Universities, the Job-Market and the Jihad

Martin Rose, MA (Oxon), MPhil

Any terrorist that I have ever met through my academic work had a highly over-simplified view of the world, which they saw in black-and-white terms. Education robs you of that simplification and certitude. Education is the best possible antidote to radicalisation. (Prof. Louise Richardson, Vice-Chancellor, University of Oxford)[footnoteRef:1] [1: Louise Richardson, addressing the Going Global conference, London, 2nd June 2015]

The objective of modern education was defined in the Covenant of Arab Cultural Unity of 1964 as The creation of generations of Arabs, believing in God, loyal to the Arab homeland, confident in themselves and in their nation, aware of their responsibility to their nation and humanity armed with science and morals, so as to share in the advance of Arab society by maintaining the position of the glorious Arab nation, and safeguarding its rights to freedom, security and dignified life [footnoteRef:2] This is a lofty but very collective and thoroughly pragmatic view of education, as forming young Arabs for a nationalist and godly purpose in the world. It has nothing to say, original or otherwise, about the business or outcomes of education itself, nor about the direct impact of education upon its individual recipients. It framed the creation, in the second half of the twentieth century, of education systems across the post-colonial Arab world that were modelled formally on those of the West, but differed in several key respects. Two generations later, the Arab Human Development report of 2003 took a less rosy retrospective view, noting that curricula taught in Arab countries seem to encourage submission, obedience, subordination and compliance, rather than free critical thought, and described education as an industrial process, where curricula and their contents serve as moulds into which fresh minds are supposed to be poured.[footnoteRef:3] [2: Quoted in A L Tibawi, Islamic Education: Its Transition and Modernization into the Arab National Systems, London: Luzac, 1972, repr. 1979, pp206-7] [3: Arab Human Development Report, Building a Knowledge Society, New York: UNDP, 2003, pp53-4]

My contention in this paper is that choices made during this period, albeit conditioned by the past, and subsequent failures to address those choices through effective reform, have led Arab education systems down a dangerous path which has had the effect of closing down, rather than opening up, the creative enquiry that should stand at the heart of education. The emphasis that the AHDR notes on submission, obedience, subordination and compliance has left the Arab World with education systems that by and large replicate the form of Western systems, but without their (far from uniform) creativity, adaptability, resources or focus on the individual student. This has had many negative results, two of which I shall discuss before moving on to look at the role of different university subject specialisations in forming mentalities open, or resistant, to violent extremism and reflecting (which is more important than the cue itself) on what this tells us about the direction of the educational reform that the system so desperately needs.

The first negative result is the failure to train students to fill the sophisticated needs of the job-market in a competitive, knowledge-based global economy, a failure that has led to massive and corrosive graduate unemployment. The second is the creation of an artificially circumscribed knowledge-universe in which critical thinking is all too often discouraged, if not outlawed, and in which young men and women are trained through rote-learning and make-or-break exams to seek simple, binary, black-and-white answers to complex problems. I would argue that the confluence of these two dark streams, of unemployability and binary thinking, has created a fast-growing educated class (or to be fairer, a not inconsiderable section of an educated class) of simplistic, un-nuanced thinkers, with idle hands, amongst whom two-dimensional jihadi thought can in certain circumstances prosper. I then note that while graduate engineers are significantly over-represented amongst violent extremists and jihadis, social scientists and humanities graduates are clearly not, despite their much greater numbers and much higher rates of unemployment. This, I conclude, offers a clue as to how education reform might progress through a much firmer emphasis on teaching excellence and open enquiry in the social sciences and through broadening the syllabus of STEM courses to include a higher proportion of challenging, and destabilising, elements like the philosophy and sociology of science.

That the ossification described by AHDR in 2003 is through no desire of the students, is suggested by (among other evidence) a piece of research undertaken in Saudi Arabia in 2011.[footnoteRef:4] In the course of this study, researchers for CSIS asked a sample of 4,500 university students whether they agreed with the statement Teachers should let us develop our own opinions and not push us in certain directions. Among the students polled, 91% of women and 87% of men agreed with the statement. This is a remarkable and positive expression of confidence and independence: although it may perhaps overstate the real appetite for uncomfortable challenge to received complacency, it is still an overwhelming vote for teachers to equip their students to think, rather than to tell them what to think to teach them how, not what. Evidently they do not do so at present. [4: Edith Schlaffer and Ulrich Kropiunigg, Saudi Youth: Unveiling the Force for Change, Gulf Analysis Papers, Washington DC: Center for Strategic & International Studies, November 2011, p4]

This is the dividing of the ways that is presenting itself now to thinkers about education in the region, secular and religious and it has clear resonances across the world. It is what Abdelwahab El-Affendi was talking about in a recent paper on Islamic education, when he wrote that We need really to develop a new learning paradigm that encourages students to develop wings, rather than attaching deadweight to their feet. [footnoteRef:5] As the CSIS report concludes, [w]hile educational institutions worldwide try to encourage young minds to develop bold and independent thinking, Saudi society continues to expect and value conformity. [footnoteRef:6] The same is true across much of the Arab world, and beyond. [5: Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Thinking of Reconfiguration, Critical Muslim 15, Educational Reform, London: Hurst, 2015, pp 49-58] [6: Schlaffer and Kropiunigg, Saudi Youth, p 7]

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The frustration caused by failure in the job market after a long and exacting education is clear, as is the search for different solutions. Gilles Kepel commented in the 1990s that the avant-garde of fundamentalists consisted of university students who had received a higher education but at the same time knew that they would not find a job based on it. Universities, more than madrassas, are hotbeds of radicalisation [footnoteRef:7] and there is a good deal of corroborating evidence that frustration at the evaporation of life chances offered through education, particularly after its initial post-colonial expansion, has been an important motor. Ali El-Kenz notes the way in which engineers in particular, frustrated by a suddenly contracting job market in the 1980s, turned to organization, politics and Islamism, especially in Egypt and Algeria, but also to a lesser extent in Morocco, Syria and Tunisia.[footnoteRef:8] [7: Cited by Alex Schmid in Radicalisation, De-radicalisation and Counter-radicalisation: A Conceptual Discussion and Literature Review, ICCT Research Paper, The Hague: ICCT, March 2013, p32] [8: Ali El-Kenz, Les Ingnieurs et le pouvoir, Tiers-Monde, 1995, vol. 36, no. 143, pp565-579]

