Researchers have recently raised eyebrows both within academe and in professional circles with their study noting the high incidence of engineers in jihad. One of the most well-known of course is key 9/11 plotter Ayman al-Zawahiri. The study builds on more than just one infamous example of course. In a work entitled, "Engineers of Jihad1," researchers Diego Gambetta, Nuffield College and Steffen Hertog, University of Durham, quote not only al-Zawahiri, “You have trivialized our movement by your
mundane analysis. May God have mercy on you,” but their abstract details the research. In the words of their abstract:
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, casting a new light on the sources of Islamic
extremism and grounding macro theories of radicalization in a micro-level
perspective.
At the very least, and despite the hubbub, I wanted to quote them accurately and discover what their research suggested.
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