KARACHI, Nov 23: Chief of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement Altaf Hussain has said that religio-political parties, mullahs and the so-called ‘guardians’ of Islam are paid to mislead the people of Pakistan in the name of the Holy Quran and Sunnah, and asked the countrymen to beware of their designs.

“They sell Islam, in fact,” he told a ‘fikree nishast’ (thought session), held under the aegis of the MQM’s Pak Colony and Baldia sectors, telephonically on Wednesday night.

Mr Hussain cited the US-USSR cold war as the classical example of religious exploitation. These very religious

parties and professional mullahs changed their faces with the passage of time and were earning bags full of dollars by declaring the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan as ‘a war between Islam and infidels’ and instigating people to fight a ‘jihad’ against the US now when the sources of their funding had dried up.

“There is nothing new in their action. Mullahs have always cashed by presenting a twisted and wholly misleading version of the Holy Quran and Hadith. They are doing it even now. Mullahs and religious parties took out processions and tried to exploit the Iraq and Afghanistan situation, but I wanted to know that how many Muslim states helped Pakistan in times of crisis, be it the 1965 or the 1971 war… and how many processions were taken out for Kashmir in the Muslim countries.”

Mr Hussain argued that the Kashmir question came up more than a 100 times in the OIC conferences, and asked: “Did any Muslim state pass a resolution to launch a jihad for Kashmir’s liberation? Did anyone of the over 50 Islamic states try to declare war for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq and Afghanistan?”

He stressed the need for seriously considering why Islamic countries had better ties with India than Pakistan. A majority of Muslim states backed India on different issues at the UN, he observed.

The need of the hour, the MQM chief said, was to take a cool and dispassionate view of the situation and decide in the best national interests, rather being swayed by emotions.