Why Are So Many Terrorists Engineers?
There’s been a little surprise recently when some academics started to look at who terrorists actually were and where they came from, their backgrounds etc. Instead of what many people think, that they are the poorest of the poor, people with nothing to lose (and we’d all think that would be true of suicide bombers, of course), they’re not. They tend to be middle class and well educated. More than that, they tend to be engineers:
We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic groups which have emerged in Western countries more recently. We also find that engineers alone are strongly over-represented among graduates in violent groups in both realms. This is all the more puzzling for engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists. We consider four hypotheses that could explain this pattern. Is the engineers’ prominence among violent Islamists an accident of history amplified through network links, or do their technical skills make them attractive recruits? Do engineers have a ‘mindset’ that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism, or is their vigorous radicalization explained by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries? We argue that the interaction between the last two causes is the most plausible explanation of our findings…
This of course touches upon our EQSQ personality tests and that’s where I would put the influence, myself.
I see it often enough with engineers who want to study economics: and a terrorist is similarly trying to study society in order to work out a way to change it. What happens is that the systemizing mind gets to work and decides that, as society itself isn’t actually how it “ought” to be then there must be some error with the system. With economics it tends to be engineers insisting that it’s all just like hydraulics: with the terrorists it’s the Jooos! or the CIA or somebody. It’s not possible, to this systemizing mindset, that society could in fact just be like people are: a messy, incomplete thing, which doesn’t really have such a system to it to be identified.
That, I think, is what makes them think that, like blowing on support of a bridge, they can make the current society fall over, if only they could apply the correct pressure at just the right point. That society isn’t a system like that, that there is no specific point at which you can kill a few people to change it, not just doesn’t occur to them, it doesn’t even enter their frame of reference that society could be like that.
November 25th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Interesting. I’m guessing that children are being urged to study engineering in Islamic schools. I recently read 3 Cups of Tea (http://www.threecupsoftea.com/), about an amazing man, Greg Mortenson, who has been building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A problem he encountered was with the many madrassas being built in the area. These are schools run by Islamic groups. While some offer a basic Islamic education, these ‘ordinary’ schools might only be there to camouflage the madrassas that teach extreme Islam for the sake of jihad (holy war). Because so much is in disarray in these countries, and because of the poverty, education is not being adequately financed. This leaves room for humanitarians such as Mortenson, but it also leaves room for more madrassas.
So, if so many children in the countries are being educated in madrassas, many of which teach an extreme form of Islam (“terrorist schools,†they’re sometimes called), it might be logical to think many are being pushed to study engineering. Engineers, of course, are very valuable to terrorist groups who want to blow up stuff.
December 15th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
That is another way of looking at it, certainly, that those in charge of the children’s education are pushing them into engineering because it might be useful to future planned attacks. I’d believe it a well, of the generation currently being educated: we’ve just had a case in the UK of a known terrorist sympathizer being stopped from taking certain classes because of what he might be taught.
But looking at the historical record I’m not sure it works with previous generations of terrorists or engineers. Because, for example, the 9/11 people were all studying engineering long before any expressed an interest in jihad.