Abstract: A clash of civilizations has been perennial in human history, and today it is again taking the form of a more than thousand year old clash: The West and Islam. However, I want to argue that humanity now has the tools to transform that clash to cooperation, and not just occasionally, as in a few times and places in the past, dependent on the temporary benignity of a well-placed leader.

1. The Argument

In very brief fashion, those "new" tools are 1) the crucial development of the ideal, and increasingly the reality, of the separation of religion from the power of the state; 2) the creation of the ideas, and increasingly the honoring, of human rights and democracy; and 3) the rise of the notion, and increasingly the practice, of dialogue as an essential means to gain an ever fuller grasp of reality, and especially in that most intractable area, religion. As these three keyand very "new"

A word about Post-Modernism: I was initially baffled as to what the term Post-Modernism meant, but as it gradually seemed to become clearer that it was essentially talking about the development of various "hermeneutics of suspicion" as solvents of all overarching views of reality, I became quite disappointed. Hermeneutics of suspicion were hardly new discoveries of the late 20^th century; they were very much present starting already as early as Friedrich Feuerbach and then Karl Marx in the 1840s, and on through Sigmund Freud, Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and throughout the 20^th century. Further, these further insights into how we humans think, that is, our epistemology, were it seems to me not a rejection, but essentially a continuation, of the Enlightenment Project of Reason; we have been increasingly seeing dimensions of our human reason that we did not previously understand. So, not Post-Modernism, but an increasingly fuller Modernity.

It is the addition of the last of the trio, dialogue, which has begun to appear significantly in only just the last half-century, that makes the shift from a clash to a dialogue and cooperation of civilizations truly possible.¹ What I intend to do here is to look at each of the three major new tools that will enable humanity to move from clash to cooperation: Religion-State Separation, Human Rights-Democracy, Dialogue.

2. Separation Of Religion From The Power Of The State

1. Union of Religion and State All-Pervading

In all past civilizations, religion has been an integral, a constitutive element. Among other things, religion supplied the ethical basis on which the authority of the state and law was built. The religion, on the one hand, profoundly shaped the state, and on the other, reflected the values of the state. As a result, in all past civilizations there has been a very intimate relationship between religion and state. Very often that relationship was so close that one could speak of the union of religion and state. In that close relationship, at times religion tended to dominate the state, and at other times the state tended to dominate religion. We have seen both in recent times and still even today. The Soviet state's domination of Orthodox Christianity was an example of the former and the Ayatollahs' and Mullahs' domination of the state in Iran is an example of the latter. The relationship of the separation of religion and state is a unique phenomenon in human history, which occurred in the modern West? more about that below.

In the early centuries of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world Christian writers, as we saw, were strongly in favor of religious liberty. After the Constantinian embrace of the Christian religion in the fourth century they quickly switched to the position that the state had the responsibility of seeing that the truth was protected and favored?and of course Christianity had the truth. In theory of course no one was to be forced to accept Christianity, but not infrequently the theory was not translated into practice. With the development of medieval Christendom in the western half of the former Roman Empire, almost everyone became Christian, with the exception of the Jews, who for the most part were allowed to continue a separate existence, often in ghettos.

The history of Islam was not very different: in theory no individual or community was to be forced to embrace Islam. But in practice the Jihad, in the sense of a Holy War against non-Muslim states, not infrequently was in fact launched aggressivelyas we saw was the case here in eighth-century Spain. Although the millet system allowed non-Muslims within a Muslim-conquered state to practice their religion, the non-Muslims were clearly second-class citizens?which fact doubtless encouraged conversion to Islam, and surely not the contrary.

