pre-stroke - higher education - dakwah

whilst jang, mat kent and duan became my good friends, there was another big group of malaysian students whom i became alienated with. these were the practitioners of extreme islamic fundamentalism - the dakwah group. my group and these group were always at odds, mainly, they dress strangely, with turbans, beards and pakistani or afghan-like clothes. they were a tight-knit group and it seems that most were either already married or have partners similarly attired. whilst we were mostly in northcote st. they were mostly cossetted in other more remote areas of cardiff. so long as they keep to themselves everything was fine but once they start to intrude into my privacy, i.e. unexpectedly dropping around early in the morning and then proceeded to lecture us, relationships then turn cooler. whilst we acknowledge each other's existence , inter-mingling or social interaction ceased. it's like they were from a different planet.three years running i came up against their candidate for the election as the president of the cardiff area malaysian students(CAMSA), and each time i came up on top, but i would like to think that i was a fair leader as i never ever treated them any less, after winning each election. some of these students , i am sure are now in the higher echelons of malaysian society, just like some from my more liberal group. however, considering events in the last 3o years, since the iranian revolution and events in afghanistan, i couldn't stop wondering as to how many of them were also caught in the fundamentalist euphoria and perhaps have uprooted to either iran or afghanistan. the strange thing was that almost all these dakwah types were people like me, students from rural areas or small towns who did well in their form5 m.c.e. exams, and were then caught in the then n.e.p net of malay empowermentin the beginning of the nineteen seventies. in umno's grand plan, we were supposed to be educated and then return home to serve the umno masters, all in the name of n.e.p.i am quite sure the umno strategist never took into consideration the advent of islamic fundamentalism. my gripe here is that yeah these dakwah people were strange but at the same time most were just innocent kids swayed by the human instinct of hunting in packs. and were victims of umno's social engineering of the seventies and eighties