On October 25, 2013, an international scientific and practical conference "Historical and cultural relations of Kazakhstan with the countries of the Foreign East" was held in Almaty on the basis of the Abai Kazakhstan National Pedagogical University (Kaz. NPU). The choice of the venue of the event was not accidental. NPU is the oldest and leading university in the republic and one of the centers of pedagogical science and culture. For many years, its walls, or rather, the Institute of Philology and Multilingual Education, train qualified specialists in Oriental studies, study Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Turkish, Uyghur and other languages. The conference was attended by historians, political scientists and philologists from Azerbaijan, Egypt, Iran, China, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and Russia, as well as Kazakh scientists from university centers of the republic. More than 80 reports of scientists from far and near abroad countries were presented at the plenary and four breakout sessions, and the conference materials were published in the collection of the same name. According to the organizers, the novelty of the conference consisted in placing new accents in the history of cultural relations between Kazakhstan and the countries of the foreign East, which was confirmed by the use of new sources of information in the reports from the richest manuscript and archival collections of a number of libraries in Azerbaijan, Turkey and Arab countries. The general tone was the desire to introduce modern analytical techniques into the research process, based on the achievements of linguistics, history, source studies and other social sciences. It was emphasized that Kazakhstan was and remains a place of not only meetings, but also mutual influence, interaction, mutual enrichment of various cultures and civilizations. And the unique experience of interethnic, interreligious and intercultural communication accumulated by Kazakhstan can serve as a subject for serious scientific research. In ... Читать далее