At various times during the intertwined history of Christianity and Islam one side or the other pointed, usually with justification, an accusing finger at the other as a brutal aggressor. In fact, neither Christianity nor Islam can claim to have been predominantly the victim and the other the aggressor;

2. Development of the Separation of Religion and State

Something unique in human history, however, began to take place in "Christendom" as it slowly morphed into "Western Civilization": the gradual, painful move toward the separation of religion and state. Some might trace its beginnings to the Gregorian Reforms when Pope Gregory VII (1021-1085 A.D.) attempted dramatically and substantially to separate the Church from the power of the Holy Roman Empire and other civil powers. Of course no one at the time promoted the notion of the separation of church and state. Rather, each side attempted to wrest power to his side; witness the thirteenth-century "imperial interregnum" manipulated by the popes (when for fifty years the popes effectively prevented the election of a Holy Roman Emperor), followed soon by the imprisonment of that most authoritarian of all popes, Boniface VIII, by the king of France, Phillip the Fair, at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

But it was precisely this mammoth power struggle that encouraged a weariness with the unquestioned assumption of the union of church and state. The Renaissance with its shifting of interest from the divine to the human provided a further basis for the gradual questioning of the wisdom of the union of church and state. This questioning manifested itself visibly in the so-called left-wing of the sixteenth-century Reformation: the Anabaptists and related sects clearly and vigorously rejected the idea of the union of church and state, for which, of course, there were viciously persecuted by Catholics and mainline Protestants.

In the end it was the pitting of Catholics and Protestants against each other that magnified the incipient weariness with the consequences of the union of church and state?induced by the earlier struggle between the pope and civil rulers?to the point of the full embrace of the principle of the separation of religion and state during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The 1789 U.S. Constitution gave for the first time a formal national articulation of the idea of separation of church and state. From that time and place it spread throughout the West in various juridical expressions, and from there increasingly around the globe.

3. The Unique Quality of Western Civilization

When historians like Arnold J. Toynbee survey the total history of humankind they find that there have been a number of civilizations which have come into existence, flourished and then declined (Toynbee discerns twenty-eight civilizations in human history). Many of them achieved admirable accomplishments, the Greco-Roman civilization being the one best known to Westerners. Its achievements were indeed great, so much so that during the late Renaissance there was a lively debate about whether the Ancients (meaning the Greeks and Romans) or the then Moderns had attained greater cultural heights. But doubtless the Greco-Roman accomplishments were in many regards matched, and in some surpassed, by, e.g., the Chinese and Islamic civilizations, as well as others.

However, it is no cultural hubris to be aware that the rising arc of Western Civilization (which is largely a synthesis of [1] the Judeo-Christian tradition, [2] the Greco-Roman tradition, [3] the Germanic tradition, [4] with a significant influence of medieval Islam, and [5] modern science and thought) has reached far beyond where any of the other twenty-seven civilizations have gone, whether in culture, science, politics, economic prosperity, technology, etc. Moreover, Western Civilization is now being transformed into Global Civilization, which had never occurred before, and the process of globalization is intensifying in exponential fashion. This is not to discount Western-now-becoming-Global Civilization's defects, blind spots, and seething problemssome of the most critical of which are largely a result of its very accomplishments, e.g., the population explosion (because of, inter alia, medical and agricultural advances), the ecological crisis (because of, inter alia, technological advances and the population explosion). But even that illustrates the main point: Western-Now Becoming-Global Civilization's greatest problems flow not from its weaknesses, but from its even more awesome, unparalleled achievements. How to account for this unique breakthrough in human history?

One of the essential elements in the advances of Western-Becoming-Global Civilization in culture, science, politics, economic prosperity, and technology, the like of which, as said?for all of its problems, which are correspondingly massive?were never before experienced in human history, is the separation of state and religion. And religion here includes any "ideology" that functions like a religion, as, for example, atheistic Marxism (it is clear to see today in Eastern Europe and the former USSR what disaster the union of state and the "religion" of Marxism led to).

Christendom began in the Late Middle Ages reaching the cultural level of the earlier Greek and Roman, and the then contemporary Islamic, civilizations. All historical data strongly suggest that Christendom, would have plateaued at approximately that level for a longer or shorter period of time, and then gone into decline?as had all other civilizations before then, and as eventually the Islamic Civilization did as well.

