Prof.Dr.Konul Bunyadzade

THE EAST AND THE WEST:

YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW

(The Caucasus and Globalization. Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies.

Religion and the Caucasian Civilization. Special Issue. Volume 3. Issue 2-3, 2009,

CA&CC Press^Ò Sweden, pp.157-166.)

The West and the Islamic East have traveled along similar roads, remaining lose contact and inevitably influencing each other. To a certain extent they can be described as two sides in a single imaginary expanse, which means that they can be discussed as two sides of the same phenomenon starting with the time Islam came into being. Prof. Khalilov has rightly written that “were the idea of civilization closely connected with religious values we could have spoken of civilizations that corresponded to their religions. It is not my task here to analyze the civilizations related to the above concepts; I intend to trace how philosophy and ways of thinking as a whole have developed and influenced the relations between the civilizations and their results. In recent history academics have been turning with increasing frequency to ancient history in search of arguments to support the division between the East and the West. To put this differently: while yesterday the problem of a divided world did not exist, today it has moved to the fore and can be discerned as the primary cause of practically all the global challenges.