ABSTRACT
To Cultural Research intended to deepen the self-understanding of Western civilization the consideration of Islam commends itself on these grounds:
Islam presents the spectacle of the development of a world religion in the full light of history.
It presents the further spectacle of the widening of this religion into a civilization.
In the development of this Islamic civilization foreign cultural traditions were absorbed, modified, and again eliminated. Some of these traditions have also gone into the making of the West. Thus the growth and decline of Islamic civilization between the seventh and the twelfth centuries A.D. illuminate almost dramatically the processes of cultural interaction and culture transformation, as well as the concept of cultural influence as such.
Islamic civilization constitutes a complete system of thought and behavior growing out of a fundamental impulse and enveloping man in all his relations—to God, the universe, and himself. This system is both close enough to the Western view of the world to be intellectually and emotionally understandable and sufficiently far removed from it to deepen, by contrast, the self-interpretation of the West.