That did not happen, however. Why? One very fundamental reason was that?starting with the Gregorian Reforms, through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and on into the Enlightenment and beyond?religion and the state slowly and very painfully began to be separated. In fact, and somewhat amazingly, the current Pope, Benedict XVI, has found a papal source for the later separation of religion and state even as far back as the fifth century:

Pope Gelasius I (492-496) expressed his vision of the West.... This introduced a separation and distinction of powers that would be of vital importance to the later development of Europe, and laid the foundations for the distinguishing characteristics of the West.²

This separation of religion from the power of the state broke the forced quality of religion/ideology and consequently freed the human spirit and mind to pursue its limitless urge to know ever more, to solve every problem it confronts. This resulted in a series of what historians call "revolutions" in the West: the Commercial Revolution (16-17^th centuries), Scientific Revolution (17^th century), Industrial Revolution (18^th century), Political Revolution (epitomized in the 18^th-century American and French Revolutions), and on into the 19^th and 20^th centuries with myriads of revolutions of all sorts occurring at geometrically increasing speed and magnitude.

With these "exponential" advances in capabilities, of course, the possibilities of destructiveness increased correspondingly?as the medieval philosophers said: The corruption of the best becomes the worst, corruptio optimi pessima. Nevertheless, because freedom is of the essence of being human, even though we may well destroy ourselves if we do not learn wisdom and live virtuously, we can never turn back to an unfree stage of human development.

Hence, those societies which try to reunite religion/ideology with the power of the stateas fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism attempt to do todayare doomed to always be third-class societies. New problems and challenges will always arise in human societies. Humans, however, have a virtually limitless capability of intellect, imagination and spirit (which is another way of saying what the book of Genesis in the Bible meant by recording that God made humans in God's image, the imago Dei) with which to address and overcome those problems and challenges ever anew. Unfortunately, when that innate human creative spirit is imprisoned in a doctrinal strait-jacket ("ortho-doxy," "straight-doctrine," becomes in fact "strait-doctrine") imposed from above by the power of the state, it will die from spiritual strangulation. And then that society will fall behind, and perhaps even succumb to, those societies which retain their creativity.

That is why, for example, the present attempt of Islamists to reestablish the Muslim law, the shar'ia, in the Muslim world will condemn those countries to always be behind the "West." And, given the Islamists' memory of the past medieval cultural glory and superiority of Islam over the West, it is precisely the present inferiority in almost every way of all Islamic countries vis-à-vis the West that infuriates them. Since 9/11/01, however, an increasing number of thoughtful Muslims are engaging in what at times is termed a struggle for the soul of Islam, meaning, the attempt to bring Islam into the modern thought world, as Islam had done so brilliantly in

Of course, the same disastrous consequences also result when other "fundamentalist" religious creeds gain state power, e.g., as was clear when the destructive Hindu fundamentalist BJP recently came to political power in India. As another example, North Korea will likewise always remain "backward" so long as it maintains a union of ideology and state.

Many Islamist apologists argue, however, that Islam is different from the West and its major religion, Christianity, because, unlike Christianity, Islam is a holistic religion which includes politics as well as all other aspects of life. In this, unfortunately, they are forgetting that Christendom was exactly the same for well over a millennium?the Constantinian Era. It is only when Christendom, the West, began to break out of that mischievous marriage of religion/ideology and state (only allegedly virtuously "holistic") that it embarked on the path of human freedom with its limitless possibilities of creativity (and destruction).

It is interesting to note that Pope Benedict XVI recognized with approval that this principle of the separation of religion from the power of the state attained its greatest expression in the United States:

American Catholics have absorbed the free-church traditions on the relation between the Church and politics, believing that a Church that is separate from the state better guarantees the moral foundation as a whole. Hence the promotion of the democratic ideal is seen as a moral duty that is in profound compliance with the faith. In this position we can rightly see a continuation, adapted to the times, of the model of Pope Gelasius described earlier.⁴

5. The Challenge to Jews, Christians and Muslims Together

As we know, however, at its best, the separation of religion and state did not, and does not, mean hostility between religion and state. Rather, it frees each, religion and state, to fulfill its respective function untrammeled by, but closely related to, the other. For the state, that function can be briefly described as the responsibility "to organize society so as to protect the rights of all, and promote the common good," and for religion, "to provide an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly."

