Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

THIS BOOK PURSUES A PUZZLING FACT: INDIVIDUALS WITH AN ENGINEERING education are strongly over-represented across a wide variety of radical Islamist as well as right-wing groups. Since we first delivered it to the publisher, there has been a steady trickle of evidence which corroborates our point of departure, as well as new research that gives sharper contours to some of our key explanations.

Engineers have continued to appear on the radical right: In December 2016, American industrial engineer and self-proclaimed Ku Klux Klansman Glendon Scott Crawford was sentenced to 30 years in prison for trying to build an X-ray death machine intended to kill Muslims as well as president Barack Obama.¹ His co-conspirator Eric Feight, a control systems engineer, had received an eight year prison sentence a year before.

But the great bulk of new evidence comes from the biographies of the Islamist perpetrators of recent violent attacks. Consider first some prominent examples that come from the Muslim world, where we have shown radicals to be not only unusually well-educated but also frequently trained as engineers. On June 2015, 23-year old Seifeddine Rezgui pulled out a Kalashnikov hidden in a parasol, and opened fire indiscriminately on tourists sunbathing on a beach in Sousse, Tunisia. He murdered 38 people and left another 39 wounded. Rezgui was a student of electrical engineering at the University of Kairouan, in northwest Tunisia. Jump now 5000 miles to the east, to Dhaka: the six attackers who in July 2016 killed 20 customers of a bakery in an upscale neighborhood were products of Bangladesh’s elite, several having attended one of the country’s top English-medium private schools as well as universities both in the country and abroad.²

Return westward again, to Istanbul, in the first few hours of 2017: Abdulgadir Masharipov, the Uzbeki ISIS operative who killed 39 revelers in a nightclub, had degrees in physics and computer science. There is no doubt that, as we amply document in chapter 1, Muslim world radicals continue to have high levels of education, often in technical subjects, and to belong to frustrated would-be elites whose high hopes are dashed in underdeveloped economies.

In our book, however, we also show that Western jihadis by contrast are more frequently socially marginal. Their lower-status background has received further confirmation not just from the identity of the recent attackers in various Western European countries, many of whom boasted a past of petty crime, but also from systematic studies. One of these, by German intelligence agencies, which was leaked in autumn 2015, reports that of 670 known German jihadi volunteers in Iraq and Syria, more than half had a criminal background.³ A September 2016 report by the Norwegian domestic intelligence agency showed that 68 percent of radical Islamists in Norway had a criminal history while more than 47 percent never completed high school. Not a single one completed higher education.⁴

Strikingly, however, another of our findings also receives confirmation: among the few militants born or bred in Western countries who have university exposure, engineers continue to be overrepresented. In November 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted five individuals for supporting Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, two of them Indians and three U.S. citizens. Three of them, Indians Farooq Mohammad and Ibrahim Mohammad and an American co-conspirator not identified by name, had at some point studied engineering in the United States.

The three seemed to not yet have committed any violent act. The case of Belgian-Moroccan Najim Laachraoui is different: a couple of weeks after our book came out, on 22 March 2016, he blew himself up at Brussels airport, part of a coordinated bombing campaign across the city that killed 32 civilians and injured over 300. As it later emerged, Laachraoui had not only acted as bomb-maker for the Brussels attacks, but also for the preceding, even bloodier attacks in Paris in November 2015. He, too, had studied engineering. Another case is that of El Shafee Elsheikh, a Sudanese-British ISIS volunteer, who was identified by Western media in May 2016 as a member of a gang of four British ISIS jail guards—dubbed the Beatles for their English accents by former captives—with a reputation for mistreating and disposing of hostages. He studied mechanical engineering.⁵

Recent research findings also complement our arguments on the social origins of the Islamist insurgency and the mindset of its protagonists. With regard to the former, more evidence has been piling up that points to relative rather than absolute deprivation as the relevant radicalizing factor. Survey evidence from Somaliland shows that more education both lowers one’s socio-economic expectations and increases one’s support for political violence (Mercy Corps 2016). A June 2016 study of developing world poll data from 2006 to 2012 by Ianchovichina and Kiendrebego (2016) finds that individuals who are unemployed and struggle to make ends meet are more likely to support violence against civilians while religiousness decreases support for such violence. This not only supports our argument that relative deprivation drives radicalization across the Islamic world. It is also in line with our view that it is less the specifically religious content of radical Islamism that attracts followers but rather a rigid vision of social order and identity that this family of Islamist ideologies shares with the radical right.

