Ararat Kostanian, a young Armenian academic who has lived and worked in Syria, Australia, Malaysia and Indonesia, considers the benefits and drawbacks of the Anglo-Saxon approach to academia and describes Armenia’s changing understanding of its place in the Middle East and the world as it absorbs a diaspora that has no Soviet experience. He notes that scholars in the Islamic world, such as Dr Chandra Muzaffar in Malaysia, are as concerned about the encroachments of “the global sickness of materialism” as Western dissidents are.