Excerpts from the book, Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education, published by Princeton University Press
by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog
On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a twenty-three-year-old Nigerian man, arrived from Ghana into Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport where he boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to De-troit. As the airplane approached its destination, Abdulmutallab disap-peared for twenty minutes into the lavatory. Back in his seat, he started fumbling around with his underwear. Neighboring passengers saw his trousers on fire and Jasper Schuringa, a Dutch film director, jumped on Abdulmutallab and subdued him, while flight attendants rushed to the scene with a fire extinguisher. The explosive device he had hidden in his pants failed to detonate and Abdulmutallab was arrested. Authorities dis-covered that he had been in contact with Al-Qaida elements in Yemen. Just a year earlier Abdulmutallab had received a degree in mechanical engineering from University College London.Two months before Abdulmutallab’s attempt, on 13 October 2009, Mohamed Game, a thirty-seven-year-old Libyan living in Italy, blew him-self up with two kilos of nitrate at the entrance of the Caserma Santa Barbara, an army barracks in Milan.
This was the first and thus far only suicide attack attempted in Italy, and Game might have been a “lone wolf” operator, at most a member of a small local network. Game—who lost his right hand in the attack and is now serving a fourteen-year sentence—has a degree in electronic engineering.Exactly three months before Game’s failed attack, on 13 July 2009, a German court sentenced forty-seven-year-old German Pakistani Aleem Nasir to eight years in prison for his role as an Al-Qaida facilitator in Europe. Nasir had been traveling regularly to the tribal areas in Pakistan, supposedly to trade in semiprecious stones but apparently to transfer money to, and coordinate European recruitment for, Islamist militant groups. Nasir is said to have been enlisting a number of German Muslims for jihad, among them German Moroccan Bekkay Harrach, who would become infamous—also in 2009—for his videotaped threats of jihad against the German government, apparently recorded in a hideout in Pa-kistan. Nasir holds a degree in mechanical engineering while Harrach had begun college studies of laser technology and mathematics before drop-ping out to take a part-time job in a mosque in Bonn. Apart from being male and of Islamic faith, these four men have little in common. They vary in terms of nationality, age, the Western country with which they had most contact, and even the extremist network they were part of.
They also differ in marital status: Game, Nasir, and Harrach had wives and children; Abdulmutallab did not. Their careers vary greatly, too. Nasir had worked at an energy re-search institute in Karlsruhe before being fired for supposed extremist statements, after which he worked as a gem trader. Game, despite his degree, had a history of underemployment and was in debt, while Harrach lived off odd jobs. Abdulmutallab never even began a career, jumping straight from his studies into extremist activities.The only thing they have in common is having studied engineering.As one would expect there are militant Islamist university or college graduates who have not had successful careers after graduation: Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani man who left an SUV packed with explosives near Times Square in Manhattan on 1 May 2010, is said to have been “unemployed and bankrupt at the time of his arrest,” though it is not clear whether his progressive radicalization was the effect or the cause of his unemployment. Wadih El-Hage, a Lebanese man who is serving a life sentence in the United States for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, held minimum-wage jobs in the United States as a city custodian and auto mechanic, despite having university training as an urban planner.
However, other extremists abandoned successful careers to devote themselves to the cause. Abdul Subhan Qureshi, leader of the Students Islamic Movement of India, who is wanted in India for various attacks, including the ones on the Mumbai trains on 11 July 2006, left his wife, three children, and a thriving occupation. Qureshi joined Radical Solu-tions, a computer firm in South Mumbai, in November 1996. According to his coworkers, Qureshi was an exceptional worker: “He handled several major independent projects, including an intranet for Bharat Petro-Chemicals carried out by Wipro in 1999, and then joined Datamatics.” In just three years, his salary quadrupled. In a letter dated 26 March 2001 he resigned, stating, “I wish to inform you, that I have decided to devote one complete year to pursue religious and spiritual matters.” For other extremists their careers mattered less because they came from very privi-leged backgrounds: underpants bomber Abdulmutallab is the youngest of the sixteen children of Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, former chairman of First Bank of Nigeria and former Nigerian Federal Commissioner for Eco-nomic Development, and lived in a luxury apartment in Marylebone while studying for his engineering degree in London. And yet, despite their deeply dissimilar employment histories, Shahzad, El-Hage, and Qureshi all have engineering degrees, just like Abdulmutal-lab and the others. Shahzad “enrolled at the University of Bridgeport, where he received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering in 2000, followed by a master’s in business administration in 2005.”
