I'm trying to empathise with them... I get why people become radicals of other kinds... but saying no music, no sex, live by the book, behead those who disagree... what part of that makes people think "I want to get into this, this sounds fun"?
The Arab world has valid grievances, which motivated 9-11 for example, but there's more to it than that.
I'd recommend the book Engineers of Jihad. It's precisely the people who wish to change the world and then are denied by external forces (largely the U.S. in this case) that are primed for radicalization.
Also iirc, Bashar al-Assad's father was the one who actually developed the tactic/justification but I'm having trouble finding a source, it's early.
"they find that a disproportionate share of Islamist radicals come from an engineering background, and that Islamist and right-wing extremism have more in common than either does with left-wing extremism, in which engineers are absent while social scientists and humanities students are prominent."
Sure, we get told that we don't understand muh basic economics, but we sure as hell better understand economics than fascists.
Given the engineers I've known, that feels harsh on Fundamentalists as a whole.
I never would have expected CHUDs to be pulled to engineering TBH. Maybe coding, but not the rest of the engineering discipline.
That being said, I'm pretty sure the CHUDs in civil engineering are more rare.
Don't google what degree Oussama Bin Laden has
I stand corrected. Horribly, horribly corrected.
Makes sense to me, engineering gets your blue collar salt of the earth types to turn a wrench and the white collar middle/upper management types who want to write out instructions that other people get dirty actually doing.
This is purely an American perspective, but I failed out of an engineering university, it was a graduate-to-Boeing pipeline.
interesting. anecdotally I know a lot of communists in engineering.
also, though democrats aren't really an amazing proxy for "left wing", it seems engineers are slightly more than 50/50 in favor of democrats, basically 50/50 if the software engineers are removed from that category. Lots of other categories are much worse, like fossil fuels workers or business owners.
thanks for the recommendation
Hafez al-Assad pioneered suicide-bombings iirc