Further to my earlier posts on the strange relationship between geekiness and suicide terrorism (1, 2, 3), I just came across a couple more theories on the subject, in Khaled Abou El Fadl’s The Great Theft (El Fadl prefers the term "puritans" for Islamists):
… puritans reject inquiries into philosophy, political theory, morality, and beauty, as too subjective -- and, even worse, as Western inventions that lead to nothing but sophistry. With the majority of the puritan leadership comprised of people who studied the physical sciences, such as medicine, engineering, and computer science, they avowedly anchor themselves in the objectivity and certitude that comes from empiricism. According to puritans, public interests, such as the interest in protecting society from the sexual lures of women, can be empirically verified. However, in contrast, they say, moral or ethical values and aesthetic judgments about what is necessary or compelling cannot be empirically quantified, and therefore must be ignored. So values like human dignity, love, mercy, and compassion are not subject to quantification, and therefore cannot be integrated into Islamic legal judgments. (p. 99)
And:
Puritans are not opposed to modernism, but, somewhat inconsistently, they believe that modernity is a culturally biased concept. For puritans, the culture of modernity, with its concepts of human rights, women’s rights, minority rights, religious freedom, civil society, pluralism, and democracy, is largely Western, and therefore both alien and alienating. However, puritans strongly distinguish between the culture of modernity and modernization. Often this amounts to differentiating between modernization and Westernization -- the former is acceptable, but the latter is not. To become truly modernized, according to the puritans, means to regress back in time and recreate the golden age of Islam. This, however, does not mean that they want to abolish technology and scientific advancements. Rather, their program is deceptively simple -- Muslims should learn the technology and science invented by the West, but in order to resist Western culture, Muslims should not seek to study the social sciences or humanities. This is the reason that a large number of puritans come to the West to study, but invariably focus their studies on the physical sciences, including computer science, and entirely ignore the social sciences and humanities. Armed with modern science and technology, puritans believe that they will be better positioned to recreate the golden age of Islam by creating a society modeled after the Prophet’s city-state in Medina and Mecca. (p. 170-171)