The whole MENA region is a classic case of quantitative educational expansion without concomitant qualitative change. The investment in education has been hugely creditable the states of North Africa, for example, have over the last 40 years spent one of the highest percentages of GDP in the world on education, at around 5 percent, and around 20 percent of government budgets.[footnoteRef:9] They have achieved most components of the second Millennium Development Goal (MDG2), universal primary education for boys and girls alike by 2015. This is not untypical of the MENA region as a whole. But, as the African Development Bank points out in a recent report on North Africa, the disastrous quality [my italics] of education produces a workforce which has neither the competences nor the basic knowledge which the labour market requires.[footnoteRef:10] It goes on, One of the deep, recurrent causes of unemployment is the poor relationship between graduates qualifications and employers needs. Graduates have a one-dimensional education characterised by limited competences, a narrow employment profile and weak mobility. Added to this is the fact that the rapid growth of the student population hasnt always been followed by a proportionate development in terms of quality of teaching infrastructure, or of the creation of the necessary number of new jobs.[footnoteRef:11] Growth is accelerating: the number of MENA universities grew from ten in 1940 to 140 in 2000 and 260 in 2007[footnoteRef:12] and has continued to grow. Student numbers across the region have more than doubled since the turn of the century. Higher education, in other words, is exploding and yet failing students across the region. [9: Mohamed Alaa Abdel Moneim, A Political Economy of Arab Education, London 2016, p25] [10: BAD, Pour une rforme fondamentale des modes denseignement dans la rgion MENA, African Development Bank Working Paper, 2015 (my translation)] [11: BAD, Pour une rforme fondamentale, p3 ] [12: Andr Elias Mazawi, Aspects of Higher Education in the Arab States, International HigherEducation 18, Winter 2000, and A. Mazawi, Geopolitics and University Governance in theArab States, ibid 34 Winter 2004]

At bottom is the fact that the expansion of education at all levels, but particularly at tertiary, in the Middle East has been largely supply-side driven, in contrast to China, Korea and Latin America where the driver has been demand from the labour market. Mohamed Alaa Abdel Moneim puts it starkly:

One could argue that the limited employment opportunities in the region make skills development through education almost purposeless and a waste of money. Using econometric terms, the relation between skills and employment is spurious, where limited skills reduce employment opportunities, since it discourages business from investing in the first place or expanding the investment after starting business, while at the same time limited employment opportunities, resulting from low public and private investments, reduce incentives to acquire skills and develop education beyond the quantitative dimension reflected in enrolment rates and average years of schooling. There is no clear-cut solution for, or agreement about, the direction of causality in this relationship. It becomes something like a cycle that enhances the continuity of the mismatch between education and economic performance in the region.[footnoteRef:13] [13: Mohamed Alaa Abdel Moneim, A Political Economy of Arab Education, p42]

Either way, the result is widespread structural graduate unemployment. Many countries in the region have an inverted pyramid of unemployment: the higher the level of education, the higher the level of unemployment. As the UNDP drily put it of Egypt in 2010, It seems true that an educated person is at no advantage when it comes to finding his/her way in the job market. In fact the opposite seems to be true.[footnoteRef:14] Of course this is to some extent a matter of choice: graduates expect a professional job, and often hold out for as long as possible, using family means where they can, before angrily taking employment below the level they deem appropriate. But either way, the failure to meet the employment expectations of the very large and very fast-growing - numbers of graduates coming out of Middle Eastern universities is providing a reservoir of deep dissatisfaction not just with the education/employment nexus but with the societies and governments that produce it. This situation is similar across the region: in Algeria 20.3 percent of graduates are unemployed; in Egypt, 19 percent; in Morocco 22.7 percent and in Libya, World Bank estimates show that youth unemployment has remained at about 50 percent, with the majority of unemployed holding university degrees.[footnoteRef:15] In Tunisia 33.2 percent of graduates are out of work and holders of masters degrees make up an astonishing 55 percent of them.[footnoteRef:16] How this can swiftly play into desperation and civil unrest was emphasized again by the unemployment riots in Tunisia in January 2016. Violence was sparked by the death of a chmeur diplom an unemployed graduate, of whom there are some 250,000 in Tunisia - demanding a civil service job. Rioting spread from Kasserine to fifteen or more cities, culminating in the storming by unemployed graduates of the Tunis governorate building. The disorder was followed by government concessions in all the usual areas, including the unplanned creation of 5,000 new civil service jobs and 100,000 training places in vocational education programmes.[footnoteRef:17] [14: UNDP, Egypt Human Development Report 2010, New York: UNDP, 2010] [15: World Bank, Breaking Even or Breaking Through, Washington DC: World Bank, 2013 p3. For Libya: http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/MNA/QEBissue2January2014FINAL.pdf ] [16: http://www.cipe.org/blog/2013/11/18/the-youth-unemployment-crisis-in-tunisia/#.VDu-4fldXuJ ] [17: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/15348/19/Unemployment-fuels-unrest-in-Tunisia.aspx ]

Unemployment is sharply differentiated by subject studied. Figures are not easy to find for many countries, but Driss Guerraoui, Moroccos leading expert on le chmage diplom, writing of his own country, stated in 2013 that 80 percent of the graduate unemployed on the database of the Prime Ministers Office held degrees in Arabic Literature, Islamic Studies, Chemistry, Physics or Biology.[footnoteRef:18] This illustrates both points neatly: the three basic sciences are taught specifically for the state competition for teaching posts and are not adapted to industry, so that the majority who do not win teaching jobs are very badly positioned for the labour market; and the former two disciplines, while they may contribute in theory to the ends laid out in the Covenant of Arab Cultural Unity quoted above, do not provide skills that employers want or need. In Algeria, where graduate unemployment runs at 21.4 percent (against 9.8 percent general and 24.3 percent youth unemployment), the humanities and social sciences lead the unemployment table with 27.3 percent and 28.7 percent respectively against 18.1 percent for scientists and 14.8 percent for engineers. In other North African countries the position is broadly similar. [18: Driss Guerraoui, Le chmage des jeunes et lexprience de recrutement dans la function publique, LObservateur du Maroc no 135, 1-7 November 2013.]

