WASHINGTON, Oct 14: The United Nations must form an inter-faith agency aimed at preventing an impending clash between the West and Islam, says Jose de Venecia, Jr, speaker of the Philippines' House of Representatives.

The speaker, who is hosting an Asian parliamentary conference in Islamabad next month, told Dawn he believes the western and Islamic worlds would head toward "a major clash if we do not do anything" to prevent it.

"We believe the creation of an inter-religious council or a specific unit on inter-faith understanding in the UN system is an idea whose time has come," he said, adding the proposed body should include ulema and religious leaders from other faiths.

Mr Venecia, a three-time speaker of the house who was first elected congressman in 1969, enjoys the support of his government, which has adopted the idea as part of its foreign policy. He has discussed the idea with US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice last year in Washington and, on her advice, spoke to President George W. Bush about it.

"Mr Bush liked the idea," he said, adding, though, that the US State Department has not announced an official US position on the issue he believes Washington will back him when he needs its support in the United Nations.

"Dialogue among civilizations is a long-standing proposition (within the United Nations as well), but the time has now come to create a mechanism within the UN system, starting with a special committee in the General Assembly," he added.

Harvard professor Samuel Huntington warned in 1993 the western and Muslim worlds were moving toward a clash, which he dubbed the "clash of civilizations." Geographically, Huntington gave Europe and North America to the West while Islam was shown as the dominant force in the Arab world, Central Asia and parts of Southeast Asia.

In the Balkans, his fault line coincides with the historic boundary between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The peoples to the north and west of this line are Protestant or Roman Catholic. The peoples to the east and south of this line are Orthodox or Muslim.

Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, leads the scholars who oppose the theory. Chomsky refers to clashes among various extremist groups within the Islamic world, and the use of Islamic extremists by the West against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, to show the clash is more political and economic than cultural.