Currently, the West's engagement with Islam is considered one of the most challenging political and cultural tasks. Cyrus Achouri questions common cultural clichés and examines Eastern and Western cultures from the perspective of whether the "autonomous" individual is a Western invention and whether it is essential for democracy. The author presents shared cultural foundations of the West and the East to demonstrate that conflicts are often rooted in political rather than cultural reasons, and he justifies the autonomy of the individual not only through cultural arguments but also with system-theoretical arguments of biological self-organization.