The most plausible explanation of the engineers’ over-representation among violent Islamic radicals everywhere lies in the joint effect of two causes. To convey how our account fits the pattern of findings we can reason counterfactually. Without the severe lack of professional opportunities that they had to endure in MENA countries we would not find an over-representation of graduates, especially from elite degrees, among violent Islamic radicals – as indeed we do not find it either in the West, in Singapore or even in Saudi Arabia where we know that graduates fared much better professionally. In all these areas violent Islamism has attracted proportionally many more marginal individuals with lower education and professional qualifications. Saudi extremists seem to reflect Saudi society in general, with neither an overrepresentation of graduates nor an elite bias among them. In the case of Singapore – arguably the closest to the West in economic terms – the sample is even below the average level of education, and in the West the proportion is smaller still. This pattern clearly points to the importance of relative deprivation and frustrated expectations, a theory that may have been abandoned too hastily, partly perhaps because it was applied at too macro a level, that is to explain country rather than group differences.
However, without their mindset, which inclines them to take more extreme conservative and religious positions everywhere, even in MENA countries engineers would have behaved as those with OEDs largely limiting themselves to non-violent forms of radicalisation, and would not register in relative terms as strongly as they do. The mindset could also explain why even in the Western and South East Asian groups in which graduates did not experience the same professional frustration they had in MENA countries, the engineers’ overrepresentation is strong. Even if there are very few graduates, most of them are engineers. In the case of MENA countries deprivation and mindset seem to have worked together, selecting elite graduates first and engineers among them, which could explain the much larger scale of the phenomenon, while in the West and in Singapore mindset alone seems to explain the phenomenon, which in absolute term is much smaller.
The only other case in which we find a trace of engineers’ prominence outside of Islamic violent groups is, consistently with the mindset hypothesis, among the most extreme right-wing movements, especially in the US and in Germany, where it is all the more striking again given the general low level of education of the members of such groups. Here we have perhaps the only other case in which the mindset alone has activated engineers into resorting to violent action – their absolute number is tiny, but disproportionate relative to other types of graduates.
Both discontent and mindset would not have had the effect they did in inducing the would-be modernising elites of the technically educated to become extremists were it not for the emergence of Islamism as the only credible political opposition to authoritarian and corrupt establishments. Social movement theories help us to capture how the protest is “framed” by drawing on local cultural resources and an Islamic rhetoric of probity, offering social and political renovation through tradition. Yet, they can explain neither the different trajectories of engineers relative to OEDs – violent vs. non-violent movements – nor the disproportionate presence of engineers among radicals outside of conventional social movements: engineers predominate among small, cell-based organizations that are uprooted from their social context, and among ‘globalized’ radicals in the West (Sageman 2004; Roy 2004). The more widespread the engineers’ phenomenon is the less it can be explained as the outcome of a specific, context-dependent opportunity of “framing”. We have shown that it is very broad indeed and hence cannot be exclusively dependent on local socio-economic, political or cultural opportunity structures. The fact that radicalisation now occurs in Western countries too suggests that the presence of democratic channels, especially with the events of post 9/11 and the Iraq war, no longer suffices to prevent it, as it may have done in Turkey, and that the movement has now found its own momentum and draws its resources from new channels. Still it continues to attract engineers.
We do not know how exactly these various elements – the mindset, the expectations and the experience – interacted to produce the radicalisation of only some engineers and not others, indeed not of most of them. There is a micro level of analysis that a fully satisfactory explanation should ideally achieve that eludes us. Only detailed biographies, of both those who did radicalise and those who did not, with information on individuals’ trajectories and dispositions would allow us reconstruct the precise micro-causality of that process.
What we do know is that at the time of writing the phenomenon shows no signs of abating. On the 30th of June 2007 a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane canisters was driven into the glass doors of the main terminal at Glasgow International Airport and set on fire causing much damage but no casualties among the public. Of the two men who were arrested in flagrante, Bilal Talal Samad Abdullah is a medical doctor, born in Britain from Iraqi parents; the other, Kafeel Ahmed, was an Indian engineer. In 2001, he “joined Queens University in Belfast, Ireland to do his M.Phil in aeronautical engineering, completing it in 2003. He did his PhD in computational fluid dynamics at the department of design and technology, Anglia Polytechnic University” (The Times of India, 6 July 2007). Ahmed, who had suffered severe burns in the attack, died on the 2nd of August 2007
On the 14th of July 2007 Hicham Dokkali, a 30 year old Moroccan with no previous record of extremist activities, tried to blow up a coach load of tourists in the city of Meknes in a botched suicide attack, which he planned to carry out using a butane gas bottle. He blew off his arm but did not kill anyone. Dokkali worked as a tax officer but was trained as an engineer (Middle East Online, 14 July 2007).
On the 4th of August 2007 two Egyptian men were stopped with pipe bombs in their car near a U.S Navy base in South Carolina where enemy combatants have been held. They have now been indicted on federal charges of carrying explosive materials across state lines. Ahmed Abdellatif Sherif Mohamed, 24, is an engineering graduate and teaching assistant at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, and Youssef Samir Megahed, 21, is an engineering student (The Associated Press, 31 August 2007).
On the 5th of September 2007 police arrested three men allegedly preparing a massive bombing campaign targeting Americans and US installations in Germany. Adem Yilmaz, a 29 years old man born in Turkey, worked as train porter, became unemployed, and drifted onto the Islamist scene. The other two are German converts. Daniel Martin Schneider, 22, reportedly comes from a middle class family, and left his gymnasium in 12th form despite having good grades, supposedly because he did not want to be taught by women. He went to Egypt to learn Arabic, did military service in Germany, followed by odd jobs and a stint in a militant training camp in Pakistan. Fritz Martin Gelowicz, 28, described as the leader of the Islamic Jihad Union terror cell, also went to a training camp in Pakistan in 2006, and comes from divorced middle class parents: his mother is a doctor and his father an engineer. He recently married a German-Turkish woman. A few days before his arrest, he “mystified his parents by visiting them both and bidding them farewell”. In 2003 he had enrolled for a combined economics and engineering degree at the University of Applied Sciences in Ulm (WTOP News.com 7 September 2007; Sunday Times 7 September 2007; Die Zeit, 6 September 2007; Tagesspiegel, 9 September 2007).
