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Books have always been the joy of my life. My family played a big role in cultivating my long love affair with books. When I was born, my father was 52, ten years older than my mother. He came from a family of Kelantanese religious scholars and small-town nobility, and following family tradition attended an Arabic primary school. However due to lack of funds to further his studies in the Middle East, he had to switch to an English secondary school by changing his age. He later went to the University of Malaya (then in Singapore) to read history, and joined the civil service in the early days of independent Malaya.

In the year of my birth, in 1982, my father was already a senior bureaucrat, in his final years of serving his country. He was preoccupied with books - both English and Malay, as well as rediscovering his Arabic - and when other kids were playing with toys and Atari computers, my father dazzled me in conversations on history, politics, religion and culture. My mother and other siblings were avid readers as well, but I was fascinated with the subject matter of my father's readings.

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