Dodgy Engineers

(Please note, the pictured engineers are probably not dodgy at all) For anyone who has closely followed terrorism since 2001, or indeed before then, its always been blatantly clear that engineers are a right dubious bunch. Despite some of my best friends being engineers, you can see why: it's a mindset of neat organization, just ripe for a fundamentalist view of the world. Perhaps all engineers should be made to do a course on post-modern philosophy, or literary studies before they graduate. It might be safer for all of us. Malise Ruthven noted this correlation in his 2002 book, a Fury for God. He pointed out that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was not just an Islamic affair, the Communist students also revolted, but were later purged by the Islamists - but, anyway, the Islamist students virtually all came from the engineering, medical and natural science faculties at Tehran University, whilst the communists were from the humanities and social science faculties.

Anyway, I just noticed Foreign Policy magazine had an article on this earlier this year - called "Engineering Jihad". You can read most of it here - only the last paragraph is missing to non-subscribers and that only says that on top of a fundamentalism-ready mindset, in the Middle East there aren't enough jobs for engineering graduates, so you also get boredom and unemployment added to this unhealthy mix.