This makes intuitive sense, both because engineering and science are much more practical and directly applicable subjects in the job market, and because [t]he underlying assumption here is that scientists and engineers are likely to contribute more to economic growth than are social scientists and students of humanity because of the increasing importance of technological innovation and adaptation in the development process, as the World Bank puts it.[footnoteRef:19] It is also the case that STEM graduates are much fewer in number, with humanities and social science students across the region running at 63 percent of the total and STEM at under 23 percent with medicine at 6.7 percent.[footnoteRef:20] This pattern of enrollment , as the World Bank observes crisply, is the opposite of what we observe in East Asia and, to a lesser extent, in Latin America, and it is clearly not adjusted to the World Banks view of a successful development paradigm. In addition, it is much more heavily weighted in some countries than others: in Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Palestine the figures for humanities and social science students are 75, 75, 76 and 76 percent respectively of total student numbers.[footnoteRef:21] [19: World Bank, The Road Not Travelled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa, Washington DC: World Bank, 2008, p20] [20: Ibid, p21, figures for education, humanities and social sciences combined - various years before and after 2000.] [21: World Bank, The Road Not Travelled, p88]

The humanities and social sciences are of course much cheaper in terms of unit cost, disproportionately studied by female students, and historically at least overwhelmingly orientated towards employment in the public sector where the simple possession of a degree rather than its subject or grade has been the main employment criterion. This has not militated for universally high intellectual standards.

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So it is rather surprising to find that engineers and (to a slightly lesser extent natural scientists and doctors) are over-represented amongst jihadis, and social scientists and humanities graduates under-represented: the opposite might be expected, with higher rates of unemployment amongst the larger numbers of humanities and social science graduates. The most important study here is by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog,[footnoteRef:22] who in 2007 calculated that 48.5 percent of jihadis recruited within the MENA region are graduates (insofar as details of education are available); and that of these, 44 percent are engineering graduates.[footnoteRef:23] There are no significant results for the humanities and social scientists amongst jihadis, except for graduates in Islamic Studies. Gambetta argues persuasively that there are two main reasons for this striking over-representation: one is the sociology of the engineering profession itself in MENA, its rapid expansion after Independence and the collapsing bubble of expectations as the great national employers of engineers privatised and shrank, in the 1970s and 80s. The other and this is the starting-point (though not in itself the essence) of my central argument is the existence of what he calls an engineering mindset, which is in his view particularly prone to a specific way of looking at the world. [22: Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, Engineers of Jihad, Sociology Working Papers 2007/10, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford] [23: Their research is to be published in book form, as Engineers of Jihad, in May 2016. ]

It is important to be clear that Gambetta and Hertog do not argue that all, or even in absolute terms many, engineers are prone to becoming jihadis: this would be absurd. They do however suggest that there is a discernible and statistically significant over-representation of engineers amongst jihadis,[footnoteRef:24] and they set out to suggest why this is so. They look, naturally, at the stalling in the 1980s of the escalator of upward mobility that engineering had provided across MENA; and they discuss carefully the selection mechanisms for the elite faculties, of medicine, engineering and science, and how these must be accounted for in any explanation. They do not and this seems to me very important reflect at any length on how the pre-university school education systems gear themselves to precisely the form of content-heavy teaching-by-memorisation and selection-by-exam that all faculties require. [24: Gambetta and Hertog, Engineers of Jihad, p 10]

What the unreformed education systems of the Arab world select for, is adaptation to, and facility with, binary right/wrong answers. The public administration, historically the major consumer of humanities and social science graduates, sets the terms for much of university education: it not only regulates the education and training system with very little involvement of employers but it is also its main client as a result the education system has created signals for public sector hiring rather than equipping graduates with the employability capital needed to succeed in the wider labour market.[footnoteRef:25] The selective essentially STEM and medicine, sometimes economics - faculties of the universities are arguably the main target clients of the secondary schools, where the best pupils are sent, and they set the terms in a similar but more specific way for the upper, scientific, streams at those schools. The schools have thus to a large extent created signals for recruitment into the selective, STEM, faculties (and reflected these in preparation for the non-selective faculties) rather than equipping school-leavers with the educational capital needed to succeed in a wider, global, education market. Their education is generally speaking a receptive process, not equipping them well for further autonomous learning. This represents a multi-layered deformation of the educational process, driven from above but hard-wired into the system from the beginning. [25: World Bank, Jobs for Shared Prosperity, Washington DC: World Bank, 2012, p181]

