THE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTS OF ISLAMIST ACTIVISM: ELITE STUDENTS AND RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS IN EGYPT*
The literature on student activism finds that protesters come from prestigious universities and from the social sciences and humanities. Studies of political Islam, however, emphasize the prominence of engineering and medical students from secular institutions. Contributing to both literatures, this paper investigates Islamist students targeted by security forces in Egypt following the coup of 2013. Matching 1,352 arrested students to the population of male undergraduates, it analyzes how the arrest rate varied across 348 university faculties. We find that activists came disproportionately from institutions that provided a religiously inflected education. This contradicts the conventional emphasis on secular institutions. Most importantly, we find that Islamists tended to come from faculties that required higher grades and that admitted students who studied science in secondary school. Controlling for grades, engineering and medicine were not especially prominent. These findings suggest that Islamist students conform to the more general pattern: political activism attracts the academic elite.
Contributor Notes
* This research was supported by a TRE Grant from the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 2015 annual conferences of the American Political Science Association and the Middle East Studies Association. We thank Holger Albrecht, Christopher Barrie, John Chalcraft, Hannah El-Sisi, Michael Farquhar, Diego Gambetta, Steffen Hertog, Ali Kadivar, Charles Kurzman, Tarek Masoud, Ziad Munson, Turkay Nefes, Jillian Schwedler, John Sidel, Richard Stewart, Dingxin Zhao, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments.
† Neil Ketchley is a Lecturer in Middle East Politics at King's College London. Michael Biggs is an Associate Professor of Sociology at St Cross College, University of Oxford.