An influential study examined the backgrounds of four hundred violent extremists and found that only 13 percent were from madrasas or Islamic boarding schools. The Sheikh hadn’t heard of the study, but its profile of extremists with day jobs as engineers and doctors didn’t surprise him. It was “Western-educated types,” not madrasa graduates, he said, who harbored the biggest grudges against the West. “They want what the West has,” he said. “They want power.”