Recent political psychology research has also produced more findings in line with our own theories. We identify three traits that we argue create an affinity to both extreme right-wing and Islamist ideology: a propensity to be easily disgusted, a preference for clear in-group/out-group distinctions and a high need for certainty and predictability that psychologists call need for closure. A July 2016 article by Aaroe et al. shows through a survey experiment that propensity to be disgusted is in fact related to preference for one’s in-group. Disgust-prone individuals are much less trusting, and more untrusting of individuals outside of their group than of in-group members. This suggests that two of the three traits we have identified are indeed interlinked.

We also found some anecdotal evidence on an important implication that we have not yet been able to test systematically. We conjecture that a certain mindset, which is (a little) more likely to be found among those who choose engineering as a course of study, is also more likely to be found among both Islamists and far right extremists. If our conjecture were correct, we should observe that same mindset to be more frequent also among the extremists who did not attend university.

A piece of evidence is reported in a long feature that appeared in the The Atlantic in early 2017, which traced the biography of John Georgelas, an American self-taught computer programmer who has emerged as one of the key ideologues of ISIS. While his only university exposure were a few courses in philosophy at a Texas community college, his profile fits like a glove the hierarchy- and order-seeking mindset we describe as being a core trait of violent Islamists: Georgelas is an extreme literalist in his interpretation of the Quran—an approach through which he seeks to eliminate any ambiguity—and is depicted as both left-brained and pedantic (Wood 2017).

Another piece of evidence comes from two white brothers from the English midlands whose life story is investigated in a British television series that aired on channel four in March 2017. One joined rallies of the radical right-wing English Defence League while the other converted to Islam. There is no sign that convert Abdul (formerly Shaun) is interested in political violence, still he follows a salafi-style Islam that is very ritual-focused, and recounts how he was instantly attracted to the sense of structure and rules governing every aspect of his life⁶ offered by this version of the religion—reflecting a highly ordered vision of life and society that we argue Islamism and right-wing ideology share. Right-wingers and Islamists are not only metaphorical relatives because of the ample overlap of their ideological beliefs, as we argue in chapter 4, but blood relatives too, it seems.

As we show in chapter 6, the pattern of women’s militancy is the exact opposite of that of the engineers (who are almost entirely males). Engineers are found among Islamists and right wing radicals and are near absent on the radical left, where social science and humanities graduates dominate. Women, by contrast, are found among left-wing extremists but rarely among Islamists and right-wing extremists. More evidence has emerged to reinforce our confidence in this pattern. In a January 2017 paper, Wood and Thomas show that women are more frequent in Marxist-oriented militant groups and less frequent in radical Islamist groups. Accounts from within the Alt-Right indicate that women are also strongly under-represented in this new right-wing movement.⁷ Recent research by Mona-Morgan Collins (2016) indicates that women’s behavior is consistent over time: she shows that women have historically voted for the left since they were enfranchised. This array of new evidence confirms the gender patterns in our own samples of radical groups, which we in turn link to the weaker presence of the three personality traits among women.

Our research seems to have also had some resonance in jihadi engineering circles. We mentioned above the five individuals that the Department of Justice indicted for supporting Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula in November 2015. The indictment reports that one of the three, Indian citizen Farooq Mohammad, in January 2008 sent an email to his co-conspirator and fellow engineering student Ibrahim Mohammad. In the email he commented on an online discussion about an earlier paper of ours that discussed the presence of engineers among Islamist extremists. His short conclusion was: :-) . . . engineers rule. Mohammad also seems to have uploaded our paper to a website registered under his name.⁸

Our book should not really be the source of professional pride among engineering-educated jihadis. In fact, we show that it is not technical skills, but a combination of social and psychological causes that explains both engineers’ striking presence among some types of radical groups and their absence among others.

1 White Supremacist Gets 30 Years Prison for His Plot to Kill Muslims and Obama, The Guardian Website 19 December 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/19/death-ray-plot-muslims-obama-glendon-scott-crawford-new-york.

2 After Slaughter, Bangladesh Reels at Revelations about Attackers, New York Times, 3 July 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/world/asia/bangladesh-dhaka-terrorism.html?ref=asia.

3 Who Are Germany’s Islamists, Deutsche Welle, 24 September 2015, http://www.dw.com/en/who-are-germanys-islamists/a-18737894.

4 Politiets Sikkerhetstjeneste, Radikaliseringsprosjektets rapport, 14 September 2016, http://www.pst.no/media/utgivelser/radikaliseringsprosjektets-rapport/.

5 Jihadi John’s Fourth Beatle Unmasked as Refugee Given Shelter in U.K.,The Telegraph, 23 May 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/23/jihadi-johns-fourth-beatle-unmasked-as-refugee-given-shelter-in/.

6 One Converted to Islam, the Other Went to Far-Right Rallies: A Modern Tale of Two Brothers, The Guardian, 19 February 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/19/extremely-british-muslims-islam-convert-far-right-brother.

7 Women and the Alt-Right,The Economist, 1 February 2017, http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2017/02/no-women-s-march.

