It should not be surprising that such efforts at integration by means of removing alleged deficiencies were mostly failures. In the case of Muslim CNI scholars, those efforts actually appear to have backfired. To illustrate the perverse effects of the CNI scholarships we need look no further than the most famous of the CNI alumni, Nur Misuari, the founder of the MNLF and presently governor of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Misuari was not the only young Philippine Muslim politicized by his time spent as a university student on a CNI scholarship. The shared experiences of the more than 8,000 Muslim CNI scholars studying in Manila between 1958 and 1967 profoundly affected Muslim politics after 1968. Much of their political education was gained outside university lecture halls from observing and participating in campus political activism. They also experienced at first hand the magnitude of popular anti-Muslim bias in the national capital and, after the election of Ferdinand Marcos as President of the Republic in 1965, witnessed an increasing antagonism toward Muslims by the same Christian-dominated state that had provided them scholarships. By 1968, the CNI scholarship program had unintentionally created a group of young Muslim intellectuals schooled in political activism and able to articulate the frustrations both of Muslim students disaffected by their encounters with Christian cultural hegemony in Manila and of peripheralized Philippine Muslims in general. Their political efforts eventually led, in 1971, to the formation of the underground Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) headed by Nur Misuari. With the declaration of martial law by President Marcos in 1972 the MNLF began an armed separatist insurgency against the Philippine state.