Caricatures of Muslims as heathens have emerged over centuries via respectable philosophers like Voltaire, who wrote, "that [Muhammad] would put his country to fire and the sword to make this book [Qur'an] respected".

Caricatures of Muslims as heathens have emerged over centuries via respectable philosophers like Voltaire, who wrote, "that [Muhammad] would put his country to fire and the sword to make this book [Qur'an] respected".

This penchant was taken up by popular culture in the form of books, journals and movies. Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad in 1869 drew scathing sketches of the Arabs as tactless, arrogant and ignorant, calling Muslims, "people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, un-progressive and superstitious".

Hollywood further augmented this caricature, with films in the 1920s like The Sheikh and Beau Geste, which reinforced stereotypes of the Arabs as a culturally backward, sexually deprived and congenitally violent people. It can be seen in modern films like Back to the future and True Lies where Arnold Schwarzenegger, the perfect American, stops Arab wildmen planning the nuclear destruction of America.

Even children's films like Aladdin are not spared from this ethnic bigotry. In Aladdin, an Arab is heard singing: "Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam, where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face, it's barbaric, but hey it's home."

It is thus not surprising to observe academics like Samuel Huntington given room to promote ideas of a clash of civilisation, in the West, with the argument that the West should not only be concerned with Islamic extremism but with Islam as a faith system.