The over-representation of engineers and scientists in extremist organizations is illustrated across a broad spectrum of reference. Of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hazem Kandil reports that One look at members educational backgrounds reveals that highly educated Brothers (including 20,000 with doctoral degrees and 3,000 professors) come overwhelmingly from the natural sciences. Noting that there are clerics, lawyers, and businessmen, he adds Absent, however, are students of politics, sociology, history and philosophy. To explain this, he quotes a former Brother as saying: In social sciences one learns that someone made an argument; another criticised it; and history validated or disproved it. Questioning received wisdom is welcomed. In natural sciences, by contrast, there are no opinions, only fact. This type of matter-of-fact mentality is more susceptible to accepting the Brothers formulas which present everything as black or white.[footnoteRef:26] The fact that this is a caricature of the way effective scientists and engineers think does not detract from its validity: elite faculties reflect and shape, in a circular reinforcement, the teaching methodologies in schools that create the everything as black or white mentality which is then assessed and used as a selection mechanism by those same elite faculties. A recent study by the General Union of Tunisian Students (June 2015) polled students across the country, concluding similarly that science rather than arts students are most attracted to jihadist groups, and that students in mathematics and technology disciplines have the highest rate of recruitment to extremism 21 percent, followed by natural sciences, chemistry and physics at 19 percent, then Benzert Engineering with 14 percent and finally literature and law at the end of the list with 3.3 percent.[footnoteRef:27] There are other similar findings, some of them for Europe where a similar pattern emerges, with slightly higher percentages but in a very much smaller (and so, less significant) universe. [26: Hazem Kandil, Inside the Brotherhood, Cambridge: CUP, 2015, pp34-5] [27: Msaddak Abdel Nabi, Why Tunisia is the Top Supplier of Students to the Islamic State, Al-Fanar, 8th July 2015. I have not been able, despite some effort, to locate the original study, and have had to correct this press report by reversing the first two figures which were clearly in the wrong order. ]

The intriguing question is why this should be so. As noted, Gambetta proposes what he and his co-researcher call an engineering mindset. It is important to be clear here that there is no suggestion that engineers are in some way natures jihadis: the vast majority of engineers are nothing of the sort. Indeed if we look for one single example to refute such reductionism, it might be Muhammed Shahrur, al-katib al-muhandis, the Syrian modernist Islamic thinker who was a professor of civil engineering at Damascus all his professional life, and in five books has shown himself a deeply innovative and imaginative religious intellectual who (in the words of one critic) caused profound anxiety among the educated public, in particular scholars and scientists.[footnoteRef:28] But the statistical over-representation of engineering graduates (over-represented amongst Islamic radicals by two to four times the size we would expect[footnoteRef:29]) is significant enough to make further enquiry necessary and useful. Gambetta cites a British Intelligence dossier which describes jihadi recruiters in the UK as seeking out individuals who are very inquisitive but less challenging, and especially people with technical and professional qualification, particularly engineering and IT degrees.[footnoteRef:30] He contextualises this in a reading of right-wing extremism in the US and Canada as well as the Middle East, in which he finds through polling evidence that engineers tend mildly to locate themselves towards the conservative end of the political spectrum and towards the religious end of a piety spectrum but are particularly well represented in the overlapping conservative-and-religious category.[footnoteRef:31] [28: Muhammed Shahrur, The Quran, Morality and Critical Reason: The Essential Muhammad Shahrur, ed. and intro. Andreas Christmann, Leiden 2009, intro. passim] [29: Gambetta and Hertog, Engineers of Jihad, p34] [30: Gambetta and Hertog, Engineers of Jihad, p42] [31: Gambetta and Hertog, Engineers of Jihad, p51-3]

This discussion leads him to three core characteristics of the engineering mindset: monism, simplism and preservatism, which he relates tentatively to characteristics of the thinking both of doctrinaire Islamists and of jihadis. Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, and whether due to selection or field socialisation, a disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of monism why argue when there is one best solution and of simplism if only people were rational, remedies would be simple. As for preservatism, its underlying craving for a lost order, its match with the radical Islamic ideology is undeniable: the theme of returning to the order of the Prophets early community is omnipresent in most Salafist and jihadist ideology.[footnoteRef:32] And exploring further the characteristics of this engineering mindset, the former CIA analyst Marc Sageman adds: The elegance and simplicity of [Salafisms] interpretations attract any who seek a single solution, devoid of ambiguity. Very often these persons have already chosen such unambiguous technical fields as engineering, architecture, computer science or medicine. Students of the humanities and social sciences were few and far between in my sample.[footnoteRef:33] (Interestingly, Gambetta tentatively finds the opposite in left-wing extremist groups an over-representation of social scientists.) [32: Gambetta and Hertog, Engineers of Jihad, pp48-9. See also Donna Riley, Engineering and Social Justice, Morgan and Claypool, (place of publication?), 2008.] [33: Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, p116]

It is certainly not necessary to accept every detail of this analysis in order to find convincing the statement that an education based to a large extent on rote-learning and teacher-centred classroom practice, with exams in their turn based on the reproduction of transmitted knowledge, will encourage the uncritical acceptance of clear-cut solutions to complex problems. Or that education of this sort is a practical, if inadequate, response to the sheer quantity of poorly reformed curriculum content that must be absorbed: [M]emorisation and teaching to the exam became [in Egypt] the most reasonable means for muddling through the large quantities of material for which the student was responsible in high-stakes exams.[footnoteRef:34] [34: Mohamed Alaa Abdel Moneim, A Political Economy of Arab Education, p66]

It is actually a little unfair to call the result the engineering mindset because, although engineers are best represented in jihadist organizations, the same is also true, if to a lesser extent, of graduates from medicine, natural science and other hard science and applied science disciplines. It suggests that the methods of teaching that have in many cases come to characterize these subjects (sometimes outside, as well as inside, the Arab World) have not always helped develop the subtlety and critical skills that are necessary for really effective autonomous thought. There has been too much of a focus on a binary choice of right and wrong, correct and incorrect, encouraging the assumption that the world is black-and-white; and while good teachers everywhere stress the plasticity of knowledge and the social aspects of truth, it is an uphill struggle in an environment where history and habit encourage a binary understanding.

