The new millennium opens against the backdrop of continued religious, ethnic and racial tensions. Lip service paid to multiculturalism and pluralism by the proponents of postmodern theories and the intellectuals from post-colonized societies is not enough to help the contending ideologies to merge into one harmonious vision of the world. At best, the re-examining of the tenets of the modern self leads to an individual quest for being; at worst, it canonizes new discourses to perpetuate old forms of hegemony. However, a new fundamentally radical thought over the past decades has consisted in serious attempts to quit the "autobahn of Western History" to outgrow the limits of Western philosophy. Central to this thought is the notion of a real fluid and drifting self predicated on the assumptions of a new organon, "an Organum Cosmopoeticum". In our paper, we will focus on the possibilities of a real fruitful encounter between intellectual figures representative of this cosmopoetic self (Kenneth White; Arnold Toynbee; Oswald Spengler; Martin Heidegger) and some highly energetic figures in the history of Islamic thought (Al-Ghazali; Ibn Khaldun; Ibn Hazm; Abu Yaarab El-Merzouki).
Last modified: 7 May 2001