Terrorist doctors? There’s nothing unusual here, I’m sorry to say. On the contrary, in the universe of Islamist radicalism, professional terrorists — who are also professionals — are the oldest story in the book. Consider this: A study of 172 al Qaeda members and associates found that two-thirds had gone to college. Most of them were professionals. Another study of five major anti-Western attacks by Islamists found that 54 percent of the terrorists had attended college (compared to 52 percent of Americans who have done so). A study of 300 militants prosecuted for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat found that, of those who were students, around a third were studying in Egypt’s elite faculties of medicine and engineering.

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These facts and more are laid out in “A Matter of Pride,” a thoughtful article by Peter Bergen and Michael Lind. Bergen and Lind do an excellent job of puncturing “the myth of deprivation” — the notion that poverty causes terrorism. Certainly Bergen and Lind allow us to conclude that the British terror doctors are not anomalies. Unfortunately, Bergen and Lind go on to make some less-than-convincing suggestions about what actually does cause Islamist terror — and how to go about stopping it. Tracing down the sources of Islamist terror is the key to solving some of America’s most urgent policy dilemmas. So here, in Part II of “Doc Jihad,” I’ll continue to explore the strikingly significant role played by medical doctors in the spread of political Islam, in light of which we can return to the important issues of theory and policy raised by Bergen and Lind.

Under-Employed
In Part I, we learned that Egypt’s massive expansion of higher education under Presidents Nasser and Sadat produced unexpected results. Instead of taking a nation of pious traditional villagers and turning them into secular modern technocrats, college students fresh from Egypt’s villages were turning the nation’s secular professions into Islamist bastions. Far from eliminating the traditional system of honor and shame, the mass education of women had actually brought back the veil as a traditionalist strategy for coping with coeducation. And instead of churning out a new democratic elite, Egyptian higher education’s authoritarian methods were simply reproducing traditional cultural modes.

Yet something else intervened to tip the balance against liberal modernity and in favor of Islamism. There was more at work than village traditionalism and authoritarian education. Egypt’s economic troubles played a critical role as well. This is the kernel of truth in economic explanations of Islamist radicalism. Egypt’s huge new generation of doctors, lawyers, and engineers may not have been poor, but after years of study and sacrifice they were seriously underemployed. The emergence of Islamism is less a tale of abject poverty than a classic case of social revolution fomented by rising expectations.

Nasser’s rash promise of a government job for every graduate was never fulfilled. By the mid-1980s the waiting list for public-sector jobs was up to eight years long. And without a job, Egypt’s socially traditional graduates were forced to remain unmarried celibates, living alone, or under the authority of their parents for years. Many of those professionals who did have jobs made barely more than manual laborers. In fact, some had to give up their profession and become manual laborers just to make ends meet. These young doctors, lawyers, and engineers couldn’t help but wonder why they and their families had sacrificed for so long.

A massive make-work bureaucracy couldn’t generate the sort of economic growth that would employ Egypt’s huge new cohort of professionals. Paralyzed by a bloated and corrupt government, the Egyptian economy was stuck in recession — at the very moment the new professional class was pouring into the job market.

For a time, in the 1980s, migration to the oil-rich Gulf states provided a solution. A newly minted Egyptian physician could find work in Saudi Arabia, just as Middle Eastern doctors find work today in Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States. Remittances sent back from the Gulf by migrants in the 1980s effectively propped up the Egyptian economy. In the meantime, Egyptians were exposed to the austere form of Islam which seemed to many to account for Saudi Arabia’s prosperity. God appeared to have blessed the pious Wahabbis, but to have turned his back on an impoverished, secular Egypt. The need to toil in a foreign land for years, just to save up enough money to finance a respectable wedding and start a household, was galling. What was wrong with Egypt, the public asked, that its sons could succeed only by leaving? When the Gulf job-boom ended in the 1990's and the migrants headed back to a still-stagnant economy, the failure of the Egyptian system seemed obvious. Was Islam the solution?

Parallel Government
Egypt may not have been a democracy, but at least the government had been able to dole out goodies to the public — the massive university expansion had once stood as proof of that. Yet an Egypt in recession, weighed down by a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy, could provide neither jobs nor services. So the new Islamist groups stepped in to fill the gap. To call the Muslim Brotherhood’s student and professional associations “unions” doesn’t quite do justice to what they became. In truth, the Muslim Brotherhood (quite possibly backed by Saudi money), began to construct a kind of state within a state.

Once again, doctors led the way. The Muslim Brotherhood gained power in the physicians association in the 1980's, just as the cost of medical care was skyrocketing. With young doctors underemployed and financially strapped, the association offered a health-care plan to union members and their families. Soon other professional associations followed suit, always under the direction of Islamists. Eventually, Brotherhood-led professional associations expanded these services to cover marriage funds, maternity benefits, consumer purchases, housing, business training, insurance, pensions, even vacation packages.

When a massive earthquake hit Cairo in 1992, the Medical Association arrived on scene long before the government, providing food, blankets, and medical care — compliments of the Muslim Brotherhood. Fearing that the professional associations had succeeded in forming a state within a state, President Mubarak cracked down on the Brotherhood, which had nonetheless firmly established itself by then as what it remains today — the only organization capable of posing a genuine challenge to the government.

So it was the provision of services — the virtual creation of a parallel government — that expanded the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood to the broader membership of the professional associations, thereby facilitating the Islamist takeover. Given Egypt’s strapped economy, even pooling the financial resources of the most well-off professionals (perhaps with some Saudi help) couldn’t fundamentally reverse the economic condition of the downwardly mobile professional middle class. Nevertheless, the Muslim Brotherhood was visibly doing more than the government. Egypt’s corrupt bureaucrats could barely manage the state’s social services without looting them. The Islamists, on the other hand, were honest. In recent years, this pattern has been repeated throughout the Middle East. From the religious parties in Turkey, to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza, Islamist parties win hearts and minds by providing honestly managed social services, where corrupt governments cannot.