Whether you agreed with it or not – and many didn’t – Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a coming Clash of Civilisations (1993) was one of the most engrossing arguments of the late twentieth century. He not only foresaw Western civilisation confronting a joint Confucian–Islamic challenge, in 1996 he also anticipated an attack on the US by young, middle-class Muslims.

In the ensuing fracas over how many civilisations there are, who belongs to which one, and what constitutes a civilisation anyway, other writers proposed variants on Huntington’s thesis. Francis Fukuyama maintained that there was no Clash since the US stood unchallengeable at the apex of human achievement. Tariq Ali argued that we are already caught up in a Clash of fundamentalisms, that the monopoly on terrorism is not held by Islamists, and that Christians and Jews who believe it is their task on earth to eradicate evil are just as capable of terrorism. Then Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, surveying Europe, the Middle East, and Asia in Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (2004), admitted that, for some reason, Western countries have earned their bad reputation and perhaps deserve to be clashed with. But the Occidentalist statements that Islamists use to justify terrorism show, in their view, a dangerous spread of ‘bad ideas’. For them, the Clash is not of civilisations or even of religions, but of ideas that impel some groups of people to attack others.