Clearly the West does not have the perfect solution to the question of the relation between religion and the state; it has many different imperfect solutions. The quite "anaemic" condition of a Christianity not completely separated from the state in Germany, Scandinavia, England, and other European countries, vis a vis its turbulent but comparatively vital condition in the U.S. with its quite completely separate relationship of religion and state further bears out the thesis of this essay, that the separate but creative relationship of religion and state is good for both religion and state, and hence, for humankind. The current increasing "union of church and state" of the Bush administration is a sad example of the destructiveness that develops when the vital principle of the separation of religion from the power of the state is not strongly adhered to.

The "perfect" solution of the relationship of religion and state lies only in an "infinite" future, toward which humans are always striving. But also clearly, the West?and countries such as Indonesia, Japan, etc., inspired by the principles of democracy and religious liberty?has shown that separation of religion and state is essential to the true full functioning of both religion and state, and to human progress to "Infinity." Said in other words: The separation of religion and the state is a necessary, though not sufficient, cause of the unending creative development of humanity.

Clearly not all Muslim thinkers and leaders are Islamists, despite the great show of force released by the radical Khomeinis of Iran, Turabis of the Sudan, and Bin Ladins of Saudi Arabia. Contemporary critical-thinking Muslim scholars and leaders like Indonesia's former President Abdurrahman Wahid and Foreign Minister Alwi Shihab?but others as well?are fully aware of the dangers of Islamism, of the history

The great challenge to Jewish and Christian thinkers and leaders is to work together with such Muslims, and men and women of other religions and ideologies, to develop jointly relationships between religion and the state which will maintain both the essential separation between the two and the needed cooperative spirit.

3. Human Rights And Democracy

Something else of vital importance grew out of the breakthrough era of 18^th-century Western Europe called the Enlightenment, die Aufklärung. Germany historians call that period forward Die Neu Zeit, "The New Age," because after it everything that was accomplished in the world was "new." The critical new thing that emerged were the twin ideas of "Human Rights" and "Democracy."

Never before did any civilization conceive of the idea of rights belonging to every human being simply because of one's being human! True, the term "democracy" (demos kratia, people rule) was created in ancient Greece, but not every human being was considered a member of the demos. In fact, only a small percentage of Athenian society was counted among the demos; the vast majority were slaves. Also, the New Testament did not do away with slavery, for the deutero-pauline and petrine authors of the New Testament say "slaves, be subject to your master" and the like, numerous times. However, it is very interesting to note that amidst all the scholarly challenges today to what Jesus is truly likely to have said and done,⁵ it is rock-solid that his clearly counter-cultural massive advocacy and practice of equality for womenof "human rights" nfor womencame from Jesus⁶ and not from the Church, Judaism, or the Roman world. The later New Testament said, for example: "Women, keep silence in the church"; "I suffer no woman to have authority over a man"; "wives, be subject to your husbands".... It took almost two thousand years for Jesus' "feminism" to re-surface in the
worldfar back in the wake of the Spät-Aufklärung's Feminist Movement.⁷

We have become very used to the idea of equality and human rights. For those of us from the West it may seem that such notions are perfectly obvious, even though they might often be grossly violated. True, these ideas are becoming in theory more and more widely accepted. It seems that today almost everyone knows about, and either has or wants, equality, human rights, democracy. But these very ideas were not even thought before the late 18^th century. When they were voiced, the Catholic papacy viciously condemned them in the 19^th century: first Pope Gregory XVI in his 1832 encyclical Mirari vos and then Pope Pius IX in his infamous 1864 Syllabus of Errors:

The false and absurd, or rather the mad principle [deliramentum] that we must secure and guarantee to each one liberty of conscience; this is one of the most contagious of errors.... To this is attached liberty of the press. the most dangerous liberty, an execrable liberty, which can never inspire sufficient horror....⁸