8 U.S. Department of Justice, United States of America vs. Yahya Farooq Mohammad, Ibrahim Zubair, Asif Ahmed Salim and Sultane Roome Salim, https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/790971/download, pp. 19–21.

PREFACE

TO EVEN THE MOST CASUAL OBSERVER, KEY MOMENTS IN THE LAST TWO centuries demonstrate the disproportionate impact that the violent actions of a handful of extremists can have in shaping the course of events in the Western world. Not all extremists’ acts have had momentous effects of course, but memorable cases come readily to mind. The attacks of September 11, 2001, for example, whose nefarious consequences have been and will remain with us for a long time, and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo in 1914, which unleashed World War I. The Spartacists whose revolutionary zeal contributed to the rise of the right in Germany in 1919 and the Baader-Meinhof Gang which, fifty years later, shook the stability of the young West German democracy. Or the anarchists who rocked the European monarchies at the turn of the twentieth century, and Sendero Luminoso in Peru and FARC in Colombia who held their countries hostage for decades. Bearing in mind all of these, the Islamist extremists, who have been the salient threat for the last two decades and who are the focus of this book, are but the latest in a long line.

Violent extremists may have abruptly changed the course of history, both nationally and internationally, but often not in the way they intended. The outcome of their actions depends more on the response of the establishment that is targeted than on the nature of the actions themselves. Who could have anticipated the reaction of the Bush administration to Al-Qaida’s 9/11 attack, a disastrous war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that had nothing to do with the attack, to say nothing of the mad carnage of World War I, which broke out following the assassination of the Austrian archduke?

To make their opponents feel threatened, extremists do not need to be well armed, or rational, or even very numerous. But their extreme risk-taking behavior makes the question of what kind of individuals become extremists all the more pressing. What kind of people embark on a violent, radical course when their chances of success are low and the fight they pick is so asymmetrical in terms of force? Only a few violent groups develop social roots, sowing the seeds of broader militant movements and larger insurgencies, and fewer still succeed in gaining power. Most are ultimately crushed and disappear. So what makes some people form or join groups of violent extremists?

Answering this question has been difficult for social scientists for obvious reasons. Extremists are few in number, operate underground, and are hard to reach not least because they tend to die young. Whatever they communicate to the outside world is tainted by their strategic aims—they let us know only what they believe serves their purposes, and it is hard to separate truth from obfuscation. Trying to understand their motivation from afar through introspection does not help either, as the very fact that they are extremists makes them difficult to identify or empathize with.

The powers under attack, too, strive to impose their narrative on events, and demonizing extremists is an inevitable part of that process. The very use of the label terrorist is part of the ubiquitous tactic of belittling the enemy’s ends while magnifying their means. State enforcement agencies and armies are wary of allowing independent scholars access to information that might undermine their official rhetoric. It is not even clear whether state agencies, under pressure from the paranoia and political impatience that typically inform counterterrorism policies, can afford the time and mental energy to turn the wealth of information that they possess about extremists into a deep understanding of the phenomenon. It is striking that even at a safe historical distance from particular conflicts with extremists, no insightful reports from government agencies seem to surface. The truth could be the first victim of conflict not so much because it is censored, manipulated, or strategically kept from public view for reasons of national security, but because it is never reached in the first place. There continues to be a yawning gap between what violent extremists can do and what we, the public, really understand about them.

The difficulty of researching violent extremism has not deterred people from writing about the phenomenon, and the literature is as copious as it is inconclusive. While there are peaks of high-quality research, with which we shall engage in the book, much of it is based on speculation and armchair theorizing. When there is any evidence at all it is often anecdotal and distorted by selection biases or prejudices.

In this book we take a different and unusual approach. Our point of departure is a surprising fact: engineers are overrepresented among violent Islamist extremists. This puzzling correlation, the existence of which we establish beyond a reasonable doubt in the first chapter, offers a vantage point from which to understand the nature of Islamist extremism and the mechanisms behind its emergence.

Relying on education as our key variable has several advantages. The level of education and, for those who attended university, the discipline of the degree pursued are types of biographic information that are not very difficult to obtain; because they are considered irrelevant for governments’ counterterrorism operations, they are unlikely to be classified or strategically manipulated. Data on education are also, in this case, preferable to data on occupation, since everyone receives some education and does so early in life; in addition, education usually does not change or progress after an individual has gone through the education system, while occupation does. So these are types of information that we can potentially acquire about everyone, even extremists, many of whom are old enough to have gone to university but are too young to have had a significant career. Lastly, education level and types are fairly comparable across the educational systems of different countries.