El-Hage studied urban planning at the University of Southwestern Loui-siana in the 1980s, interrupted by spells of jihadist training in Afghanistan. Qureshi for his part “obtained a diploma in industrial electronics [in 1995], and landed a part-time job at String Computers in Mazgaon. Later, in 1996, he went on to earn a specialised software maintenance qualification from the CMS Institute in Marol.” Socioeconomic background, age, country of origin or relocation, group of affiliation, employment and family situation—all these features vary among the men discussed thus far. The only feature they share is a degree in higher education, in particular a degree in engineering. This is doubly puzzling when set against commonsense expectations. While we readily accept that the dispossessed are natural candidates for extremism, we are at a loss to comprehend why well-off, educated men should join the ranks of jihad. And why would individuals with a technical mind and training in modern technology have a penchant for a movement at once violent, religious, and in many cases, as we will see in chapter, permeated by antiscientific beliefs? At the Origins Evidence of this link is not limited to recent cases. It spans three decades and three continents and appears in connection with notorious attacks. Mohamed Atta (Egyptian) and Khalid Sheik Mohammed (Kuwaiti), leading figures in the 9/11 plot, both studied technical subjects: one urban planning in Hamburg, the other mechanical engineering in the United States. In fact, of the twenty-five individuals directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, eight were engineers. Engineers are, moreover, found right at the beginning of modern Islamist militancy.
In 1970s Egypt, three groups considered part of the beginning of modern jihadism had been started or were led by individuals who had a technical education. Al-Takfir wal-Hijra, which was involved in the assassination of a cabinet minister, was founded in 1969 by Shukri Mustafa, an agricultural engineer and former member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Shukri was radicalized during his incarceration in the Tura prison and Abu Zabal concentration camp in Egypt. The second group—known as the Military Academy Group for its violent occupation of the Egyptian Technical Military Academy in April 1974, from where it launched a failed attempt to march on the ruling party’s headquarters—was founded in the 1970s by Salih Siriyya, a Palestinian with a doctorate in the teaching of science (Ibrahim 1980; Kepel 1985). Siriyya, too, had been imprisoned. Finally, an electrical en-gineer, Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, played a pivotal role in the group al-Jihad, which was responsible for the assassination of President Sadat in 1981 and became the most notorious successor to the earliest Egyptian groups (Nesser 2004; ICG 2004). Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian so-ciologist who was the first to study the early violent Islamists, interviewed thirty-four members of two of these groups, the Military Academy Group and Al-Takfir, who were imprisoned in the late 1970s. Twenty-nine of them were either university graduates or students, and of the twenty-five for whom he reports their area of study, nine were engineers, seven were doctors, five were agronomists, two were pharmacists, two were studying technical military science, and one was studying literature (Ibrahim 1980, 1982).Engineers were also members of radical student groups in Egypt in the 1970s called Gama’at Islamiyya.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later gained worldwide notoriety as bin Laden’s partner and successor at the helm of Al-Qaida, was a member of one of them. Abdallah Schleifer, an American Jew who is now a professor of media studies at the American University in Cairo and converted to Islam in the 1960s, made Zawahiri’s acquain-tance in 1974 when working for NCB news in Cairo. When they first met, Zawahiri, then at medical school, gave Schleifer a tour of the campus: “during the tour, Zawahiri proudly pointed out students who were paint-ing posters for political demonstrations, and he boasted that the Islamist movement had found its greatest recruiting success in the university’s two most élite faculties—the medical and engineering schools. ‘Aren’t you im-pressed by that?’ he said” (Wright 2002).Indications of the link between radical Islamism and engineering are also found beyond the Middle East. We have already mentioned Abdul Subhan Qureshi, the Indian computer engineer. Two of the three men who in 1987 founded Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Sunni fundamentalist Pakistani group that fights against India’s sovereignty over the State of Jammu and Kashmir, were professors at the University of Engineering and Technol-ogy of Lahore, albeit not engineers themselves. While appealing to ma-drasa students and the disenfranchised, Jemaah Islamiya in Southeast Asia also recruited “many technical faculty members, including archi-tects, engineers, geophysicists, chemists, and robotics engineers” (Abuza 2006: 78).
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Diego Gambetta is professor of social theory at the European University Institute, Florence, and official fellow of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. His books include The Sicilian Mafia and Codes of the Underworld (Princeton). Steffen Hertog is associate professor of comparative politics at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats.
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