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Mohammed, who faced brutal interrogation practices, was granted the request because the CIA wanted to prevent him from going insane. But Mohammed's desire also raises a question that has long enticed scholars of terrorism: Why is it that so many terrorists have engineering backgrounds?


But the link isn't just anecdotal. In a 2009 paper, Diego Gambetta, an Oxford sociologist, and Steffen Hertog, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, found that "among violent Islamists with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries." Of a group of 404 members of violent Islamic groups in the Muslim world, Gambetta and Hertog tracked down the course of study for 178 individuals. Of those 178 violent Muslims, 78 (44 percent) were engineers. Broadening the course of study to engineering, medicine and science, 56.7 percent of their sample had studied these fields.

According to Gambetta and Hertog's findings, this is a problem unique to violent Islamic groups in the Muslim world. Among nonviolent Islamic groups, for example, engineers are present — but to a far lesser degree than in violent groups. And among violent Islamic groups in the West, education levels tend to be much lower on the whole. Meanwhile, non-Muslim left-wing groups — Germany's Red Army Faction, Italy's Red Brigades, and Latin American guerrilla groups — include almost no engineers. Among anarchist groups, engineers are equally absent. Right-wing groups include some engineers, but they are far from overrepresented.


Engineers, the authors find, are far more conservative on the whole than members of other professions. Islamic extremism "rejects Western pluralism and argues for a unified ordered society" — a political worldview that lines up nicely with a profession averse to chaos.


Still, a few objections to this theory immediately emerge. First, certain aspects of work as a terrorist — placing wires here, installing fuses there — seem naturally suited to an engineer, raising the possibility that the profession is sought as a preparatory pathway for a career in murder and mayhem. But this criticism, the authors point out, misses the fact that bomb-making is typically handled by a small cadre of specialists and that individuals trained as engineers have frequently ascended to management positions within terrorist organizations, where they have little contact with technical, day-to-day operations. Moreover, engineers simply don't turn up with the same frequency in terrorist groups in other parts of the world.

More important, there may be problems with the causal mechanism the authors lay out. In other words, how is it that one goes from being an earnest engineering student to being a terrorist? Here, the authors are quick to emphasize that the argument they posit is a feedback loop between the conservatism of an engineer and the disappointment of thwarted expectations. Somewhere in that swirl, they argue, a terrorist can be born.


Groll writes for Foreign Policy.