But there is more to education level and type: their greatest advantage for our purposes is that they reflect actual behavior rather than (self-) reported attitudes, and, unlike other biographical data that are often available—such as gender, age, or place of birth—they are at least to some extent the result of the subjects’ choice. As such they carry a wealth of information that can help us uncover important socioeconomic circumstances as well as personal dispositions. The discipline of the degree attained in particular has the potential to contain information about personal characteristics. Individuals’ preexisting traits and motivations may determine how they choose among similarly demanding and rewarding but otherwise incommensurable areas of study, such as medicine, engineering, economics, and law. For those who can afford to select among equivalent courses, their choices are likely to be less constrained by social or economic factors and thus be a proxy of personal propensities.

These features of education made it both possible and worthwhile for us to put together data sets on the level and type of education of five categories of Islamist activists.

(1) Three large and diffuse groups: militant individuals born and active in a variety of Muslim countries in peacetime; militants born or raised in Western countries; and nonviolent Islamists from across the Muslim world.

(2) Two more specific groups: Islamist extremists in Iran before the revolution; and Islamist extremists from around the world who defected and abandoned the ways of violent politics.

We do not include in the main sample larger Islamist insurgent groups such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Shabab in Somalia, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Even though they now represent a salient threat to Western interests, we believe that they are significantly different from the smaller clandestine groups. They operate in less asymmetric conflicts and engage in more traditional warfare; they have a territorial basis and strategy; and they build up a governance of sorts in the territories they hold, with rich interactions with local communities. What we know about them indicates that both their recruitment mechanisms and people’s motivations for joining are likely to be very different.¹

While we focused on smaller groups rather than full-blown insurgencies, we pursued as wide-ranging comparisons across ideologies as we could. We collected data on the education of nine types of right- and left-wing extremists active both before and after World War II: the early Nazi and Italian fascist movements; the neo-Nazis in Germany and Austria; U.S. and Russian white supremacists; members of the Spartakusbund, of the Rote Armee Fraktion and of the Brigate Rosse; and a collection of anarchists active around the world. In total, we collected biographical data on more than four thousand individuals.

A second, more general advantage of our approach lies in the type of reasoning that results from starting research with a causal puzzle. Research on complex topics can easily drown in a sea of conjecture. Bad research is littered with unnervingly long lists of potential causes of whatever it is the researcher is trying to explain: asking, for example, What are the causes of suicide? is not likely to be of much help in identifying any of them. By contrast, following a method Emile Durkheim put to systematic use, asking, Why do Protestants commit suicide more often than Catholics or Jews? and thus restricting the range of what differentiates one group from another, can help isolate some of the causes of suicide.

Similarly, our puzzle compels us to recast the grand questions concerning extremism within circumscribed limits: whatever conjecture we put forward must be compatible with the basic finding that engineers are much more likely (and, as we will see, students of certain other disciplines much less likely) to pursue the violent route of Islamist extremism. Conversely, any inference we draw from this basic fact, by being narrower and well-defined, offers greater scope for being testable. Engaging in this exercise opens up unexpected implications for extremism of other kinds, both right and left wing, which we compare with Islamist extremism in the last three chapters.

There are four classic questions that surround extremism that the correlation at the core of our book will help us frame in a new and clearer light.

What are the socioeconomic conditions that explain why people join extremist groups?

With respect to Islamist extremists alone, scholars have produced an almost inexhaustible lists of precipitating factors, including the failure of secular modernization projects, blocked social mobility, economic malaise, Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel, the legacy of colonialism and cultural imperialism, and political alienation (Wiktorowicz 2004b: 3). When taking a broader view to include other kinds of extremists, the list becomes even longer. Poverty is often invoked, though its presence is uneven at best; in some cases it seems to matter but not in others, or if it does it is not with first movers but with second-generation rebels (see, e.g., Hertog’s review [2010] of Krueger 2007). In fact, the opposite effect has also been detected: there is evidence of a positive correlation between level of education and militancy both among Islamist and left-wing radicals (Russell and Miller 1977; Krueger and Maleckova 2003; Krueger 2007; Berrebi 2007).

To deal with these contrasting predictions, social movement theories have invoked political opportunity structures and political entrepreneurs able to frame discontent (Snow et al. 1986; Tarrow 1998; Tilly 2004; Wiktorowicz 2004a, 2004b). Still, concepts such as these are too abstract to distinguish between cases with precision, and it is not apparent how they can generate testable hypotheses that can explain why, among larger dissatisfied populations, certain agents were the first to become radicalized or were more prone to join. Social movement theorists themselves have advocated a move away from global theories to more mechanism-based explanations (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). Some important results have been achieved in this direction, for instance, by studying how social networks matter in mobilizing certain individuals rather than others (McAdam 1986; Sageman 2004).

By taking the general question to the specific microlevel of mobilization we aim to contribute to this more focused research agenda: we do not look for any general mobilizing factor but for factors that