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Two obvious questions follow: first, why has education in the MENA region followed this path? And second, what, as we try to imagine the reform of education systems in the region, can be done to reverse this slide into mass graduate unemployment and vulnerability to simplistic thinking? They are questions with political as well as educational ramifications: they touch on the nature of society, the place of religion and the security of political authority. They represent the powder-keg whose ignition is both widely feared and widely desired across the region and which was one of the motors of the Arab Spring. Though from a modernisation theory perspective, the expansion of education leads to the spread of values that support individual agency and reject traditional authority,[footnoteRef:35] the theory needs to be carefully qualified in the Middle East, where much of the energy of governments in education reform is devoted to making sure that this kind of rejection doesnt take place, and individual agency doesnt get out of hand. This in turn shapes many of the policy choices made, and also helps to explain the building head of steam that erupted amongst the regions youth in 2011. [35: Mohamed Alaa Abdel Moneim, A Political Economy of Arab Education, p8]

The universities of the post-colonial Middle East were, and largely remain, modelled on those of the European colonising powers, because there seemed to modernisers in the middle of the last century no other valid model on which to build. There are slightly differentiated trajectories in British and French possessions, but neither colonial power had any notion of large-scale university provision for native populations, despite a certain attention to the prestige value of such institutions. At Independence the ex-colonies were not well provided. The new governments set about rectifying the lack, often bringing together as new universities groups of colleges and freestanding faculties that had grown up before Independence. In Iraq the University of Baghdad was founded in 1957, gathering together eight pre-existing faculties and institutions the first of which, the College of Law, dated from 1908. Egypt saw similar development, with three universities (Cairo, Alexandria and the private AUC) in existence at Independence.[footnoteRef:36] Syria was another early developer, with the Syrian National University founded in 1923, again bringing together existing faculties of law and medicine, and then adding to them.[footnoteRef:37] French North Africa was much less even less well-endowed. Algiers had a university as early as 1879, but Algerians were only admitted in 1946, and by 1959 there were just 600 of them.[footnoteRef:38] Moroccos first university as such post-dated independence, by when the country had some 640 Muslim graduates in total.[footnoteRef:39] Libya had no university at all until 1955, when the first faculty at Benghazi was founded.[footnoteRef:40] [36: Alan Richards, Higher Education in Egypt, American Friends of the Middle East-Africa METS, World Bank Working Paper, Washington DC: World Bank, 1992] [37: David Dean Commins, Historical Dictionary of Syria, Lanham 2004] [38: http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/24/Algeria-HIGHER-EDUCATION.html] [39: Spencer Segalla, The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology and Muslim Resistance 1912-1956, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009, p248] [40: Hisham Matar, A Tree that Scarcely Fruits, Times Literary Supplement (16 January 2015).]

None of these universities constituted an education very specifically tailored to the needs of the Muslim students of the countries in which they were situated, and this despite the existence of august institutions with long and distinguished histories. The Azhar in Cairo, the Zitouna in Tunis, the Qarouyyine at Fes and the Yusufiya at Marrakech all offered more traditional models of Islamic Higher Education which were set aside in the conviction that Europe and the US provided educational exemplars for the high road to modernity. Often the early educational leaders and planners had themselves been educated in the colleges and universities of the colonial metropolis, and had absorbed Western values and assumptions. One need only think of the great new campus of Baghdad University, built in the 1950s with buildings by Walter Gropius, in a city where Le Corbusier and others, European and Iraqi, were putting up towering symbols of secular modernity, to understand where post-Independence higher education frequently saw itself as heading. Naturally for many students it was precisely this high road to modernity that provided the attraction of the university, and for the regimes of the time the instrumentalisation of education in the service of national development was axiomatic. Traditional institutions of higher education were a threat both to the march of progress and to the authority of the post-Independence regimes, since they had been the cauldrons of an anti-colonial activism frequently more radical than that espoused by the new regimes themselves; and since they represented an alternative locus of authority and legitimacy. So the Azhar was co-opted by the Free Officers regime, the Yusufiya effectively shut down by the French, the Qarouyyine allowed to moulder gently in shabby penury by the Moroccan Crown and the Zitouna limited to a theological role under close supervision.

The results were naturally mixed. The region continued, and continues, to have significant centres of learning, but these were increasingly the modern institutions, while the older ones became either more modern themselves, or less relevant. Fast-growing populations and the promise of higher education for all who passed their secondary school leaving exams combined with the promise of employment in the public administration for all university graduates - made for growth much faster than resources really allowed. Language questions and debates (still effectively unresolved in many parts of the region), arguments about Orientalism, colonial history and anthropology, epistemology and the proper place of religion, along with all the other difficult questions of post-colonial identity and politics, created a certain intellectual distance from, while holding fast to the institutional and ethical model of, the Western university. At the same time there was a general (though differentiated) failure effectively to reform primary education, with the result that its successes were quantitative (as measured by MDG2) rather than qualitative, with literacy still an enormous problem in many countries. (76 percent of Moroccan children are effectively illiterate in Grade 4, for example, according to the most recent PIRLS results, in the teeth of more optimistic international statistics[footnoteRef:41]). This means that the students moving up through the system are frequently handicapped by linguistic confusion and defective literacy. [41: Martin Rose, Education in North Africa Since Independence, Dubai: British Council, 2015, pp11-12]

Finally, there is an increasingly clear bifurcation based on the subject of study. Elite faculties medicine, engineering, natural science and in some cases economics continue to act as filters for profitable employment, and to attract many of the brightest and the best, even though the days when they saw little or no graduate unemployment have long gone. On the other hand, the open faculties continue to grow, absorbing the bulk of the expansion in higher education each year, but have lost much of their traditional role of equipping students with the parchment they needed to get into the public service. The nature of this problem is clear from the fact that in most countries of the Middle East the public service is contracting rapidly: in Egypt, for example, where 20 percent of men and 50 percent of women born in 1978 would find their first job in the public sector, those figures were down by 2006 to 5 percent and 20 percent.[footnoteRef:42] [42: ERF, Egypt Labour Panel Survey (Economic Research Forum and CAPMAS), 2006]

There is no sign of the growth in student numbers letting up in the near future. Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Syria will see demand for primary education peak in 2020-30, and for tertiary a decade or more later. In Iraq, Oman, Qatar, the UAE and Yemen that primary peak wont be reached until 2050.[footnoteRef:43] Egypts population will continue to grow at least to the mid-century. Progression rates from primary to secondary, and from secondary to tertiary are growing in most countries but even if they remained stable in percentage terms, that would mean a greatly growing pressure on higher education institutions across most of the region. This can only have an impact on quality, as the African Development Bank report quoted above makes clear, with universities failing to produce suitably skilled graduates for the labour market. It has the makings of a perfect storm. [43: World Bank, The Road Not Travelled, pp97-8]

