I wouldn't discount the possibility of a correlation between radicalism and the "engineering personality" (or the limitations of an engineering education) playing a significant role, but this other, more Marxian explanation strikes me as the best starting point. A young, smart, ambitious middle-class man with thwarted personal ambition is a dangerous thing, because when he sublimates his career ambition into some other goal—and for people from an Islamic background, fighting for Islam and achieving glory in the next life is a very obvious alternative goal—he's likely to make something like the proverbial dent in the universe.
> It's really more likely -- and I'm replying without having read the topic article -- that this is related to the fact that developing states with "socialist" (I use the term advisedly) bents tended to privilege engineering, medical and scientific education in its universities, while not having economies capable of effectively supporting those graduates.
And to be fair that emphasis probably really is quite rational, because engineers are probably the kind of people a rapidly-developing middle-income country most needs. Unfortunately setting up the pipeline of trained engineers isn't nearly enough on its own to ensure the rapid development, of course.
One reason I find that interpretation plausible is that this seems to have happened before:
"The writers who invented and elaborated the post-Kantian theory of the state belonged to a caste which was relatively low on the social scale. They were, most of them, the sons of pastors, artisans, or small farmers. They somehow managed to become university students, most often in the faculty of theology, and last out the duration of their course on minute grants, private lessons, and similar makeshifts. When they graduated they found that their knowledge opened no doors, that they were still in the same social class, looked down upon by a nobility which was stupid, unlettered, and which engrossed the public employments they felt themselves so capable of filling. These students and ex-students felt in them the power to do great things, they had culture, knowledge, ability, they yearned for the life of action, its excitements and rewards, and yet there they were, doomed to spend heartbreaking years as indigent curates waiting to be appointed pastors, or as tutors in some noble household, where they were little better than superior domestics, or as famished writers dependent on the goodwill of an editor or a publisher."
That's from /Nationalism/ by Elie Kedourie http://www.amazon.com/Nationalism-Elie-Kedourie/dp/063118885.... http://www.worldcat.org/title/nationalism/oclc/27812918 : he's talking about Germany around 1800. This group of radicalised students produced colourful people like Karl Sand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ludwig_Sand , and of course an ideology which was eventually to burn Europe down at least a couple of times. And they tended to be literary-minded types who'd studied theology in university. (Though no doubt that partly reflects that fact that relatively few people did technical subjects at university at that time.)