can retrieve such stories and follow the example of some Western scholars who have already started this process (A. Toynbee, M. Hodgson, E. Said, B.S. Turner, A. Hourani, R. Khuri). In the contemporary world, the importance of this task cannot be overestimated because if it is not fulfilled one will have to accept the main thesis of S. Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). He will be correct unless one can change dominant and pessimistic narratives about the history of Islamic civilization.

Hence, it is necessary to:

- Overcome Eurocentrism and the linear, one-dimensional understanding of civilizational development, that is, to recognize that there are several centers in the world, each with its own narrative about its role in the history of humankind. Such features of modern Western society as democracy, free-market capitalism and individualism are manifestations of its unique civilizational identity and are based on the Western lived experience, but they are not universal and appropriate for all peoples. The Great Narrative of Western modernity that dominated the stories of civilization for the last three centuries no longer appears adequate. It is necessary to rebuild humanity, to make it more just and free, based on worldwide civic values as well as the civic values of each civilization while preserving the identity of them all;

- Recognize the ontological uniqueness of the Islamic civilization as one of several different civilizations existing in the world;

- Recognize the equal right of Islam as well as of Christianity to have their place in human society (according to Kant’s ideas about the history of religions); and

- Avoid any kind of missionary or civilizing attitude towards Muslim society, that is, to exclude attempts to impose the Western upon the Islamic narrative.

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