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But what is particularly interesting is what lies behind the counter-intuitive relationship between employment and radicalisation, because this suggests where remedies lie. Every expectation is that high levels of unemployment should lead to high levels of dissatisfaction, anomie and a preparedness to embrace radical solutions to intractable problems. In other words, graduates without jobs and without prospects are easy targets for those who seek to recruit soldiers of jihad. It is perhaps only mildly surprising that jihad offers an albeit rather risky employment alternative: given levels of salary, it can be a perfectly rational career choice, according to at least one researcher, J-P Azam.[footnoteRef:44] [44: J-P Azam, How to Curb High Quality terrorism, http://www.idei.fr/doc/wp/2006/terrorism.pdf - visited 10.11.2015; Why Suicide-Terrorists Get Educated, and What to Do About It, http://idei.fr/sites/default/files/medias/doc/wp/2011/educated_terrorists.pdf ]

But the figures assembled by Gambetta and Hertog, as well as statistical and narrative evidence from a number of sources all suggest that the problem, though dramatic, remains small, and is far from uniform. As I noted above, 44 percent of all identifiable graduate jihadis recruited in MENA are engineers; very few are humanities and social science graduates. This phenomenon is noted again and again: the study of the social sciences and humanities seems to offer some kind of prophylaxis against recruitment, and a particularly remarkable one, in that humanities and social science graduates outnumber STEM graduates by more than 2:1 across the region and see much higher levels of unemployment.[footnoteRef:45] In countries where Islamic Studies are classified as a social science this distorts the figures, since this course does contribute more significantly to jihadi recruitment: but the resilience of other social science and humanities graduates is all the more remarkable, and clearly does not depend on a universally high quality of teaching. [45: Martin Rose, Immunising the Mind: How can education reform contribute to neutralising violent extremism? British Council Working Paper, 2015]

Accounts of social unrest, and of the genesis of the Arab Spring, in North Africa often stress youth unemployment as a precondition and an engine, and it is clearly so. On the face of it, this makes good intuitive sense, though it is notable that the young man who sparked the Tunisian rising of 2011 by setting fire to himself, Mohamed Bouazizi, an unemployed vegetable hawker, spent every penny he earned on getting his sisters into education: His dream, said his sister Basma, was to see his sisters go to university.[footnoteRef:46] In other words he remained idealistic and optimistic about the possibility of education in social betterment. But large numbers of Tunisians have travelled to join Daech in Syria, where the Tunisian contingent is said to represent the single largest national cohort in relation to population size. This may relate to high levels of graduate unemployment; but the GUTS (UGET) study above makes clear that in Tunisia too science rather than arts students are most attracted to jihadist groups. [46: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/01/201111684242518839.html ]

There are of course a number of possible contributory explanations here. These lie in the generally higher educational achievement, and often socio-economic status, of graduates in selective elite faculties; and in the frustrated expectations of those who emerged from university thinking themselves the representatives of a post-Independence elite with an assured future, and found that this was no longer true. No doubt these are a part of the story. But they dont help explain why equally frustrated students of sociology and history, anthropology and literature seem not to take the same route.

Here I think we need to look at ways of thinking, remembering that this is not a monolithic statement about engineers, but the analysis of a slight bias that has small but noticeable results at the level of jihadi recruitment. However, it has much more serious, because less visible but more widespread, results at the level of those who never dream of travelling to fight in the jihad (or indeed of studying engineering) but who have internalised ways of thinking that define their relationship with authority and autonomy in particular ways.

Most education at state schools (as well as universities) in Arab countries is teacher-centred and relies on the transfer of knowledge from teacher to student, assessed on the basis of the students ability to reproduce the knowledge received at formal, written, exams. Attempts to shift whole national systems to child-centred learning, generally at the instance of international donors, have not succeeded, foundering generally on the reluctance or inability of teachers to escape the legacy of their own education and to achieve the self-confidence necessary to teach effectively in a position where they do not always hold centre-stage. The World Bank, again, comments that In the late 1990s several MENA countries adopted pedagogical reforms with many of [these] characteristics (e.g. student-centred learning, competency-based curricula, and focus on critical thinking). Despite these efforts there is little evidence of a shift away from a traditional model of pedagogy. The main activities in the classrooms in MENA continue to be copying from the blackboard, writing and listening to the teachers Group work, creative thinking and proactive learning are rare [footnoteRef:47] [47: World Bank, The Road Not Travelled, p88]

This paedagogical conservatism has many roots, of course. A recent study stresses the concessions that have to be made in order to retain control of changing societies where bread, circuses and a large stick no longer suffice to do so, but also the constraints: rulers and politicians cannot change the elaborate hierarchies and strict chains of command, given the invaluable role they play as control devices. The author sees the current working-out of a new equilibrium of governance, in which policy concessions in softs areas of policy like education and health are the pay-off to an increasingly educated and modern middle class for continued acceptance of the autocratic political dispensation. But major system-change of this sort has to take account of political realities and collective interests: it is slow and very difficult.[footnoteRef:48] [48: Mohamed Alaa Abdel Moneim, A Political Economy of Arab Education, passim]

It is also tempting, and perhaps not irrelevant, to look for some of the background to this paedagogical conservatism in traditional education. If this has any substance it relates to the role of the teacher in encouraging, or discouraging, free enquiry, critical thinking and autonomous judgement. On the face of it, these are not the prized criteria of success in traditional Islamic education, where the committing to memory of texts and authorities has often been paramount, in the form of malakat al-hifd, or mnemonic possession. I recall a conversation in 2011 with a student from the Qarouyyine, who told me about his learning: hafiz by the age of 14, he had gone on to commit to memory another ten or so books across a wide range of traditional subjects, each tested and signed off with an ijaza by a master. One view of this process was expressed by Marshall Hodgson, as the teaching of fixed and memorisable statements and formulas which could be learned without any thinking as such, and in his discussion of traditional pedagogy Dale Eickelman cites Berque (it defies all pedagogical technique) and Nefissa Zerdoumi (a purely mechanical, monotonous form of study).[footnoteRef:49] [49: Dale F Eickelman, Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth Century Notable, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, pp58-59]

It isnt necessary to accept the rather dismissive tone of these remarks in order to see their point. A system of classroom practice that extended from the msid or kuttab to the reading-circles of the Yusufiya or the Azhar had, and to an extent still has, as fundamental underpinnings the acceptance of authority in the form of both teacher and text, the committal to memory of the latter and its faithful reproduction. But at the same time it is important to recall that teacher-centred, disempowering classroom practice was also characteristic of Europe for many years and that evolution from it towards pupil-centred learning is a still uncompleted (if largely achieved) journey of liberation.