That erroneous opinion most pernicious to the Catholic Church, and to the salvation of souls, which was called by our predecessor Gregory XVI (lately quoted) the insanity (Encycl. August 13, 1832), namely, that "liberty of conscience and of worship is the right of every man; and that this right ought, in every well governed State, to be proclaimed and asserted by the law."⁹

However, the Catholic Church totally reversed itselfthough of course it never publicly admitted that it didconcerning religious liberty and freedom of conscience in the Vatican II 1965 Declaration on Religious Liberty:

This Vatican Synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or social groups and of any human power, in such wise that in matters religious no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs. Nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.¹⁰

1. The Universe is a Cosmic Dance of Dialogue

In a profound way Dialogue has been at the heart of the cosmos from the very beginning: Dialogue that is, the mutually beneficial interaction of differing componentsis at the very heart of the Universe, of which we humans are the highest expression: From the basic interaction of Matter and Energy (in Einstein's unforgettable formula: E=mc²Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light), to the creative interaction of Protons and Electrons in every atom, to the vital symbiosis of Body and Spirit in every human, through the creative dialogue between Woman and Man, to the dynamic relationship between Individual and Society. Thus, the very essence of our humanity is dialogical, and a fulfilled human life is the highest expression of the Cosmic Dance of Dialogue.

In the early millennia of the history of humanity as we spread outward from our starting point in central Africa, the forces of Divergence were dominant. However, because we live on a globe, in our frenetic divergence we eventually began to encounter each other more and more frequently. Now the forces of stunning Convergence are becoming increasingly dominant.

In the past, during the Age of Divergence, we could live in isolation from each other; we could ignore each other. Now, in the Age of Convergence, we are forced to live in One World. We increasingly live in a Global Village. We cannot ignore the Other, the Different. Too often in the past we have tried to make over the Other into a likeness of ourselves, often by violence. But this is the very opposite of dialogue. This egocentric arrogance is in fundamental opposition to the Cosmic Dance of Dialogue. It is not creative; it is destructive.

Hence, we humans today have a stark choice: Dialogue, or Death!

2. Dialogues of the Head, Hands, and the Heart

For us humans there are three main dimensions to dialoguethe mutually beneficial interaction among those who are differentcorresponding to the structure of our humanness: Dialogue of the Head, Dialogue of the Hands, Dialogue of Heart.

a) The Cognitive or Intellectual: Seeking the Truth

In the Dialogue of the Head we mentally reach out to the Other to learn from those who think differently from us. We try to understand how they see the world and why they act as they do. This Dialogue of the Head is vital, for how we see and understand the world and life determines how we act toward ourselves, toward other persons, and toward the world around us.

b) The Illative or Ethical: Seeking the Good

In the Dialogue of the Hands we join together with Others to work to make the world a better place in which we all must live together. Since we can no longer live separately in this One World, we must work jointly to make it not just a house, but a home for all of us to live in.

c) The Affective or Aesthetic: Seeking the Beautiful

In the Dialogue of the Heart we share in the expressions of the emotions of those different from us. Because we humans are body and spirit, or rather, body-spirit, we give bodily-spiritual expression in all the Arts to our multifarious responses to our encounters with life: Joy, sorrow, gratitude, anger.... and most of all, love. All the world delights in beauty, wherein we find the familiar that avoids sameness, diversity that avoids distastefulness.

d) (W)Holiness: Seeking the One

We humans cannot long live a divided life. If we are to even survive, let alone flourish, we must "get it all together." We must live a "whole" life. Indeed, this is what the religions of the Western tradition mean when they say that we humans should be "holy." Literally, to be holy means to be whole. Hence, in our human Dance of Dialogue we must "get it all together," we must be (W)Holy. We must dance together the Dialogue of the Head, the Dialogue of the Hands, and the Dialogue of the Heart. We must then all join together in the Cosmic Dance of Dialogue.

