A surprising number of Islamic terrorists are engineers. Why did they graduate from building bridges to building bombs?

Mohammad Atta. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Ramzi Yousef. All helped plan and execute terrorist attacks on Americans. But they have something more curious in common: all three are engineers by training.
Is there something about radicalism that appeals to engineers? Yes.

That’s the conclusion of two researchers at Oxford University, who have put out a study titled Engineers of Jihad, reporting that engineers are overrepresented among jihadists.

The authors, Oxford sociology professor Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, looked at members of violent Islamic groups worldwide. Out of 404 terrorists in the study, Gambetta and Herzog identified the field of study for 178, and of those, 78 had studied engineering. That’s 44 percent—more than ten times the representation among the population in the terrorists’ nations of origin. (A full 61 percent held “elite degrees,” which includes doctors, physicists, mathematicians and engineers.)
“The evidence of this puzzling link is not limited to notorious cases...But is found right at the start of modern Islamic radicalism,” the authors wrote.

The bigger question is why this link exists in the first place. Is this overrepresentation due to a particular psychology that makes engineers prone to radicalization? Are there specific economic and social circumstances in Islamic countries that push engineers over the edge? Or could it be a product of networking?

Despite their small sample size, Gambetta and Hertog concluded that all three factors played a role. As for the first—the engineering mindset—the researchers wrote that engineers’ predilection for black-and-white thinking echoes the tenets of Islamic fundamentalism.

The Islamic scholar Khalid Duran (who famously coined the term “islamofascism”) has said that in Egypt, “the Muslim Brotherhood is really the Engineering Brotherhood.” Their training in the technical sciences, Duran suggested, had led engineers to reject their imaginations and instead take up a hard-edged view of the world. As the researchers put it, engineers and scientists are drawn to radical Islamic thought because of “its intellectually clean, unambiguous and all-encompassing nature.”

In our interactive feature, “The Mind of the Engineer,” find out how specific aspects of the engineering mindset draw these scientists towards Islamic radicalism.

As for economic conditions, Hertog noted that because engineering degrees are highly prized in the Muslim world, those who enter into technical universities tend to be “among the most highly motivated and the most talented. They are the ones who have suffered the most from the developmental failures that most Islamist countries have gone through.”

In Egypt, Syria and Palestine, Hertog said, it is engineers who go through “the most pronounced experience of frustration when they ended up unemployed or they realized they wouldn’t get anywhere in the nepotistic networks.” Because they feel let down by a society that cannot utilize their educations, it’s “would-be elites that end up in radical groups.”

If this frustration is the mechanism that leads engineers towards the fringe, one would expect that there would be fewer radicalized engineers in countries with better economic prospects. And, indeed, Gambetta and Hertog discovered just that: Saudi Arabia, one of the wealthiest countries in the Middle East, is the only Islamic nation without an overrepresentation of engineers in its radical population.

But this isn’t just a simple matter of psychology and economics. It also seems to be a function of old-fashioned social networks among family members and friends that pull would-be radicals into terrorism.

Gambetta and Hertog wrote that “the engineering phenomenon could be explained by a historical accident and its ‘natural’ consequences, with no deeper meaning: illegal groups are set up in a clandestine fashion and their existence is advertised along networks of pre-existing social bonds.” Such groups then grow by marketing their extremist ideologies among their friends, kin and neighbors.

Of course, not all engineers end up as terrorists, and Hertog cautions against such pigeonholing, saying, “there seems to just be certain attitudinal and religious biases among engineers.”

Ultimately, he said, “personality traits do matter.” And it is those individual personality traits that combine with a particular social environment create what the researchers labeled “a potentially explosive concoction.”

From a well-known bomb maker to the Glasgow International Airport bombers, our interactive feature explains the specifics of a few high-profile jihadists who all trained as engineers.