But although some of the paedagogical deformities come from traditional education, so too may some of the solutions. In a recent article, the British educationalist Abdallah Sahin noted both the problem, and potential solutions, in an Islamic context:

The heart of the problem is the predominance of an indoctrinatory approach to learning and teaching about Islam. This confines Islamic education to uncritical transmission of a revered set of texts. This form of Islamic education is exploited by extremist recruiters in both majority and minority Muslim societies. Islam has a rich heritage of critical education and shares with Abrahamic faiths the prophetic educational teachings that call for continuous self-examination, so that the faithful remain balanced in their religious observance.

Extremism relates to a form of religiosity involving a highly rigid interpretation of Islam. A complex mix of individual or collective identity needs, peer pressure and personal grievances including Islamophobia has led some young Muslims gradually to adopt an extremist personality. This has been nurtured by formal and informal indoctrinatory educational activities that use a narrow religious content which shapes the ideology of religious extremism. The results can leave people vulnerable to negative influences and be used to legitimise irrational hatred via an us versus them narrative.

To tackle this we need to challenge indoctrinatory practices, including those on the internet. We need to provide young Muslims with Islamic literacy that integrates reflective thinking skills and intercultural understanding to help them engage intelligently and confidently with their faith heritage and wider society. Unfortunately, so far neither Muslim communities nor educational policymakers have shown interest in developing such alternative educational models.[footnoteRef:50] [50: Abdallah Sahin, Lets tap into Islams heritage of critical education in order to defeat extremism in schools, The Guardian, 12th January 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jan/12/islam-education-extremism-schools-muslim-prevent ]

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It seems that there are fundamentally different habits of mind demanded by the sciences and the social sciences at least as taught in the public schools of MENA. Kandils Muslim Brother, whom I quoted earlier, talked of how in social sciences one learns that someone made an argument; another criticised it; and history validated or disproved it. Questioning received wisdom is welcomed. It is at least arguable that the social sciences encourage the questioning of authority and that the sciences, when inflexibly taught, do not. But after a previous public comment on this I was intrigued to receive a communication from a research biologist who noted that: It is interesting that you do not appear to find many biologists in your samples. In my career I have collaborated a lot with chemists, and realised that they on the whole are focused on problems for which there is only one answer: statistical probability is something my chemical colleagues could not cope with. This made it often very difficult to come to satisfactory conclusions. It also meant that biology was seen by them as a very primitive science (like sociology) consisting of opinions which only the exact sciences could resolve with empirical facts.[footnoteRef:51] [51: Personal communication with the author, December 2015]

It is important that this discussion not become a competition between disciplines for perceived immunity to the siren call of jihad, but the comment is intriguing for a number of reasons. Most obviously because it fine-tunes the distinctions that can, and need to, be explored between thinking-habits in different disciplines; and also because it raises the question of probability, one of the touchstones of modernity, and one of the recurrent problems at the interface of religion and science. Christianity as much as Islam has historically had difficulty with it, as impugning divine omnipotence, and it is interesting to see it raised in this context as a discriminator.

In the suspicion which is widely felt towards the social sciences in the more traditional and authoritarian societies of MENA, the lack of definition, the unnerving propensity to question received authority and to sidestep hitherto unquestioned causes all play a part. The fundamental question for social sciences after Independence according to ESCWA, was not asking impertinent questions, but how to serve the state, the nation or the modern project pursued by the nation. This project was concerned with the countrys need for a modern administration and economic sector. That absorbed the social sciences into resolving technical problems rather than being critical of them.[footnoteRef:52] In much of the region there is quiet pressure for that situation to continue. [52: ESCWA, The Broken Cycle: Universities, Research and Society in the Arab World, Proposals for Change, Beirut: ESCWA, January 2014 p42]

While in liberal democratic societies, in theory at least, the development of individual autonomy and critical capacity is welcomed as the proper attribute of a citizen, this is often not so in societies that are politically or religiously authoritarian, and where the authority of rulers is not generally open to question or even discussion. Many MENA governments have actively or passively encouraged the expansion of Islamic Studies, in part at least as a method for maintaining intellectual control of the classroom (Hassan II of Morocco is said to have been one such). But this strategy has frequently been counter-productive, since the ballast of organized Islamism that has travelled with Arabic and Islamic Studies teachers, often from Egypt in early post-Independence days, has fertilised a different kind of insubordination.

