Historical and cultural message of Islam and Europe

Abstract

Samuel Huntington’s geopolitical vision of the clash of civilizations, that is of the European and American with the Islamic civilization, belongs, in fact, to one of the viewpoints on the relations between West and Islam. Of course, as usual, there exist two extreme camps opposing each other. One claims that the relations and mutual influences cannot and do not exist, and that they have never existed. The other tries to prove the opposite by writing and speaking of the fusion between Europe and Islam. Nowadays, we witness the domination of the first camp. It draws a thick line between the two civilizations and assumes that their ideas, historical past, values and hierarchy of values have absolutely nothing in common. Arnold Toynbee, excellent English historian and philosopher of history, wrote that in the past when Europeans were militarily opposing Muslims, Europe let the Islamic civilization ruin itself by attacking Balkans, Hungary and Austria and walked, one could say, the Islamic civilization around by imposing itself in Yemen, Africa and India.