COMMENT | Asia is what political scientists, of the constructive persuasion, call a "concoction".

Cemil Aydin, one of the finest historians on Japan and the Middle East, now based in University of North Carolina, once affirmed in an Oxford dictionary on political thought, that "Asia" was the classical Greeks' description of everything east of Persia some 2,500 years ago. Asia, for the lack of better word, is an amorphous idea, lacking in any concrete geographical delimitation.

In many ways, nor does the latter matter much. The world, after all, is spherical. East of Japan is Hawaii, then the mainland United States, which we call the West. At the height of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the demonstrators somewhat captured the irony and intellectual turpitude, indeed emptiness of the concept of East and West.

Holding pictures of the then Ayatollah Khomeini, tens of thousands in the streets chanted: "neither East nor West, Islam is the best." As Iranians look back, and the rest of the Muslim world looks back together with them, invariably, through the optic of this historical revolution – one that raised the spectre of Islamic revivalism throughout the world, extending from Marrakesh in Morocco to Mindanao in the Philippines – all are inclined to wonder if the future is better mapped on the basis of learning from all?...