The same confrontation is evident along a number of religious fault-lines. Daech has no compunction in rooting out subjects at the universities of the Caliphate (Mosul in particular) that seem to undermine authority, in this case conveniently and jointly religio-political. Its Diwan of Education eliminated the faculties of archaeology, fine arts, law, philosophy, political science, sports, tourism and hotel administration ... the diwan also cancelled classes involving studies of democracy, non-Islamic culture and human rights in all faculties. It forbids studies of drama and novels, money-lending, ethnic and geographical divisions, historical events contradicting Islamic States revisionism, and Iraqi civics.[footnoteRef:53] Of course there is a two-way relationship between most of these studies and authority: restricting or eliminating the teaching of subjects that encourage critical thought and the dispassionate analysis of the nature of authority is part of authoritarianisms defences: at the same time, careful encouragement of such thought and such analysis is a vital part of progress towards a juster, more free society. Vincent Romani writes of university development in the GCC that The humanities, social sciences and liberal arts cannot be expected to develop in a highly conservative and authoritarian setting which explains the expected focus of the new curricula [i.e. of new GCC universities] on the exact sciences and the expected domestication of the social sciences within a framework of social engineering.[footnoteRef:54] [53: http://www.al-fanarmedia.org/2014/11/islamic-states-plan-universities/ ] [54: Romani, Vincent., The Politics of Higher Education in the Middle East: Problems and Prospects, Middle East Brief, Waltham: Brandeis University, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, 2009]

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The two deep-rooted problems of Higher Education in MENA that I have examined here graduate unemployment and the binary, mechanistic mind-set - are not separate, discrete problems. They are intimately related. It is all too clear that MENAs universities are not reliably producing the graduates that their countries need, to lead, inspire and push forward the building of a modern knowledge-based industrial society: many too many of the regions graduates lack what the World Bank calls transversal skills. These are the skills that enable citizens to better adapt to an evolving labor market, society and polity, and they depend on an approach to science and technology in school and university which uses them (as well as content) to help teach complex problem-solving skills and practical knowledge that are essential in the labor market. They are achieved effectively when learning becomes both inquiry-based and child or student-centred. Workers are expected to act more like professionals, taking responsibility for making decisions without turning to hierarchical structures.[footnoteRef:55] [55: World Bank, The Road Less Travelled, p88]

It is easy to object as many do that this is precisely how science and technology are taught. The unemployment figures (quite apart from the more reflective teachers in the regions universities) say otherwise. A key question here is the autonomy of the individual, the ability to act decisively without turning to hierarchical structures, and this comes not just from the classroom, but from the society of which class and lecture room are microcosms. Science can be nuanced, multi-faceted and ambiguous if it is taught in that way, and if its indefiniteness, its Popperian provisionality, are well understood and become integrated into the students thinking. It is a huge philosophical leap, but one that must be made if the young Arabs, Kurds and Amazigh of the region are to fulfil their potential, and their societies are to prosper. But if governments and societies are determined to maintain the external hierarchies and political constraints that restrict action and self-expression, then this leap will not take place, either in the classroom or in society. There are clear and excellent examples in the US, the UK and elsewhere, as well as a few in the MENA region, of science courses that include obligatory philosophy, sociology and history, but they are still too few. Too many evoke the comment of Steven Schwartz on medical education (though it could have been made about other subjects), that for immigrants to Western countries the problem is particularly acute: Muslims can go through the courses with very little exposure to the arts and humanities, and therefore not have their sometimes simplistic views on religion challenged. In Britain, where medicine is an undergraduate field, the chances that Muslim doctors will receive any college level training in the humanities is slim.[footnoteRef:56] [56: Stephen Schwartz, Scientific Training and Radical Islam, Middle Eastern Quarterly, Spring 2008, pp3-11]

The unifying conclusion here is that what makes graduates employable in a highly sophisticated, globalised labour market is the same set of critical, autonomous skills, assumptions and attitudes that also equip them to think critically in a way that proofs their minds against the two-dimensional simplisticisms of jihad. This convergence was well noted by the former Egyptian Minister of Education, Hussein Kamel Bahaa El Din, who described education as contributing to the military, economic and political security of the country. The political security dimension includes contributing to democracy and internal peace through empowering students to think critically, thus protecting them from attempts at brainwashing by terrorists and extremists.[footnoteRef:57] [57: Mohamed Alaa Abdel Moneim, A Political Economy of Arab Education, p76]

On the side of the social sciences and humanities the moral is also terribly clear. If these disciplines, indifferently (and often poorly) taught as they all too often are, and leading to a great sump of graduate unemployment, can have the notable effect that they seem to have in proofing minds, then how much better could they function, well taught? These disciplines are effective vectors of exactly the critical, inquiry-based, sceptical thinking-skills that modern societies need. That their graduates are blocked and unable to find jobs is a reflection of those societies, their very slight appetite for sociological self-understanding and evidence-based policy, their aversion to criticism of power-structures and authorities and their inbuilt fear of the empowerment of, and respect for, youth. If today an instrumental approach to research dominates: sociology effectively takes the shape of social engineering, economics is primarily business oriented, and Islamic philosophy or law is dominant within the humanities,[footnoteRef:58] then that is the core problem, and it awaits solution. For now, in the words of the same author, these problems and constraints have left Arab higher education in a miserable state. [58: Romani, Vincent, ibid.]

And if this is true of higher education, it is true of the schools that prepare students for the universities. The process of building well-informed intellectual autonomy, of challenging simplistic receptivity and rote-learning, cannot begin too early. Reform of higher education is can only be really successful in addressing the problems set out in this paper, if it uses the leverage of the universities to undo and remake the signals they send out to schools about the way the schools prepare their students.

As for the differential between subjects for forming a mind receptive to extreme ideas, while it is significant, it is important too to remember the words of Professor Louise Richardson with which I began this paper: Education robs you of that simplification and certitude. Education is the best possible antidote to radicalisation. All good, open, education for critical thought is a sovereign remedy for gullible seekers after undemanding certainty.

*

Finally, literature has perhaps been a little lost in the discussion of the social sciences. Howard Jacobson wrote memorably recently, in an article entitled Show me the jihadist with a well-thumbed copy of Middlemarch in his back pocket, Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party. When demagogues or dictators ban art, this is the reason: art is the great solvent of obedient fundamentalism.[footnoteRef:59] [59: Howard Jacobson, Show me the jihadist with a well-thumbed copy of Middlemarch in his back pocket, The Independent, 11 December 2015]

Martin Rose, MA (Oxon), M Philmartin.rose@magd.oxon.org

The content of this paper represents the personal views of the author, and is not to be understood as the opinion of the British Council, or of any other organization for which he may from time to time work.

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