Around the turn of the year, five young men from some of Bangladesh’s wealthiest families began to disappear without explanation. One had been educated at the elite Scholastica school in the capital, Dhaka, where instruction is in English. Others went to the private North-South University. Two had studied at the Malaysian campus of Australia’s Monash University in Kuala Lumpur. In short, they were getting the best education.
Last week it emerged that the missing youths were the gunmen who attacked the Holey Artisan Bakery restaurant, in an upmarket part of Dhaka, going from table to table killing those who could not prove they were Muslims. They killed more than 20 people, including Europeans working in the garment industry.
Pictures of the five were released by ISIL to show their allegiance. The country was shocked for two reasons: Bangladesh has seen a spate of crude murders with machetes of secular activists and intellectuals, but this was a well-planned and organised operation – as indeed was the subsequent attack on an Eid prayer gathering outside Dhaka.
But what was most shocking about last week’s attack was that the militants came from the local elite. Imtiaz Khan, a politician of the ruling Awami League, told the BBC he was “shocked and dumbfounded” to find what had happened to his son, Rohan Imtiaz. While searching for Rohan, he had found that “many other boys are missing, from well-educated families, children of professionals and government officers”.
The surprise is understandable but the notion that those who are susceptible to jihadism are poor, mentally-ill misfits does not fit the facts. Huge resources have been allocated in Muslim majority countries and in the diaspora to monitoring what is said in mosques and taught in madrasas, where the poor send their children for free religious instruction and food.
While madrasas may provide some foot soldiers, it is often those with a western education who carry out the attacks that grab the most headlines. Universities, not madrasas, are now the prime recruiting ground.
It was at the Technical University of Hamburg, Germany, where Mohamed Atta, who had previously studied architecture in Cairo, formed the nucleus of the group that launched the September 11 attacks in 2001. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, another conspirator, had studied agricultural engineering in the United States.
The super-rich are not immune. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called “underwear bomber” who tried to blow up an aircraft on descent to Detroit, is the son of the one of Nigeria’s richest bankers. He was radicalised at University College London. The man who killed 38 tourists on the beach in Tunisia in June last year, Seifeddine Rezgui, had a master’s degree in electrical engineering.
A study quoted in a 2015 British Council report, Immunising the Mind, into the origins of terrorists has found that 48 per cent of those recruited in the Middle East and North Africa had a higher education. Almost half of them had studied engineering. This has led to speculation that the study of engineering predisposes the student to find straightforward solutions to the problems of society, unlike those who study social sciences, where critical thinking is encouraged. But this line of argument is not helpful: many of the brightest students in the Middle East study engineering, and the discipline actually requires complex problem-solving skills.
More realistically, it is worth looking at how young people experience university. All over the world, student politics is a battle of extremes, where young men and women dabble in revolutionary theories, while not expecting that daddy will be hanged or that their bedroom will be expropriated as housing for the poor. For most, this is a passing phase. But not for everyone. The murderous German urban guerrilla group known as the Baader-Meinhof gang were university educated, with the exception of Andreas Baader who was a petty criminal.
There is no simple answer to the question of why young people are lured to join ISIL and Al Qaeda. But for a significant proportion, a clash between a young person’s Muslim heritage and western education can be a trigger. For Mohammed Atta, the experience of studying in Berlin seems to have driven him to strike back at the dominant power by using aircraft as flying bombs.
With ISIL this principle is magnified. It exists largely as a phenomenon of the internet, an invention that has been turned into a weapon to use against the West, which reaches into the phones of young people everywhere.
Olivier Roy, a French researcher into extremism, has focused on the psychological aspects of ISIL recruitment. He notes that a significant proportion of recruits are converts to Islam or second-generation immigrants in western countries who have lost touch with their Muslim heritage. For instance, the terrorists behind the Paris attacks last year were trained in Syria but had spent years dealing in drugs. Their transformation into “holy warriors” came as a surprise to those who knew them.
“Most jihadists are ‘born again’; with radical Islam, they get a new lease of life. That’s why there are so few jihadists who are part of the first generation of immigrants,” Mr Roy has said.
The Dhaka terrorists were hardly from a low social class. The best jobs were open to them. But the fact is ISIL’s message can reach everyone, from drug dealers to A-grade students. Getting into a fancy university does not resolve the contradictions in a young person’s mind between their heritage and their place in the modern world, and higher education is no inoculation against recruitment. When ISIL finally loses control of the territory it controls, the power of the message may diminish. But for the moment, vigilance must be exercised in universities, perhaps even more than madrasas.
Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs
On Twitter @aphilps
