 By the time he left for Pakistan in 1974 he had also become the local chairman of an anti-apartheid group, National Youth Action, and had been detained several times by security police.Esack spent eight years as a student in Karachi, completing the traditional "Dars-i-Nizami" program of Islamic studies and becoming a "mawlana" or Muslim cleric.As he noted in the introduction to his book "On Being a Muslim", some of his fellow students later joined the Taliban in Afghanistan.