Wealthy Nigerian underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab; Hamas’s West Bank-born chief bombmaker Yahya Ayyash; Abdul Subhan Qureshi, working-class Mumbai train bomber and India’s most wanted terrorist; Pakistani-American and failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, the son of a high-ranking Pakistani airforce officer; Kuwaiti 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki, senior al-Qaeda recruiter and the first American citizen to be targeted and killed by a U.S. drone strike: all among the most notorious terrorist figures of the 21st century, with widely divergent geographical, social and economic origins, and seemingly linked only by religion and political extremism.
Oh, and one other thing, as it turns out: engineering degrees.
Nor are they outliers. According to two European social scientists working in Britain, Italian Diego Gambetta and German Steffen Hertog, who present their case in Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education, the presence of engineers among known Islamist extremists is 14 times greater than can be explained by random distribution.
The situation has not changed. This is something I had heard anecdotally, but this news story covers a credible academic study. I share this for the purpose of conversation and reflection as a fellow engineer who is concerned for the world.
I do not know what or if there is a solution, but I believe it is an important issue for the engineering community to be cognizant of. Many of the leaders earned their engineering degrees in the West. Most didn't grow up believing this extremism as children. I am not suggesting or implying that engineering education makes people terrorists.
However, a common pattern is these very smart people study in the West and start becoming radicalized as young adults. I want to know why that is and if there is anything we as Western Engineering Educators can do to combat the radicalization.
This is not a unique problem. It isn't a Muslim problem either. We see similar trends in the US and Europe of the overrepresentation of engineers in Far-Right extremist movements, alt-right, and neonazi.
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