It’s unlikely that Osama bin Laden picked up the idea of a clash of civilisations from a Harvard professor’s essay in a 1993 edition of Foreign Affairs, but when al-Qaeda terrorists slammed two aircraft into New York’s Twin Towers and attacked the Pentagon eight minutes later – that’s what he got.
The conflicts between cultures and religions that would replace the Cold War, as Prof Samuel Huntington predicted, have defined the last two decades and will dominate the world for the rest of this century.
