The typical Islamist of this era was an engineer born sometime in the 1950s whose parents were from the countryside. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of an ultraconservative faction of the Afghan mujahedeen, was trained as an engineer; Hacene Hashani, the spokesperson for the Algerian Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) in 1991, was an oil engineer; Ayman al-Zawahari of al-Qaeda was trained as a medical doctor.

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politi…, loc. 341