It’s just over a quarter of a century since the American political scientist, Samuel Huntington, wrote his famous essay on ‘the Clash of Civilisations’. It set the tone for a series of wars. Huntington was writing after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the Cold War between Soviet Russia and the West. Rather than an era of peace, Huntingdon forecast a new struggle between what he viewed as irreconcilable enemies: Islam and the West. Huntington asserted that identity, rather than ideology, lay at the heart of contemporary politics. "What...