The end of the 20th century marked the conclusion of the period of totalitarian ideologies. Finally the dehumanizing technological universalism which had so terrorized the world from the 1930s, through World War II and into the 1980s was displaced by a new awareness of the person and of human subjectivity. In the euphoria of 1989 the way appeared to open to a new utopia in which the creative freedom of peoples could be asserted, their values and virtues affirmed and their cultural traditions renewed.

Unfortunately — or more interestingly — life has not proven to be so simple. With the new recognition and even celebration of the cultural specificity of the many peoples has come competition, even conflict, sliding at times into genocide. Consequently, among the challenges which we face as we move into the 21st century perhaps the greatest is to find the resources and the creativity to be able to live these cultures fully in a way that can generate not conflict, but cooperation between them.

At base this is an issue of whether reality as such — and in particular human reality — is to be comprehended in terms of matter, colliding atoms and nuclear conflict or in terms of the spirit and hence bonds of sharing and love. Indeed, even when Samuel Huntington rooted civilizations in religion, he still interpreted them according to former models as basically conflictual.

It is necessary then to study in depth the nature of cultural traditions as human artifacts and especially the interpretation of their mutual relations. This has been the subject of a number of studies and conferences, especially in Islamic contexts. There the special concern to be faithful to the message of the Prophet received in the past makes particularly important the hermeneutic issue of how this can be read in a way that ground and enables the onward progress of life in new times.

Hence Part I is entitled "Hermeneutics as the Interpretation and Interchange of Cultures". Chapter I, "Hermeneutics of Cultural Traditions and Their Religious Roots" concerns directly the hermeneutic issue of cultures in order to look intensively into their constitution and interpretation. It traces this issue to the religious roots of cultures and civilizations.

Chapter II, "Cultural Traditions as Prospective and Progressive (Tashkent Lecture, 1999)" was written in response to the question of whether tradition is a block to progress. This has been claimed by classical liberalism which emphasizes "freedom from" in order to be unlimited in one’s choice. This lecture given at the philosophy summer school in Tashkent in 1999 looks at tradition in its diachronic and prospective character as a progressive force.

Chapter III, "Hermeneutics and Cultures (Tehran Lecture, 1999)," given at the Mulla Sadra conference in Tehran in 1999 reviews some of the same matters with special attention to the implications of hermeneutics for cultural studies.

Part II is entitled "Globalization as Relations between Cultures". Here Chapter IV, "Nicholas of Cusa: an Epistemology and Metaphysics for Globalization as Diversity in Unity (Conference on the Philosophical Challenges and Opportunities of Globalization, Boston, 1998)" is concerned to resituate the issue of the relation between cultures in the new global context. But to do so requires a new epistemology and metaphysics. This will take considerable time to develop, but it promises to be a major challenge and contribution of the third millennium.

However, it is possible to reach into the treasure house of earlier work in philosophy to find at the break between Medieval and Renaissance thought the sketch of a new way of thinking achieved by one who has been called the last of the medievals and the first of the Renaissance minds, namely, Nicholas of Cusa. His sense of the human, precisely in contrast to the divine, was that because it was limited it needed multiplicity and diversity, that is, it needed the whole of creation in order to reflect the infinite and All-Perfect which is as well the One act of creative love. From this it follows that each is a contraction of the whole and related inherently to all else. This provides the basis for a new way of thinking that is truly global in character. This paper was prepared initially for the joint meeting of the International Society for Metaphysics (ISM), the World Union of Catholic Philosophical Societies (WUCPS) and the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy (RVP) on "Philosophical Challenges and Opportunities of Globalization" in Boston in 1998 on the occasion of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy.

Part III "Religion and Cooperation between Peoples and Cultures" deepens the discussion of the role of religion in the dialogue between cultures. If the source and goal of being is God and if cultures are the patterns of human understanding and commitment, then religion as the relation of humans, persons and societies to God must be the basis for cultures. In this light, issues of relations between cultures are rooted in relations between religions. Hence this part begins with Chapter V, "Cultures, Religions and Relations between Peoples," to lay the foundations for the investigation of whether this relationship of cultures and more radically of religions is in principle one of harmony or of conflict. As with Chapter I, this provides more detail for the chapters which follow in this Part.

Chapter VI, "The Relation of Islamic and Christian Cultures," treats a special instance, namely, the relation between Islamic and Christian cultures. After long defining themselves in contrast one to the other, the two are now embarked on a project of mutual positive discovery. The need for this is only intensified by the processes of modernization and of East-West interaction in a global world of economics, communication and culture. This lecture was delivered at the conference in Bulgaria in 1998 on "Islamic and Christian Dialogue".

Chapter VII, "Islam as Seen from the Christian West (Al-Azhar, 1994)," goes more deeply into the way in which Islam and Christianity see each other. Great progress has taken place on this in recent years, led by the al-Azhar University in Cairo, which was the site of this lecture in 1994.

But this issue is not only one of cultures, but of mega-units or whole civilizations. It extends from relations between cultures to relations between civilizations. Here a key work has been that of Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order. His thesis, as noted above, is that the identities of the several civilizations are rooted in religion and that all identities are conflictual.

This thesis is developed in Chapter VIII, "Samuel Huntington and the Religious Basis for Civilization," a lecture presented in Tehran in 1998 at the Center for Cultural Research. It is redeveloped and subjected to critique in Chapter IX, "Conflict or Cooperation between Civilizations," delivered at the Institute for Dialogue between Civilizations in Tehran in 1999. The Chapter draws upon a number of the earlier chapters to develop, in contrast to Huntington, the conditions not for conflict, but for dialogue and cooperation between civilization. This is based on their religious character as calling for a transcendence of egoism in favor of cooperation between peoples on a shared pilgrimage from different quadrants, but toward the one Holy Mountain (Isaiah 27:13).