Christianity and Islam are the two most populous, geographically widespread, and powerful religions today (also have been for centuries and will be for the foreseeable future). They, along with Judaism, must lead the way in developing and spreading a creative relationship between religion (ideology), ethics, and the power of the state. Though small in numbers today, the significance of Judaism in the past?remember, it comprised almost a tenth of the population of the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus (8-10 out of 100 million) ?was immense through its decisive influence in the shaping of Western Civilization; in an almost baffling way it has today once again become immensely significant through the tiny state of Israel, and particularly in its relationship to the West (former Christendom) and Islam. Thus Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have a special responsibility to take the lead in developing and furthering a creative relationship between religion, ethics, and the state.

No civilization or society can flourish without having a cohesive basic ethic at its foundation. As noted above, the foundation of this essential civilizational/societal ethic has in the past been provided by particular religions for each civilization/society. This was and is true for Western Civilization as well, in that at its ethical basis there lies the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, though increasingly "rationalized" and "secularized" in recent centuries. Indeed, even in the most powerful nation of Western Civilization, the United States of America, there is scholarly consensus on the existence at its core of a "civil religion," which is precisely this "quasi-Deist" Judeo-Christian tradition. Nevertheless, expanding this "civil religion" in the U.S. is the development as the result of greatly increased religious pluralism since the transformed immigration laws in the 1969s. This is leading to the placing of "interreligious, intercultural dialogue" also at the heart of the U.S., and Western-Becoming-Global Civilization.

Each civilization/society will have to develop, maintain, and constantly update for itself such a fundamental ethos/ethic if it is to survive and flourish, but in the new millennium it will increasingly have to do so within the context of "Modernity" with its growing focus on freedom, human rights, separation of religion and state, religious/cultural pluralism and interreligious, intercultural dialogue. Each of these foci, of course, have their necessary correlatives, i.e., freedomresponsibility, human rightsobligations, separation ofrespect and cooperation between, religion and state, and pluralism religious/cultural mutual respect and dialogue.

Underlying all of these, and other, elements of Modernity, which each civilization/society will have to come to terms with in conjunction with its own traditions and in its own creative way, is the global fact that no civilization/society can live in even relative isolation today and on into the third millennium. Ours is already "one world": global communications, global transportation, global economics....and holding it all together will have to be a Global Ethic?with freedom/responsibility, human rights/obligations, religious pluralism/dialogue and separation/respect between religion and state. This Global Ethic must, and can, be arrived at, and constantly be extended, by consensus through unending dialogue among women and men of all religious and ethical persuasions. And those with the greatest power and influence, of course, have the greatest responsibility to lead the way in this consensus-building through dialogue, and consequent action: Jews, Christians and Muslims.

This, I believe, is how humankind will move beyond its up to now perennial clash of civilizations to a dialogue and cooperation of civilizations.

¹See Leonard Swidler, The Age of Global Dialogue, trans. by Lihua Liu (Beijing, 2006).

²http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0601/articles/benedict.html , Pope Benedict XVI, Without Roots (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

³One finds an acknowledgment of the present decline of Islamic civilization, and a determination to do something positive about it, in certain leading Muslim circles, for example, in Malaysia: "None of the Muslim countries are considered to be developed or advanced, despite about ten are among the rich nations of the world." Perceptively the author goes on to note that the Muslim countries "are so weak politically, economically, socially and even educationally .... Muslims have become so weak and dependent on others in almost every field" (Seyed Othman Alhabshi, An Inspiration for the Future of Islam (Kuala Lumpur: Institute of Islamic Understanding Malaysia, 1994), pp. 14f.), and then quotes Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad: "We Muslims are backward in many
fields." (Speech of Prime Minister, Dato Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad at the Opening of the International Youth Camp, Morib, Selangor, August 10, 1981, cited in ibid., p. 18.)

⁴Benedict XVI, Without Roots.

⁵See Robert W. Funk, and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998).

⁶"Jesus Was a Feminist," Catholic World, January, 1971, pp. 171 183.

⁷See the forthcoming book Leonard Swidler, Jesus Was a Feminist. Why Aren't You?!

⁸Pope Gregory XVI, Mirari vos, in Leonard Swidler, Freedom in the Church (Dayton, OH: Pflaum Press, 1969), p. 45.

⁹Pope Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors, in ibid., p, 47.

¹⁰Quoted in ibd., p. 62.