Why some engineers become terrorists

Why some engineers become terrorists
30 Mar 2008, 0000 hrs IST,Shashi Tharoor

An IIT graduate — so the story goes — is walking near a pond one day when a frog speaks to him. "Kiss me," it says, "and i will turn into a beautiful princess." The IITian does a double-take, turns back to check if he has heard right, and sure enough, the frog repeats itself: "Kiss me and i will turn into a beautiful princess." He looks thoughtfully at the frog, picks it up and puts it into his pocket. A plaintive wail soon emerges: "Kiss me and i will turn into a beautiful princess." He ignores it and walks on. Soon the frog asks, "Aren't you going to kiss me?" The IIT guy stops, pulls the frog out of his pocket, and replies matter-of-factly: "I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend. But a talking frog is cool."

No prizes for guessing what a literature graduate would have done in the same situation! Such is the self-image of the engineer in India: rational, hard-working, self-disciplined, steady, focused on the results of his work. Parents pray for the smartest of their kids to become engineers. Any child with better than average marks in science at school is pushed towards the profession, sustained by peer pressure that convinces him there could be no higher aspiration.

And no doubt for some there isn't. But that clearly isn't the whole story. Disturbing new research at Oxford University by sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog points to an intriguing — one might say worrying — correlation between engineering and terrorism.

If that doesn't raise eyebrows at the IITs, nothing will. But consider the evidence: Osama bin Laden was a student of engineering. So were the star 9/11 kamikaze pilot Mohammed Atta, the alleged mastermind of that plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and their all-but-forgotten predecessor, the chief plotter of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef.

The Oxford scholars, after putting together educational biographies for some 300 known members of violent Islamist groups from 30 countries, concluded that a majority of these Islamist terrorists were not just highly educated, but a startling number of them are engineers. Indeed, according to Gambetta and Hertog, nearly half had studied engineering. A summary of their research in Foreign Policy magazine remarked that "across the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the share of engineers in violent Islamist groups was found to be at least nine times greater than what one might expect, given their proportion of the working male population."

Is there something about engineering that makes its most proficient graduates vulnerable to the temptations of violent extremism? Gambetta and Hertog seem to think so. They have no patience for the more conventional possible explanation — that engineers might be sought after by terrorist groups for their technical expertise in making and blowing up things. Instead, they argue that the reason there are so many terrorist engineers is that the subject helps produce a mindset that makes one prone to radicalisation.

Engineers consider themselves problem solvers, and when the world seems to present a problem, they look to engineering-type solutions to solve it. Engineering, Gambetta and Hertog suggest, predisposes its votaries to absolute and non-negotiable principles, and therefore to fundamentalism; it is a short step from appreciating the predictable laws of engineering to following an ideology or a creed that is infused with its own immutable laws. It is easy for engineers to become radicalised, the researchers argue, because they are attracted by the "intellectually clean, unambiguous, and all-encompassing" solutions that both the laws of engineering and radical Islam provide. According to Gambetta and Hertog, surveys in Canada, Egypt, and the US have proved over the years that engineers tend to be more devout, and more politically conservative, than the rest of the population.

I'm not suggesting one should buy wholesale the conclusions of the Oxford researchers; I know a few engineers who wouldn't harm a fly, so i'd be wary of making any sweeping generalisations about an entire profession. But the study does seem to me to open the door to make a nowadays unfashionable case: the argument in favour of studying the humanities. I have always believed that the well-formed mind is preferable to the well-filled one, and it takes a knowledge of history and an appreciation of literature to form a mind that is capable of grappling with the diversity of human experience in a world devoid of certitudes.

If terrorism is to be tackled and ended, we will have to deal with fear, rage and incomprehension that animates it. We will have to know each other better, learn to see ourselves as others see us, learn to recognise hatred and deal with its causes, learn to dispel fear, and above all just learn about each other. It is not the engineering mindset that facilitates such learning, but the vision of the humanities student. The mind is like a parachute — it functions best when it is open. It takes reading and learning about other peoples and cultures to open (and broaden) minds.

Ignorance and lack of imagination remain the handmaidens of violence. Without extending our imagination, we cannot understand how peoples of other races, religions or languages share the same dreams, the same hopes. Without reading widely and broadening our minds, we cannot understand the myriad manifestations of the human condition, nor fully appreciate the universality of human aims and aspirations. Without the humanities, we cannot recognise that there is more than one side to a story, and more than one answer to a question.

That, of course, is never true in engineering. Perhaps the solution lies in making it compulsory for every engineering student to take at least 20% of his courses in the humanities. Maybe then he might even kiss the frog.