At the close of five hundred years of European expansion in Asia, a new Zeitgeist has arisen: ‘Asian values’. The idea has been given wide international exposure, especially by intellectuals in the United States. It has formed the basis of a grand historical narrative in which they can locate themselves in the aftermath of the cold war. The rise of the west, it is argued, was marked by a succession of conflicts: the wars of princes, the wars of nations and, in the twentieth century, the wars of ideas. In the great struggle of our age, liberal democracy vanquished communism. However, it has not triumphed in the extra-European world. To explain this, the new meta-histories turn to the cultures that define civilizations. Old arguments about the cultural conditions for democracy have been given new focus. The great struggles of the twenty-first century will not be about ideology, but culture. The old cold warrior, Samuel Huntington, calls the new cold war ‘the clash of civilizations’. Huntington has a number of civilizations in mind, but he is quite clear where the most deadly challenge lies. ‘Islam’, he writes, ‘has bloody borders.’